SCS mod cheese

[Guest RIP King Arthur]

Good afternoon all,

First some background: I installed the SCS mod for the first time a few weeks ago and played for 3 hours during which I died approximately 10000000000 times :)   I had been looking for a way to make the trilogy more challenging by changing difficulty and some people on reddit pointed me to the SCS mod which I've heard about previously on several occasions.  After my first 3 hour experience I felt like I had a decent feel for the changes the mod made to the game, and started a No-reload, Insane difficulty SCS run which I didn't expect to complete but after 2 weeks and about 12 hours of recorded game time I did end up making it without having to reload!

Now regarding the cheese: during that run I noticed the changes made to Shandalar (aka he doesn't trigger an automated sequence of spells ending in him teleporting out of the game anymore?). I was using the algernon's cloak on him to try and charm him then run away when it would fail and he would turn hostile to attack me. To my surprise attempting to charm a non-hostile npc with the cloak doesn't trigger hostility?!  On my playthrough he got charmed in the first try but when I went to repeat it after the playthrough finished I noticed the non-hostility clause and possibility of just rest-repeat until it works. 

So my first question is if this will be addressed at some point since Shandalar is not really supposed to be vulnerable to cheese like that? :)

The second "cheese"  I wanted to discuss, I noticed on my second playthrough by accident. I was a bit in a hurry after collecting Imoen since I wanted to test something out so I didn't level her up (apparently SCS allows you customize companion level-ups starting from lvl 0). We got engaged in a fight and that's when I discovered Imoen was immortal at lvl 0, and so are any other companions if you just don't give them their initial levels? I know it's easily avoided by the players themselves by just assigning the appropriate levels, but I was wondering if there isn't an easy way to fix this immortality in the mod itself so that people using SCS can't exploit it (intentionally or unintentionally) in the first place?

Kind regards,

A happy new SCS mod user

[ABlake]

Quote

To my surprise attempting to charm a non-hostile npc with the cloak doesn't trigger hostility?! 

Regarding this, spells/spell-like abilities have a flag called "hostile". If this flag is set, targeting a neutral NPC will be considered "hostile action" and turn them hostile even if the effect is not damaging. If not, then neutral NPCs won't react unless they take damage from said spells/abilities. E.g. Web in vanilla BG/BGEE is not flagged hostile so neutral NPCs won't react to being hit by it, but in my modded BG2 it is.

Edited July 16, 2021 by ABlake