Jump to content

Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

DavidW

By DavidW
in Sword Coast Stratagems

Recommended Posts

DavidW

DavidW

Posted
  • Author
Posted
11 minutes ago, Guest Jesse said:

What does 'we now use' imply here?  Does this mean that NPC magic users will default to IWD spells in their rollout, but SR spells continue to co-exist for player use?

'The mod uses'. 

i.e. the spell-selection list for NPC mages/priests is the IWD list, not the SR list. NPCs will still use SR spells, but their spell selections won't be tailored to SR. (So, for instance, they won't learn Larloch's Minor Drain, because the vanilla version is too weak.) PCs aren't affected.

Link to comment
DavidW

DavidW

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I should add that if any fan of SR and the IWD spells wants to do me a set of SR+IWD spell choices, I'd be happy to use them. I'm not sufficiently invested in SR to do it myself. The relevant files are in stratagems/[mage|priest]/spellchoices/[iwd|demivrgvs], in a hopefully-self-explanatory format - it's basically a matter of looking at the SR allocations and the IWD allocations and combining them.

(In principle you could also do it for the defensive spell choices in stratagems/[mage|priest]/spellchoices_defensive/[iwd|demivrgvs], although those are quite a lot more complex.)

Link to comment
suy

suy

Posted
Posted
10 minutes ago, DavidW said:

i.e. the spell-selection list for NPC mages/priests is the IWD list, not the SR list. NPCs will still use SR spells, but their spell selections won't be tailored to SR. (So, for instance, they won't learn Larloch's Minor Drain, because the vanilla version is too weak.) PCs aren't affected.

Is simplifying the implementation the motivation for this change, or is something else? Just curious, I'm not a SR user myself. But if I were, I would dislike it very much, as it makes the world inconsistent, where mages on one side of the fight seem to have access to something that others don't. One of the things where I saw SCS making a huge improvement to the game was that, after installing it, computer-controlled enemies would do stuff that humans do as well (better choices in spells, throwing MMM in between casting, etc.). But just curious. :)

Link to comment
DavidW

DavidW

Posted
  • Author
Posted

No problem.

Just to clarify further: SCS v32 came with 3 sets of NPC spell choices: vanilla, SR, and IWD. The issue is: which set to use if both IWD and SR spells are installed? I'd originally assumed that SR users wouldn't be that keen on the IWD spells, since a lot of the design motivation for SR was a systematic, internally balanced revision of the spells, and just dumping the IWD spells into the mix breaks that, so that in any case the important thing was for NPC mages/priests to properly understand and use the new SR system, so I defaulted to 'SR' choices if both SR and IWD were installed. But feedback from several people suggested this was the wrong call, hence the swap-over here (you can reverse it through an ini choice).

I don't use SR myself so I'm fairly happy just to go with what people want here.

Link to comment
subtledoctor

subtledoctor

Posted
Posted
51 minutes ago, suy said:

Is simplifying the implementation the motivation for this change, or is something else? Just curious, I'm not a SR user myself. But if I were, I would dislike it very much, as it makes the world inconsistent, where mages on one side of the fight seem to have access to something that others don't.

Thing is, a lot of what SR does is simply replace existing spells with new/better versions. The number of entirely new spells added by SR is pretty small - and overlaps with the IWD spells to an extent. Whereas, the set of IWD spells is larger and consists of entirely new spells added to the game. So in giving enemies access to the IWD spells, they will end up getting some SR spells (the ones that overwrite vanilla spells) and some other SR spells (the ones that duplicate IWD spells), and all of the IWD spells. For SR players, this should result in much richer gameplay than SCS v33, which omitted the larger group of IWD spells.

Sure, combining them all might be ideal, but it also might not be worth the effort. I'd like to play with SCS v34 before making a definitive assertion, but I suspect SR players will barely even notice the difference. Looking at the respective spell lists... the biggest issue I can spot at a glance is the difference in Monster Summoning spells. I don't quite remember how the different MS spells from each mod interact with each other. But in any case both spell mods add high-level MS spells, so enemy mages will get access to some high-level summons no matter what. There also might be some difference in the conjuring of undead summons... but again, I'm not sure it's something the player would ever notice.

I always play with SR, and with IWD spells, and with SCS. So you can take it from this one player, at least, that this will probably work out very well.

Link to comment
Roberciiik

Roberciiik

Posted
Posted

Hello,

I tried to install IWD spells with my local translations to check if substitution works. However, Bard class description hasn't changed after installation, well even alignment restrictions are still in the descriptions. Do I need something extra to load dw_iwdspells.tra? Maybe non-English files are not loaded at all? Could you verify this? 

Link to comment
DavidW

DavidW

Posted
  • Author
Posted

The bard lines aren't used as of v34 - there is functionality to install bard spells from IWDEE but SCS doesn't implement it. (This is shared code with IWDification, which does implement it, and it might get added to SCS in the next version.)

If the alignment descriptions aren't being processed, that's more concerning. The tra file is loaded by a standard SCS function - it shouldn't be failing to get the native-language version.

Try installing the arcane IWD spells, and then looking at the description for the 6th level wizard spell Create Water Elemental. Is the name and description in English or in Polish?

Link to comment
Roberciiik

Roberciiik

Posted
Posted (edited)

Ok, I double-checked that file is loaded. It correctly replaces Mordenkainen's Force Missiles description (water elemental spell is also correct in Polish in this case). But 'Cause XYZ Wounds' and others spells alignment restrictions are not replaced. Cure XYZ Wounds looks good, however.

I noticed that all 'Conjure Lesser XYZ Elemental' don't have descriptions of the spell. Descriptions are all the same and stay about "stone eye" (ability probably?).

Edited by Roberciiik
Link to comment
Palanthis

Palanthis

Posted
Posted

Thank you @DavidW for updating SCS up to this day. It's amazing !

I have a question : i didn't noticed any bugs before with the 'innate sequencers' component. Yet you seem to have spotted some bugs which motivated your decision to deprecate the component. It's very sad. Just being curious here : what are these bugs indeed ?
Some bugs already seem to affect vanilla EE v2.5.16.6, according to this page : https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Spell_Sequencer

Also, a lot of comments on this page are about the bugs.
To my knowledge, 2.6 EE dosen't seem to haave fixed this.


So my question is : are the bugs described here related to SCS modded games ? Or does SCS adds another set of bugs to the vanilla EE ?
I just want to be sure SCS brings its own set of bugs with the component you deprecated. Because the sequencers of the vanilla game seem to be bugged anyway...

Link to comment
DavidW

DavidW

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I'm not sure - it's just that I had a bunch of bug reports that looked complicated to track down, and I made a judgement call that it was more important to get v34 out and address the critical issues that had come up, rather than spend an additional time chasing them down.

If you want to reactivate it, just edit stratagems.tp2 in a text editor and remove the DEPRECATED flag on line 696.

Link to comment
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...