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coaster's weidu log for Beta v2 & bug reports


coaster

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WK completed, now in the Marching Mountains. All looking good so far.

 

There is a fire giant here who is still dropping a convenient big stash of normal weapons (an oh-so-subtle hint that there might be magic golems ahead...). Should this be incorporated into the "Remove unrealistically helpful items from certain areas" component?

 

BTW I never found the "Improved Alacrity" memo you mention in the spoilers - was it supposed to be dropped with the Robe of Vecna?

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Wow, the rest of Sendai's enclave was fun! Quite a few surprises lurking where I didn't expect. With Sendai herself, is it intentional that the statues come to life in twos rather than one at a time? I'm sure it was one at a time in vanilla. Anyway, it made the Sendai battle quite a bit more interesting.

 

On to Abazigal now. One minor issue - Ekim Cyre stays blue circle after sounding the alarm when entering the lair.

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David - for your return. I'm done - Melissan is down and the Throne is mine.

 

Some remarks on the overall mod:

 

-It is very good at doing what it says on the tin. It isn't an uber overhaul of the whole game, but certainly makes many battles a lot harder because the enemies are much smarter.

- I found the earlier part of the game a lot harder. Obviously part of this was because I had the hardest options installed; fighting a summoned Planetar at level 8 is not really doable (not for me anyway). But the rest was pure AI; the groups of yuan-ti mages may not have had the highest level spells, but they certainly took my group apart pretty effectively. I would probably have found things easier with Keldorn and his high level dispels, but with an evil/neutral party this wasn't really an option.

-The game got much easier as I progressed. ToB in particular has lots of uber weapons for the PC & companions; there is only so much an improvement in AI can do to counter this. The prime example was Balthazar; he took about two steps before I had chopped him to pieces. I'm sure things are much harder with Ascension installed, but this kind of proves the point - Ascension alters Balthazar's abilities as well as the AI.

-The computer doesn't really deal very well with traps (this is no different from vanilla BG2). What would be nice would be if some enemies had a detect/disarm/evade traps ability which negates trap effects in some way; it is still all too easy to lay a few spike traps and kill enemies instantly before any spell buffs go up. Even Ascension Demogorgon is vulnerable to this.

 

In short, I guess that when I play through SCSII again, if it remains "as is", I'll probably use it in conjunction with something else - Ascension certainly, plus some of the Quest Pack/Tactics components, with the SCSII AI sitting on top. However, if you continue down the road you've taken with SCS, adding other enhancements (eg. the extremely well-balanced end-chapter battles, plus other improved encounters such as Ulcaster) that would be extremely welcome. The improved Sendai enclave was hugely enjoyable - more of the same would be good (obviously keeping an eye on the amount of additional XP you make available to the player, an issue I know you're aware of).

 

Finally - thanks for your work & making BG2 more fun - I can't remember the last time I actually enjoyed playing through ToB, but I did this time!

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Congratulations on your Ascension.

 

Re bugs: I think I've got all the ones you mention, with the exception of the Statue issue which (I think) is a BG2fixpack problem - I'll report it there.

 

As for your comments: I'm very glad you liked it. I'm fairly sure you're right, too, about difficulty - pure AI ain't going to be sufficient in ToB, the party are just too uber. I think Ascension does fairly well at increasing enemy powers without being toooo cheesy, though, so I'm not inclined to try to improve on it in terms of new enemy abilities / immunities. (I also think it's a massive improvement on the original plot). So mostly I'm inclined to write ToB bits of SCS to integrate with Ascension (i.e. through hopefully-better AI) rather than to replace it. (I did Illasera and Gromnir because they were dead simple - basically just using standard fighter or fighter-mage scripts - and I did Sendai because Ascension doesn't cover her and because I thought scripting a mage/cleric would be interesting).

 

(If you still have some BG2 energy, you could try going back to the start of ToB (assuming you've got a savegame there), installing Ascension and putting the SCS component over it. But you've already done more than enough!)

 

As for traps: yes, I know this is a problem, and I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. (It's easy enough to make a ring of trap immunity, of course, but that feels a bit unmotivated). It's not helped that I've never actually played the game with a high-level thief in the party.

 

And as for new content, a la Sendai's Enclave: yes, in principle I'd love to. (Abazigal's enclave, the guardians of the parasites on the Suldanesselar tree, the approach to Bodhi in C6, the Sahuagin city, and the Shade Lord all spring to mind). But it won't happen any time soon, alas - I'm already way into time deficit...

 

(Oh, the "improved alacrity memo" wasn't meant seriously - I just meant that if Azamantes gets the cloak he'll automatically memorize IA.)

 

Thanks loads for your very detailed and helpful feedback.

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