Jump to content

Random stuff


Guest!

Recommended Posts

Yeah, but from that point of view, they don't expect to have a Bhaalspawn crashing in on the operation, now do they?

 

Weimer called it the "seatbelt principle": memorise spells on the assumption you're going to be attacked by a powerful opponent, because on the one day in a hundred when you are, you'll need them.

Link to comment

I mean, when I suddenly attack a mage and he's got 5 8-hour long buffs, I'm not surprised. But when I attack a mage and he's got 20 half-hour long buffs - if makes me suspicious. Why did he activate them all exactly at the period of time before being attacked?

In my next install I'll try "Mages are allowed to cast spells instantly at the start of combat only when they are created near the PC", to see how it works. Maybe it's the compromise I'm looking for.

Link to comment
I mean, when I suddenly attack a mage and he's got 5 8-hour long buffs, I'm not surprised. But when I attack a mage and he's got 20 half-hour long buffs - if makes me suspicious. Why did he activate them all exactly at the period of time before being attacked?

Fair enough, there's a certain abstraction going on... the idea is to simulate mages having the same pre-battle prep time as the party does.

In my next install I'll try "Mages are allowed to cast spells instantly at the start of combat only when they are created near the PC", to see how it works. Maybe it's the compromise I'm looking for.

It might be - that's the one I use myself, in fact.

Link to comment
It would make sense if mages (but especially priests) would react to shouts by starting to buff and fire off their contingencies when they go into battle. That's what we do.

 

-Galactygon

 

Hard to code (and avoid exploits) in practice, though.

Link to comment
Guest Raven_BWL
Notice how any paladin who isn't either Keldorn or <CHARNAME> never gets turned. Way to test stuff and be bug-less :)

 

What makes you think this is a bug? That's how it was supposed to work in IA v5. It may not be perfect, but it's intentional.

Link to comment
Notice how any paladin who isn't either Keldorn or <CHARNAME> never gets turned. Way to test stuff and be bug-less :)

 

What makes you think this is a bug? That's how it was supposed to work in IA v5. It may not be perfect, but it's intentional.

That's interesting. What was the rationale?

Link to comment
What makes you think this is a bug? That's how it was supposed to work in IA v5. It may not be perfect, but it's intentional.

I read somewhere where somebody was discouraging somebody else from having any Paladin in the party because of turning (I can't find the link, so I might be recalling wrongly).

 

Besides, I usually label 'selective blindness' a bug - call me crazy :)

Link to comment
Yeah, but from that point of view, they don't expect to have a Bhaalspawn crashing in on the operation, now do they?

 

Weimer called it the "seatbelt principle": memorise spells on the assumption you're going to be attacked by a powerful opponent, because on the one day in a hundred when you are, you'll need them.

 

But...

 

That's too sensible!

 

Icen

Link to comment
Fighters of L8-L11 have a 30% chance of having one or the other. Fighters of L12-L16 have a 50% chance. Fighters of L17+ have a a 60% chance. It's not clear to me that that's too high when you compare with the level at which the player gets them.

 

It's not a level issue, it's a quantity issue. Potions of Magic Shielding are extremely rare, they aren't found anywhere (that I can recall, at least), the player can only buy them from Roger in the Temple Sewers and he only has a couple. In each and every of my playthroughs I usually ended up collecting no more than 4 or 5 of them during the course of the whole game.

Long story short, the problem with distributing them at large is that the player might feel like the only one who doesn't have access to an army-sized stock of PoMSs (compared to the availability of other kinds of potion) that can be just thrown away. I know I did.

 

Yeah, I've some sympathy with this. I don't personally use Wish that often but my own testing of it suggests that someone with a very high Wisdom will get some useful option pretty much every time it's used. I randomise those options (so no mage in SCS2 always gets the Timestop/Alacrity combo; sometimes they'll get lower enemy defences, or hardiness all round.) I assume that wizards who cast Wish either have high Wisdom or simulate it via potions; I plead guilty to being too lazy to do an in-game implementation.

 

I could have introduced a small chance of getting a bad wish even for these casters, but I'm not sure it would really add much to gameplay. Once in a long while a battle would be unexpectedly easy because a wizard got a bad wish, but you couldn't plan for it and it would just (I reckon) lead to things being randomly unsatisfying.

 

I assume mages have a high WIS score and wouldn't choose the bad options anyway. The problem is that, in my experience, 90% of the times mages cast a double TS + IA, and the remaining 10% a "Breach every party member". Even with maxed WIS, it's extremely unlikely that a mage would get that option every single time. In the end, it's just unfair. What I'd like to see is a bit of randomization within the good or neutral wishes (including the full rest one). That, I think, could add quite a bit of flavour and variety to high level mage battles.

 

- Protection from Magic Energy also protects Undead from instant death from Sunray (which, I don't know why, is applied by doing a thousand damage on a failed st), eliminating the only real use of Sunray, ie: to instablast Liches.

Vanilla game feature, not something SCS2 adds.

 

Yeah, I know, but this doesn't look like fixpack material either, I thought I'd mention it just in case you might want to do something about it.

 

- Using a Sequencer/Trigger is a full round action, like drinking a potion or casting a spell, but mages apparently don't know that and happily fire them immediately after casting (or soon before).

I'm fairly sure I don't do this, actually (certainly I don't intend to, and I've never seen it myself). If you're sure it's happening, it would be helpful if you could keep track of exactly when and in what circumstances.

 

They do it all the time, actually. Every single Sequencer/Trigger I've seen was shot as a free action and didn't impede spellcasting.

 

This is a perennial issue, and one I'm always happy to keep under review, but here's an example. Going right to the top, a typical L30 archmage on the maximum buffing sessions has the following spells via prebuff:

 

-Spell Trap (18 rounds)

-Protection from the Elements (20 rounds)

- Globe of Invulnerability (20 rounds)

- Shadow Door (20 rounds)

- Mirror Image (23 rounds)

- Protection from Normal Missiles (50 rounds)

- Stoneskin (12 hours)

- Melf's Minute Meteors (24 hours)

- Protection from Magic Energy (200 rounds)

- Protection from Fire, Cold, and Acid (200 rounds)

 

So there are only five spells with durations of ~20 rounds or less, and plenty of time for the mage to cast them all. I'm not sure what the unrealism is. (Of course, there will also be three or four spells that come in instantly via contingencies, and possibly another three that come in in the first round via spell trigger).

 

At very high levels, prebuffing is a lot less of an issue. It's at mid levels that it's most glaringly unbalancing. A level 15 mage has less time (and less spells in his spellbook) to spend casting buffs than a level 20+ archmage, can't buff via CC and ST and the party (usually 4-6 level below) has fewer means to fight off.

 

Besides, it looks to me like there's a balance issue with massive prebuffing: mages are now totally overpowered and not even remotely comparable to equally experienced characters of other classes.

Define overpowered. They're not any more powerful than PC mages can be.

They aren't more powerful than party mages, they're more powerful than every other class, that's the problem. Party mages are overpowered too, which, btw, is one of the reasons why I apply some self-imposed limitations.

More generally, I'd like a scenario in which a L15 mage is roughly as challenging as a L15 fighter or a L15 cleric. But I know this is hardly feasible in BG2.

 

Idle suggestion: reduce the quantity of buffs to roughly 75%.

But what would be the justification? - why, in game, would enemy wizards choose to only use 75% as many buffs? (One possible reason would be that between buffs and combat spells, they use slightly too many spells; this is sometimes true, but won't really be fixed until I implement a properly systematic spellbook rewrite.)

 

Casting time (for low to mid level mages this actually is a problem), reduced offensive capabilities (once the mage's shot his meteors and fired a few offensive spells, he's as good as dead). A bit more offense and a bit less defence would quite spice up mage fights.

 

The problem is that "cheesy" is in the eye of the beholder.

 

No kidding, those things shoot their rays at a machinegun rate of fire. :)

 

I understand "doesn't happen in the vanilla game" and "players can't do it but enemies can" and "exploits a loophole in the game that breaks realism". But beyond that, no-one really seems to know what "cheese" really means. If anyone has an argument why SI in triggers/contingencies makes the game less interesting or enjoyable, I'm listening; personally, I like it because it gives me some chance of keeping mages alive for a few rounds.

 

This boils down to mages (both enemy mages and party mages) being much more powerful than every other character.

It's not like they need to be kept alive for a few more rounds: mages are already always the last men standing and almost every battle involving mages drags on and on and on, with lots of running around, turn-the-corner-and-save tactics, reloading, etc... it's enjoyable once in a while, but when it happens regularly the fun factor wears down rapidly.

 

I don't see any suggestion in the readme that the wizard's spells are supposed to be depleted when his image casts them. I agree you could read it that way, but you could equally read it the other way, and since there's no way the BG2 engine could have done that, I assume the developers didn't intend it to. (And sure, the PnP version depletes the caster's spells, but this isn't PnP). Failing to freeze the caster is a problem, though (as acknowledged in the readme): it happens sometimes but not always, I suspect because the engine is confused by all the spells going off at the start. Again, I'm confused as to what the rules are for what's "cheap" or "borderline cheating".

 

Ironically, I've considered stopping using that spell because it's too ineffectual: it's very hard to stop the party's truesight killing the image before it has the chance to do any damage.

 

I don't think Bioware paid much attention to perfect coherence within the game mechanics, BG2 is full of wonky stuff that can't work as it should. On PI specifically, while this isn't pnp and the description could be read that way, I think you'll agree with me that a level 7 spell that doubles a mage's spellcasting capacity is way off scale, so this is more about balance than adherence to the rules. From my experience, I've found that mages casting PI are almost always also protected from Divination.

Link to comment
Fighters of L8-L11 have a 30% chance of having one or the other. Fighters of L12-L16 have a 50% chance. Fighters of L17+ have a a 60% chance. It's not clear to me that that's too high when you compare with the level at which the player gets them.

 

It's not a level issue, it's a quantity issue. Potions of Magic Shielding are extremely rare, they aren't found anywhere (that I can recall, at least), the player can only buy them from Roger in the Temple Sewers and he only has a couple. In each and every of my playthroughs I usually ended up collecting no more than 4 or 5 of them during the course of the whole game.

Long story short, the problem with distributing them at large is that the player might feel like the only one who doesn't have access to an army-sized stock of PoMSs (compared to the availability of other kinds of potion) that can be just thrown away.

But enemies don't have access to an army-sized stock; they have access to at most one each, which is fewer than the player has.

 

 

I assume mages have a high WIS score and wouldn't choose the bad options anyway. The problem is that, in my experience, 90% of the times mages cast a double TS + IA, and the remaining 10% a "Breach every party member". Even with maxed WIS, it's extremely unlikely that a mage would get that option every single time. In the end, it's just unfair.

The coded odds are 50% TS+IA, 50% Breach for singleton casters; 25% TS+IA, 25% Breach, 25% Hardiness, 25% Improved Haste, for casters with allies. You might just have got unlucky. (Actually, against a well-buffed party I reckon Breach is often more useful than TS+IA)

 

- Protection from Magic Energy also protects Undead from instant death from Sunray (which, I don't know why, is applied by doing a thousand damage on a failed st), eliminating the only real use of Sunray, ie: to instablast Liches.

Vanilla game feature, not something SCS2 adds.

 

Yeah, I know, but this doesn't look like fixpack material either, I thought I'd mention it just in case you might want to do something about it.

No, I like it that way (otherwise you can kill liches instantly if they fail a save and there's nothing they can do about it).

 

- Using a Every single Sequencer/Trigger I've seen was shot as a free action and didn't impede spellcasting.

That's weird, and I can't reproduce it locally. If anyone else is seeing the same behaviour, let me know.

 

 

At very high levels, prebuffing is a lot less of an issue. It's at mid levels that it's most glaringly unbalancing. A level 15 mage has less time (and less spells in his spellbook) to spend casting buffs than a level 20+ archmage, can't buff via CC and ST and the party (usually 4-6 level below) has fewer means to fight off.

I'm unclear whether your worry is that it's unbalancing or just unrealistic. I'm also not sure why a L15 mage has less time than a L20 one. (You're right that he lacks CC and ST, but notice that I separate these from prebuffing).

 

There's obviously some guesswork in the prebuffing regime as to whether enemy wizards have too many spells, but I think it's about right - if you want to give an example that's overdone, though, I'll look at it.

 

More generally, I'd like a scenario in which a L15 mage is roughly as challenging as a L15 fighter or a L15 cleric. But I know this is hardly feasible in BG2.

Indeed. (It's outside SCS's remit to alter the game at that level; it's about using existing resources as intelligently as possible).

 

Idle suggestion: reduce the quantity of buffs to roughly 75%.

But what would be the justification? - why, in game, would enemy wizards choose to only use 75% as many buffs?

 

Casting time (for low to mid level mages this actually is a problem), reduced offensive capabilities (once the mage's shot his meteors and fired a few offensive spells, he's as good as dead). A bit more offense and a bit less defence would quite spice up mage fights.

So hang on: are you saying you think wizards would be more dangerous if they prebuffed less and attacked more? Wouldn't that make it even more unbalanced?

 

This boils down to mages (both enemy mages and party mages) being much more powerful than every other character.

It's not like they need to be kept alive for a few more rounds: mages are already always the last men standing and almost every battle involving mages drags on and on and on, with lots of running around, turn-the-corner-and-save tactics, reloading, etc... it's enjoyable once in a while, but when it happens regularly the fun factor wears down rapidly.

Well, obviously if you're not having fun, ultimately you should probably uninstall the component. But you might want to rethink your strategies: I don't tend to use many of those kinds of strategies.

 

From my experience, I've found that mages casting PI are almost always also protected from Divination.

Yes, but their Projected Images aren't; they go down very quickly to Truesight.

 

Thanks for the continuing food for thought.

Link to comment

Very interesting discussion.

 

I find Guest! feedback well motivated and that's why I had decided (not light-heartedly) already some days before I read his post, that I won't use the "prebuffing" component.

 

The reason being that mages are the most powerful class already in the vanilla game (at certain levels being *way* the most powerful) and I don't want SCS to make it even more true. I would have liked to have prebuffing for realism but gameplay is obviously more important.

 

What I care most is what Guest! said about potions (which I agree completely with): there is no way I will give up on "Potion for NPCs" but I do wish that what Guest! says could be kept in consideration for newer versions. It's mostly a matter of quantity. In too many fights, we see enemies using potions systematically.

 

The rebuttal of DavidW here is something I can't really agree with (and I realize it's a general thought that keep as apart at a rather deep level): if I have understood well, DavidW says: "Well, if the party can, then the AI can as well" and applies this principle everywhere. While I do agree that this principle should be respected as much and widely as possible for fairness' sake, I want to point out that the game sets the player (and party) in a situation where the odds are all against them. The player starts already with a huge disadvantage: having to survive through literally hundreds of fights (some of which really deadly). Since the game puts you in this starting situation, I find fair that the enemies inventory won't generally directly compare to the party's.

 

A bit like for the use of HLA, I believe the "Potion for NPCs" should sort of select specific fights to equip the enemy with them. This would also grant some more variety to the fights (which is always good).

 

Thanks!

Link to comment
Very interesting discussion.

 

I find Guest! feedback well motivated and that's why I had decided (not light-heartedly) already some days before I read his post, that I won't use the "prebuffing" component.

 

The reason being that mages are the most powerful class already in the vanilla game (at certain levels being *way* the most powerful) and I don't want SCS to make it even more true. I would have liked to have prebuffing for realism but gameplay is obviously more important.

Fair enough, though I suggest trying it in practice - I think Guest! is overestimating the difficulty level. (You have to actively work to carry antimagic spells and bring down mage defences, but if you do that, it can be done reasonably straightforwardly.)

 

As a point of interest, do you mean "PC mages are already the most powerful class in the vanilla game", or "enemy mages are already the most powerful class in the vanilla game"? If the former, then of course SCS doesn't change this, because it does almost nothing to help PCs. If the latter, I'm surprised: I find mages terribly weak in the vanilla game, precisely because their AI is pretty stupid.

 

What I care most is what Guest! said about potions (which I agree completely with): there is no way I will give up on "Potion for NPCs" but I do wish that what Guest! says could be kept in consideration for newer versions.

It will be once anyone presents me with a good realistic argument as to why the potion level should be lower.

 

The rebuttal of DavidW here is something I can't really agree with (and I realize it's a general thought that keep as apart at a rather deep level): if I have understood well, DavidW says: "Well, if the party can, then the AI can as well" and applies this principle everywhere. While I do agree that this principle should be respected as much and widely as possible for fairness' sake, I want to point out that the game sets the player (and party) in a situation where the odds are all against them. The player starts already with a huge disadvantage: having to survive through literally hundreds of fights (some of which really deadly). Since the game puts you in this starting situation, I find fair that the enemies inventory won't generally directly compare to the party's.

But notice that

 

 

(i) the player actually has way, way more equipment than enemies do - dozens of times as much, usually. No enemy party in SCS, or any mod as far as I know, has even a tiny fraction of the vast range of potions, spell scrolls, protective items, amazing weapons, etc., that the party rapidly acquires. (Obviously, if they did there'd be massive balance issues).

(ii) If your argument is based on fairness, presumably the question is: does it make the game too hard? If so, fair enough, but I don't have the impression this is generally felt.

(iii) As always, any discussion of fairness has to be coloured by how vastly, colossally, unfair it is that the party is controlled by a human brain whilst the enemy is controlled by a few thousand lines of scripting.

A bit like for the use of HLA, I believe the "Potion for NPCs" should sort of select specific fights to equip the enemy with them. This would also grant some more variety to the fights (which is always good).

 

As always, the problem is SCS's design principles: I'm just not particularly interested in writing a mod which doesn't respect in-game realism, and I continue to see no reason why creatures wouldn't just buy and use potions at about the rate they're doing. So I've no idea what logic would be used to select who gets the potions.

Link to comment
What I care most is what Guest! said about potions (which I agree completely with): there is no way I will give up on "Potion for NPCs" but I do wish that what Guest! says could be kept in consideration for newer versions. It's mostly a matter of quantity. In too many fights, we see enemies using potions systematically.

somehow, this particular component is one of my favorites. In vanilla game, the potions cost so much, that I end up almost never using them. This one allows me to use them more freely, almost in any fight.

 

Since the game puts you in this starting situation, I find fair that the enemies inventory won't generally directly compare to the party's.

Enemy's inventory is never ever compared to party's. (the only ones who have a slight approximation are other adventurer's parties)

Link to comment

DavidW,

 

when I spoke about the "mages being already the most powerful class in the vanilla game", I was speaking of the PC class. Even if SCS doesn't do anything to help PCs, it does a lot to make the enemy mages very deadly. The vanilla mages were a laugh (with few exceptions) and it's very good that SCS gives them a hard boost. But now I feel a bit like among the enemies, mages are getting too strongs compared to other classes. Just like for the PCs. Two wrongs instead of one to reflect the internal PCs (un)balance?

 

Bearware,

 

that's just the point! Exactly what you are saying... just reverted. I want potions and scrolls and items to be expensive and not so accessible! I just don't like that both the player and (now with SCS) the enemies have wide access to items' use so that "This one allows me to use them more freely, almost in any fight." I find it an abuse. I realize that this is just my point of view which is diametrically opposed to yours. We can work for subtraction or addition. I tend to like the first method best. Guess DavidW's vision makes some people happy and some not in this case... :)

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...