Bug with improved deployment of assassins

[Guest Grond0]

I like the randomized encounters with the 2 groups of assassins, but they have one particularly annoying aspect - they will follow and cluster round an invisible party. This makes it impossible to just avoid fighting them if you want to do anything else in the area they teleport into, which can be a real pain in a no-reload game.

 

From their behaviour it looks like their script is set to home in on the party as part of their entrance to the map area. If the party is invisible they can't initiate dialogue so just continue to home in. Would it be possible to change the script so they behave more like many of the mages encountered, e.g. they cast oracle or equivalent in response to noticing some sign of an invisible party, but once this has been done once or twice they will no longer react. This would allow the party to run away and avoid the encounter if they wished to.

[Bhryaen]

I like the randomized encounters with the 2 groups of assassins, but they have one particularly annoying aspect - they will follow and cluster round an invisible party...

I want to second this. SCS is one of my "must" mods, but I've had similar experiences when I've used stealth, particularly with a thief wearing the Cloak of Nondetection, and enemies are "supposed to" talk with and attack me. It may be the same "seek-and-destroy" script that Grond0 is finding with the Improved Deployment component. It's impossible to sneak around and do a backstab then because they continue facing you and following you around even though they aren't supposed to be able to detect you at all, much less come at you constantly as if about to engage you in melee or dialogue. If there's some way to trigger them to just stop when they can't find you- or even return somewhere or wander- anything but behave so unrealistically.

[phordicus]

one way i've handled this (even in vanilla where it's far more common and annoying) is to assign a proximity check to those MoveToPlayerX blocks. once they get within range 10, i switch them to RandomWalks and then back to MoveTo when they're outside of 100. this keeps them "searching" without looking so retarded or omniscient.

[DavidW]

Known problem, on the to-do list for the next version.

[Chronis]

Couple of small bugs I have noticed with my game SCS version 19

 

Both groups of mobile assassians have some sort of script that breaks charm person.

The spell takes effect as normal and then the charmed enemy immediatly turns hostile again.

 

The caravan raiders immediatly to the north of Bergost are not working. Only the raider leader attacks.

Her three bandit henchmen are flagged hostil but do not attack.

 

The 4 sirine's guarding Kelddath Ormlyr do not attack you if you attack Kelddath Ormlyr or if he attacks you.

Similarly Kelddath Ormlyr does not go hostile if you attack the sirines.

 

Thanks for a great mod. Trying to do a solo game its quite the challenge.

[Chronis]

Seems the script also breaks charm person in the bandit camp as well.

[Chronis]

So I tracked down the source of the charm problem.

 

There is code that breaks charm in both

_Bandit.BCS

DW#C3AS1.BCS

 

There is probably similar code in other locations as well.

The problem code is some variation of the following

 

IF

!Allegiance(Myself,ENEMY)

Global("gonehostile","LOCALS",0)

THEN

RESPONSE #100

SetGlobal("gonehostile","LOCALS",1)

Enemy()

Continue()

 

Often the enemy will go hostile from some other event then this particular trigger

so the variable gonhostile will be 0. When the enemy is subsequently is charmed

the !Allegiance(Myself,ENEMY) will come back true and the script will trigger

breaking the charm spell.

 

Fixed my local copy of _Bandit.BCS by adding

!StateCheck(Myself,STATE_CHARMED)

 

Seems to work well.

[DavidW]

The charm issue is fixed in v20. Also in v20, assassins don't spawn if the protagonist is invisible. I'll see if I can track down the problem with the bandits north of Beregost, and with Keldath.