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At what point did forcibly integrating dozens of SCS changes as immutable was seen as prefferable to choosing them during install?


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Before, every change i was aware of, because i had selected it.

Now i have to alt tab constantly to the goddamn readme to see exactly what game changes im not aware of are in effect.

Or just get buggered by them in passing. Like the guarded compound's staircase being magically sealed off. That was a hoot.

Took me a while to figure out why +3 weapons return "ineffective" vs mantled enemies. Had fun with that one.

Was having to read and choose too much of a burden for someone?

 

 If you dont implement the 120k gold required to pay off gaelan + the 50k for spell casting license as mandatory in your next update, I'm starting a riot.

English is a third language for me, so im at a loss as to properly impress on you just how much I hate that particular change in direction, but there it is.

 

Edited by perkyguy
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10 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Your English is very good.

True true.  I know native speakers who couldn't have communicated as succinctly.  Sorry for veering off-topic, but wanted to give kudos where they're due.  I have no feelings one way or the other on the actual topic at hand having not ever had the courage to install this mod.  EDIT: Other than to say...honey gathers more flies than vinegar. :)

Edited by Lauriel
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I would just say that the changes were not due to immutability, but due to different design desition. Aka, these are two different subjects entirely. Or we could say, even 3.

1; Layered difficulty...

2; immutability is just a coding stance. That DavidW likes. It has nothing to do with stripping components from the main install.

3; The SCS has had it's components coded multiple times, and everytime, the things just keep growing and it gets harder and harder to ask a 1000 questions in the setup. So long time ago, a bunch of them got intergrated into a .ini file, but it hasn't been enough, clearly.

This is not my stance, but DavidW's...

Edited by Jarno Mikkola
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What ? it's far better (and more simple) now !

Before : you had to choose everything at install time; and if the game was finally too hard for you (beholder lair? chess area?), you had to reinstall everything.

After : you can choose almost everything when playing (increase this, decrease that...) so that you can adjust the difficulty without reinstalling everything (just for a single battle if you want : who said chess area again ?).

I prefer new versions a lot !

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At what point? When version 32 released, about a year ago (or 18 months ago for the playtest version). 

As for why: there were three design principles driving the redesign of the install system for v32.

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1) Move difficulty-related choices out of the install process and into the game wherever possible, for the reason Fouinto gives (you can change the difficulty on-the-fly rather than having to do a lengthy reinstall). This wasn't possible until EE and ToBEx allowed the hardcoded increased-damage feature of the difficulty slider to be disabled.

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2) When the readme flagged a choice of components as 'not recommended', move the option to choose it anyway out of the main install process and into the ini or the fine-tune-difficulty system, so as to make sure people who don't follow the recommendation know what they are doing and aren't just getting a non-recommended choice by accident. (And so I can make clearer to people which issues are bugs that I will try to fix, and which are 'use at own risk' consequences of exotic install choices.)

For instance:

- I have long recommended that users install the SCS spell-system changes, because those changes are assumed by the AI and not using them leads to behavioral glitches in enemy spellcasting. So in v32 they are installed by default (but can all be deactivated via the ini, if someone knows that they are going against the recommendation and wants to do it anyway).

- I have long advised against giving HLAs to every 18th-level wizard in SoA, but I still used to get complaints that it was unfairly difficult. Now you can still do it, but it's a 'legacy of Bhaal' difficulty, accessible (unless you're playing on LoB) only via the fine-tune-difficulty dialog.

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3) simplify where possible: as Jarno says, the install process had got a bit unmanageable. (But this is relatively minor compared to (1) and (2) ).

I don't think there are any install choices available in v30 that aren't still available in v33, but the default options, given to non-power-users who don't make use of fine-grained customization, are more streamlined and offer less chance of a problematic install. I appreciate your feedback, but it seems to be very much the minority view, so this is unlikely to be reverted.

A couple of minor points:

- it was never the case that changes as specific as the Guarded Compound staircase locking were called out explicitly in the install process. (That particular change came in v32 and was to avoid various reported glitches, but the lich in the Crooked Crane has been doing it since SCSII was in beta).

- I have always had the view that if you don't read the readme, it's your own lookout. That said, the installer's description of 'Initialise AI components' could probably be more explicit that the initialisation includes spellsystem tweaks.

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