I vote Outer Space (not played) vs Duotron (own, play often) - the playfield seems to have a lot more going on. Once you master banging the captive ball back and forth without draining, Duotron is pretty easy to rack up points, except for lighting up the special which is damn near impossible unless you hit the A lane at the start of play.

It's been a great first game (not too much going on under the playfield so not bad to keep running) but I could see trading up at some point.

No help on the spot targets, but I've gone back and forth with the captive ball. My game came set up with individual rings around posts, but when I ordered a ring kit, it came with a 4" rubber ring that wrapped completely around the captive ball island. Apparently this is the way it was designed (see flyer excerpt below). Definitely make the captive ball less posty, maybe too easy to hit.

You miss that satisfying click of ball-on-ball contact. But the larger captive island ring is a lot more springy for balls in upper playfield area.

I'm definitely in the fence, have set it up both ways, but I seem to have settled on the larger ring at this point.

Captive Ball Flyer (resized).jpg

Captive Ball (resized).jpg

Think it's a timing thing, but bouncing back and forth (which does happen a lot) only scores 1x (3 bonus advances for 5-ball, 5 for 3-ball) - I was worried about a double score making the captive hole even more valuable, but I've never noticed that. As opposed to the upper kickers - where the ball does get hung up and score multiple times.

Still, it's pretty easy to hit the captive ball if one catches the ball, either shooting same side (left-left or right-right) or crossing over - so all it takes is 1-2 good balls to rack up a good score.

I do find the center captive hole is easier to hit with the big ring; when it was small post rings, it was indeed, as pinwiztom notes "posty" (love that term) and hard to get the ball to settle in. I sat down with the schematic not too long ago to figure out how the captive hole value worked - it's related to the number of bonus advances: 0-3 = 1000, 4-6 = 2000, 7-9 = 3000, 10-12 = 4000, 13-15 = 5000). Initially I thought it was related to number of times you hit the hole, and since the captive hole also advances the bonus, sometimes it increments the hole value by chance.