Criticism of SCS mod

[subtledoctor]

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

SR does the same, but it has its own problems, like not being able to leave the current area - meaning you have to kick them out of your party anyways unless you happen to have a Freedom on you.

In my current game with SR 4b18 (and SCS), when a lich cast Imprisonment at Mazzy, first it mazed her, then after some time (wanna say about 5-10 rounds), she died. I eventually beat the lich and then left the area and raised her at a temple.

I'm not 100% sure of how the mods interact, or if SR by itself works the same way. But in any event I'm moderately happy with the way it functions. I suppose it become something like a no-save Finger of Death, where you can use Freedom to get your party member back in the moment, or wait and raise them later on. I guess my only gripe  is that it makes Freedom have very, very narrow utility. Ideally it would apply some condition such that the victim could not be raised unless you first cast Freedom. Like, walk to a temple, cast Freedom to retrieve the body from the Imprisonment, and then raise or resurrect as usual. Or maybe you need the combination of Freedom + Raise out in the field, but you can skip the Freedom step at a temple because it's assumed that priests' abilities to resurrect at actual temples - the seat of their power - can overcome such difficulties.

Don't know if that would be feasible to implement in this engine, though.

(Maybe I'll change Freedom into Dimensional Anchor, or something. Hmmm...)

[Bartimaeus]

3 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

(Maybe I'll change Freedom into Dimensional Anchor, or something. Hmmm...)

Yeah, I think Kreso made it so that it slayed the character after 1 turn to 'fix' the problem, crude solution as it is. No ideal way to solve the problem that anyone's ever been able to think of, unfortunately.

I wasn't able to figure out if Dimensional Anchor would actually prevent someone from being imprisoned in P&P (not that there's any need to follow P&P - I was just curious if it would). From what I was able to tell, it seems like the spell is geared towards preventing the target from trying to do anything extradimensional, not to prevent extradimensional things from happening to it. I also fear that this spell would overwhelmingly benefit the player, especially with no spellstate for SCS to detect to prevent enemies from casting it on the same creature over and over.

[Aldex]

The most bad thing about SCS is prebuff component timing for enemy mages. When the fight starts, you must wait 1-2 seconds to activate all prebuffs on enemies, so in terms of playing fair as the scs mod suggests, you must wait those 1-2 secs and only then ( after prebuffs activates ) you can cast and fight, because if not, you can instakill enemies without their activated prebuffs. Yeah, you could wait 1-2 seconds, that`s not a big problem, but those that aren`t mages ( fighters e t.c ) are running to get you, while enemy mages are still frozen in waiting their prebuffs. In overall picture, that means that enemy fighers are already slashing your companions in melee range, while enemy mages are still waiting for their prebuffs. That means you can`t  spelltriger  3x skulltraps or fireballs in the start of combat to hit enemy mages+enemy fighters because of this annoying timelag with prebuffing system. It`s really annoying and unrealistic to see.  Sorry for my english. 

[Mahatmah]

Well, I personally like the way things work.

Mages and caster opponents can be a very serious threat for any party in BG1 and early to mid BG2, especially with smart casters and prebuff.

This window of prebuff allows players to use well placed backstabs, or just open fire first. It always felt to me like a fair strategy, justified by the difficulty augmentation from the component and quite lore friendly since you'd need time to "activate" such defenses.

If anything, the component still makes caster opponents way stronger, while pushing you towards dirty tactics and alternative strategies : that's everything I wanted from it.

Also, there is only so much you can do before enemy mages are prebuffed, they might not always be reachable depending on the encounter, and the best you can generally hope for is a nice backstab opening on a priority target. Sure, you might get an instakill and trivialize an encounter, but I do not recall it hapenning that often : I usually refrain myself from opening fire on non hostiles before hostility is triggered by a quest or dialogue for example, tho.

Edited December 2, 2021 by Mahatmah

[subtledoctor]

On 11/30/2021 at 9:49 PM, Aldex said:

The most bad thing about SCS is prebuff component timing for enemy mages. When the fight starts, you must wait 1-2 seconds to activate all prebuffs on enemies, so in terms of playing fair as the scs mod suggests, you must wait those 1-2 secs and only then ( after prebuffs activates ) you can cast and fight, because if not, you can instakill enemies without their activated prebuffs. Yeah, you could wait 1-2 seconds, that`s not a big problem, but those that aren`t mages ( fighters e t.c ) are running to get you, while enemy mages are still frozen in waiting their prebuffs. In overall picture, that means that enemy fighers are already slashing your companions in melee range, while enemy mages are still waiting for their prebuffs. That means you can`t  spelltriger  3x skulltraps or fireballs in the start of combat to hit enemy mages+enemy fighters because of this annoying timelag with prebuffing system. It`s really annoying and unrealistic to see.  Sorry for my english. 

Yeah it's really awful that SCS decided to intentionally add a delay here, on purpose and for no reason, because the mod wants it to work that way.

What, perchance, do you suggest the mod should do to improve this? Just out of curiosity.

[Jarno Mikkola]

6 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Yeah it's really awful that SCS decided to intentionally add a delay here, on purpose and for no reason, because the mod wants it to work that way.

What, perchance, do you suggest the mod should do to improve this? Just out of curiosity.

I have no idea, but perhaps the idea would be to getting rid of the horrible whole slaught defensive prebuff riddiculousity that is ingrained into the SCS scripts. You want them to have shield... cheat a little and set the AC to 6 instead of the 10, remove the spell and the spell charge, and all the while checking that you didn't make the thing impossible to kill. This will make it so that it's not a choore to kill all the low level mages that you'll encounter, while using the same old 4 spells you need in every encounter from start to end. After all, the enemies have x100 more spells slots and likely all the time in the universe.

[subtledoctor]

Wouldn’t work. Any other ideas?

[Jarno Mikkola]

On 12/3/2021 at 2:33 AM, subtledoctor said:

Wouldn’t work. Any other ideas?

Ouh you little mind. How lost you are.

See, if the first thing the enemy does is attack instead of DEFEND, it does work. It might not be optimal in the long run, but that's not what the game is about...

[Graion Dilach]

One of the main reasons behind SCS is that it doesn't cheat buffs on top of the enemies.

Enhanced Powergaming Scripts have an option to speed up prebuffing, although taking that idea might come with a maintenance burden.

[subtledoctor]

8 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

Enhanced Powergaming Scripts have an option to speed up prebuffing

I don’t think that affects enemies.

I haven’t paid too much attention to this issue of pre-buff “delay” - the small delay in enemy defenses going up is so minor that I don’t notice it (I generally have warriors leading my party, and by the time my back-row casters are in sight of the enemy caster, the pre-buffs are already up.) But, thinking about it, my guess is that SCS triggers those pre-buffs by applying a script trigger or an “enemy seen” contingency. Both of those require approximately .1 to 1 second to work (and the exact delay is a bit random). There’s no getting around that delay, it’s not something SCS adds on purpose; it’s just how the engine works. 

Edited December 6, 2021 by subtledoctor

[Jarno Mikkola]

Actually, that approach is already in use, as SCS can use script that auto force casts the defensive spells on mass. This is also presumed to use a few spell charges... as doing so without them is counter to the intent of not cheating™. As it supposedly uses the minor or regular sequncer spell effects, which would take spell charges away.

[Guest Baquan]

This guy lol, playing BG2 for the first time, but with SCS on the hardest difficulty settings, and he's going to come whine about it and curse people out. 

[Jarno Mikkola]

On 12/26/2021 at 10:44 AM, Guest Baquan said:

This guy lol, playing BG2 for the first time, but with SCS on the hardest difficulty settings, and he's going to come whine about it and curse people out. 

You do understand the people don't play these things in a vacuum ? They asked how to uninstall, and I gave them the option. I also had ran into this problem, as it happened to be quite persistent in many places. I have read DavidW's answer to my first post and it shows a path around the problem I have had... but it tends to not be the whole solution in every case, as said in the very post. Which you should understand to be the crux of the whole /////// problem.

A way to fix this could be an adequate spell counter table that is FIXED, no matter what counters are used, or which mods. As the problem is at least partially an information cap, which is easy to solve with multipage/tab document. And the last thing is, it needs to be appendexed with additional information. As there is a table for this, from 2003 if memory serves ... but it contain no information on special cases, like a Transmuters encountering a Lich. Or a half a mage like in the First Posters party. Now, I am not saying that I am that insane, but as the game gives no information about which protections are left on the opponent mage, unless you use the EEex mod with the spell extentsion... like here;

It's kinda hard to do these things with say 2 arcane casters, plus meatshields.

Edited December 27, 2021 by Jarno Mikkola

[Christian]

3 hours ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

here;

It's kinda hard to do these things with say 2 arcane casters, plus meatshields.

Is this mod available somewhere to show active buffs on enemies? I do get rather often the impression that the combat log is missing some precast spells and such a mod would help immensely with that.

[Jarno Mikkola]

55 minutes ago, Christian said:

Is this mod available somewhere to show active buffs on enemies?

Yeah, should be. But, truthfully, I have never personally used it, it's EE only and requires the EEex mod. It should be this mod: Bubb's Spell Menu. After having installed it, you double right click the dragon and it should show the menu... from what I read a while ago.