Optimal Peggle Scoring

Oh man, it's been a while since I've posted anything here.  Anyway, I recently finished up Ape Escape time attacks, with a final time of 1:59.62, and submitted them all to Cyberscore.  I also looked through the list of games they had, adding in some EoSD scores (can't let bad scores take the top spot when I can make the top spot a slightly less bad score :V), AE2 and 3 time attacks, and a couple other assorted things.  What I noticed, though, is that Peggle had had some decent competition.  The highest score for the first level and the one I'll use to explain why my scoring method is optimal, was 963,830, with 5 scores above 700k.  My method, is done optimally, yields a score of over 4.5 million with very little luck required-or ~2 million, if you decide to ignore one aspect.

Anyway, the method people seemed to be using is putting all of the scoring on the final 2 shots, one of which would be (hopefully!) an Ultra Extreme Fever, guaranteeing the 100k bonus at the end.  For Peggleland, there are 96 pegs in the level arranged fairly neatly, so hitting a cluster at the end (orange->purple for maximum scoring) with the Triple Score effect on Warren's Lucky Spin, would result in a fairly high scoring shot-easily hitting 400-500k.  But therein lies the problem: it's a one time use shot, even if you set up for it, in 99% of cases it's not going to outscore my method in terms of Points Per Peg, abbreviated to PPP from now on.

For a standard shot, the PPP is going to be the sum of all peg values, as the score for any given shot is (score of pegs)*(number of pegs hit)+any style points obtained.  So if you were to hit 3 orange pegs and 7 blue pegs on your first shot (in times 1 multiplier), you would score (100*3+10*7)*10 points, or 3700.  Since that's 3700 points across 10 pegs, its PPP is 370.  Now, the first shot is almost always going to hit more than this, but it's a good example.  What happens if we hit 2 oranges and 5 blues, with the oranges being a Long Shot?  (200+50)*7+25000=26750 points for 7 pegs.  The addition of the Long Shot increases the PPP from 250 all the way up to around 3800!  That's...kind of a lot.

Now, you might be thinking that since Style Points aren't multiplied by Triple Score or the multiplier, they become less effective in the end of the game.  And, to a certain degree, that's true.  However, my scoring method involves hitting one, and only one, peg and bouncing it straight into the bucket.  Every shot.  This is effective due to the Free Ball Skills style point, worth 5000.  That's how much a purple peg is worth in x10, and this can be done from the beginning of the game AND in conjunction with the purple at x10!  The result of this style point is it makes hitting a blue and going straight into the bucket have a PPP of minimum, 5010.  If you were to hit an orange, then purple and have the ball fall in the bucket (no style points) in x10 multiplier, you would get (5000+1000)*2=12000 points from 2 pegs, and only 6000 PPP.  Considering the 5000 is 1 peg earlygame and this is 2 endgame, what would happen if you tried the other method?  If you were to hit each of those individually with Free Ball Skills, the resulting score would be 5000+5000 and 5000+1000, for 16000 points and 8000 PPP.

Of course, the style points end up snowballing when you remember that PopCap added a few for repeatedly getting the ball in the bucket.  Let's quote the readme file.

Mad Skillz: Have 5 balls in a row fall in the Free Ball Bucket.
Points: 25,000

Crazy Mad Skillz: Have 10 balls in a row fall in the Free Ball Bucket.
Points: 100,000

Since these -exist-, getting 10 Free Ball Skills in a row gives 50,000 off those, and then these 2 bonuses as well.  This result in a PPP boost of 17,500, on average.  Here's the table of Free Ball Skills in a row, total points and PPP.

Consecutive Free Balls	Cumulative Style Points	Style PPP
1	5,000	5,000
2	10,000	5,000
3	15,000	5,000
4	20,000	5,000
5	50,000	10,000
6	55,000	9,166.66
7	60,000	8,571.42
8	65,000	8,125
9	70,000	7,777.77
10	175,000	17,500

Additionally, a Lucky Bounce (25,000 each) is possible on each shot.  Going back to Peggleland, there are 96 pegs, so optimally you would end with a 4 peg shot, with 92 shots obtaining Free Ball Skills, possibly refreshing with a 0 peg shot every 10 to enable Crazy Mad Skillz to be obtained again (I haven't checked this yet, and can't find confirmation anywhere).  Further, the first 22 of those should be orange pegs to gain maximal multipliers for the end of the level.  From there, shooting the purple peg 68 times and the orange twice will leave 4 pegs, 1 of which is orange, 2 of which are green and one of which is purple.  You'd shoot them all in the same shot, obtaining Cool Clear, Super Long Shot, Kick the Bucket, Spin Again and Multiball Madness (if the spins take place after the last orange is hit and a Multiball is chosen).  This gives 175,000 additional Style Points.

The scoring on Peggleland would thus be as follows: 22x orange peg Free Ball Skills with 20 Lucky Bounces, giving 850,000 style points.  The score off of pegs is a little trickier to calculate due to the scaling multiplier, but you would get 9 at 100 points, 5 at 200 points, 4 at 300 points and 3 at 500 and 1 at 1,000.  This totals 900+1000+1200+1500+1000 = 5600 points off pegs.  Score from the "setup" phase: 855,600.
From there, the Free Ball phase results in 68 shots scoring 5000+5000, and 2 scoring 1000+5000.  Mad and Crazy Mad Skillz will both trigger another 7 times, and there will be another 70 Lucky Bounces.  Score from this phase: (68*10000)+(2*6000)+(7*125000)+(70*25000) = 680,000+12,000+875,000+1,750,000=3,317,000 points from this phase.  Cumulative score would be 4,172,600 going into the fever.
Score on the fever would be (1000+1000+1000+10000)*4+175,000 style + 200,000 bonus holes + 90,000 extra ball points.  BUT WAIT, everything but the style points get TRIPLED.  This totals 1,201,000 points from the fever, netting a final "optimal" score for Peggleland of 5,373,600.  This is 5.57x the existing record.  If you do this without the Lucky Bounces, and with a simpler fever you would *only* achieve a score of around 2.2 million points.  This is easily achievable with my method, and outscores the best achieved score by a factor of 2.

Cyberscore, prepare to get wrecked.  Well, I guess Das Bucket might be hard to top a million on due to the nature of it...