Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

[polytope]

7 hours ago, Guest guest said:

Prebuffing through a full array of potions means a warrior could theoretically come out of the gate hasted with +30% hp, 30% lower thac0, Full Plate equivalent AC, 24 str, 21 dex, 18 con, 2hp/round regeneration, immunity to charm/fear/etc, a -20 bonus to all saving throws, and 50% to all magic and elemental damage, 50% magic resistance, or even complete immunity to most elemental damages and another -10AC bonus to crushing. (And depending on how liberal you want to be, you could stack potions or even add green scrolls or common charged items as prebuff effects).

Alas, that all vanishes with a single dispel magic thrown by the player because potions don't have a caster level and single class warriors don't have Spell Immunity (unless you use my revised dispel magic mod in which case potion chance to be dispelled is calculated at drinker's level, not trying to excessively self promote or anything...).

I would support more NPC fighters getting gear which is power equivalent to Valygar or Keldorn's personal items; some already do (Drizzt's friends). It might be too alien to DavidW's usual design paradigm.

If you really want much (emphasis, much) tougher enemy fighters, I'd recommend Improved Anvil from blackwyrmlair (incompatible with SCS and my own mods, though).

[polytope]

13 hours ago, DavidW said:

A Ruhk *transmuter* having *abjuration* spells is more of a scope limitation. SCS only works out how to stat four speciality classes (Conjurer, Necromancer, Invoker, Enchanter), and in addition can't handle speciality fighter-mages. Ideally I'd have a genuine bespoke transmuter script and spell allocation for the Ruhk but it would be a lot of work and it's never been a priority over other projects (and my day job!)

The vanilla Transmuter is in any case an awful kit like the Beastmaster and is only chosen by players who want to increase the game difficulty through nerfing their character. Admittedly, a Rakshasa suffers less from a lack of Abjuration (no need for protections against most spells) but it would be simpler and better design to just rename that guy.

On this subject, I reported some problems with Rakshasas and other creatures shortly after your last update of v34: They use protective spells (like Minor Spell Turning) that don't benefit them, and the highest level Rakshasa casters have actually lost their weapon proficiency and have worse base THAC0 than their level equivalence would suggest (most of the weaker Raks have three stars in their weapon which is really more than a F/M should, then again, by the 2ed rules I think they should also strike as if using magical weapons since they are high HD monsters who are also immune to normal weapons).

Edited July 11, 2022 by polytope

[subtledoctor]

13 hours ago, DavidW said:

The other issue, of course, is that if you kill a mage you can't steal his memorized spells, whereas if you kill a fighter you can steal his stuff.

I never thought about it before but the idea of “warrior pre-buffing” is interesting. It would address the valid issue of why mages have so much more valuable tools (spells) than warriors without simply enriching a murderous player. A similar logic could apply: a few potions with long duration could be deemed to have been drunk before the fight, and then some potions with short duration could be stocked in inventory and used during the fight. 

(Note how rogues already get this treatment, to an extent, when they get invisibility from the get-go.)

If I were designing/balancing this I would limit it to ~two ‘pre-buff’ potion effects - or maybe ranging from 1 to 3 depending on level. Add an element of randomness and it could spice up warrior enemies - is this warrior going to be extra hardy? Or resistant to fire? Can’t say! Could even add effects from green scrolls i to the mix. 

One of my mods already does this, randomly adding an extra AC bonus vs. slashing or piercing or crushing attacks, or a chance to stagger the player, or advantage on saves vs. mental attacks or poison. It’s a neat little bonus for otherwise-predictable enemies. Potion pre-buffing would take that idea further. 

Edited July 11, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Graion Dilach]

On 7/2/2022 at 11:49 AM, DavidW said:

Better Calls for Help is mostly intended to get already-hostile groups to work together better; it’s not intended to mess with the vanilla game’s (somewhat tangled) logic as to who goes hostile in the first place, though sometimes it ends up doing so accidentally.

Loosely related and I'm not sure if you consider this one as a bug - I had games where the riverbed spawnpoint's xvarts in Fire Leaf Forest pulled in Darryl and one of the Larries as aid through Better Calls for Help.

Edited July 11, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[jmerry]

I've seen Larry, Darryl, and Darryl get involved too. Though in my experience it was a rest spawn that got them mad. They start neutral, but they're receptive to shouts for help from your enemies. Probably not an SCS thing at all, really.

On the rakshasas, I feel they are a bit out of whack. They really shouldn't be full mages at levels higher than their HD; they should be mages at some lower level, with special abilities for the AoE spells they love to throw around. My opinion only, of course.

Edited July 12, 2022 by jmerry
Correcting old sitcom reference

[marco_costa]

4 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

Loosely related and I'm not sure if you consider this one as a bug - I had games where the riverbed spawnpoint's xvarts in Fire Leaf Forest pulled in Darryl and one of the Larries as aid through Better Calls for Help.

Excuse me, but there are two _Darryls_, not two Larrys.

Carry on.

[Guest guest]

I've had a bit more time to play, and I noticed one more thing that bugs me a bit. Alongside several other summons, my player summoned Planetars seem to be hugely buffed since vanilla BG2, and this is both poorly documented and not easily toggleable by players. At first I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, since I didn't install improved fiends/celestials, but after a few wiki searches and playing around with the options, I noticed two things. First, EE oddly decided to give Dark Planetars and Planetars a huge passive regeneration that scales with haste. Obviously outside of the scope of SCS here, but I noticed one thing that is. All summoned Planetars, whether player or enemy have the PLANGOOD.BCS script applied, which has a series of if/or/then statements that apply various special abilities to them based on the difficulty setting, and this is tied to mages (I think).

We have a few lines here that seem likely to be the cause starting at roughly line 52 checking for :

GlobalLT("DMWW_mage_difficulty","GLOBAL",2)  // - this ranges 0-5 with an increasing list of effects

and applying

Global("innate_casting","LOCALS",1) // - not sure what this one does

ApplySpellRES("dw#innat",Myself)  // No such index - this effect seems to apply the casting speed 10 reduction

ApplySpellRES("dw#inrem",Myself)  // No such index - idk what this is
        SetGlobal("innate_casting","LOCALS",1)

ApplySpellRES("dw#fiehp",Myself)  // No such index - i assume hp
        SetGlobal("staying_power","LOCALS",1)

ApplySpellRES("dw#hprem",Myself)  // No such index - i assume even more hp

So by playing on the hardest difficulty setting in SCS I accidentally took the strongest player summon in the game and made it significantly tankier and gave it instant casting of powerful spells like heal and insect plague. I don't think these really needed a buff to begin with so I swapped innate_casting to 0 and deleted ApplySpellRES("dw#innat",Myself). I'm not sure if this will break anything down the line, but it seemed to remove the instant casting at least. This presumably weakens enemy summons as well, but me steamrolling chapter 2 with god-tier planetars seems a little silly. I'm not sure whether this change should be under spell revisions, or revised fiends/celestials, but I don't think it really makes sense being a component of smarter mages. Probably ideally there'd be two separate options, with the main planetar changes being under improved fiends/celestials and a separate toggle to split Planetar summoning into player and NPC versions of the spell with only the NPC version getting the fancy new buffs.

I'm going to assume most of this applies to Deva's as well, but they can't solo the game for you quite as well, and I don't have a 3m xp priest yet, so I can't comment on it. Also probably applies to Solars and non-summoned Celestials, but I'm mostly concerned about my sorcerer wiping entire maps with a single level 9 spell slot right now. I will say though that the level 6 Conjure Animals seems pretty horribly overtuned as well, and I've reverted it back to summoning mountain bears in my install.

Quote

Alas, that all vanishes with a single dispel magic thrown by the player because potions don't have a caster level and single class warriors don't have Spell Immunity

Yeah. I noticed that as I was typing it and was waiting to see if anyone else would, and I also recalled there being a mod where scrolls were used at caster level. Regardless some level of increased warrior buffing would make them slightly more threatening, and even requiring a single remove magic gives them a layer of protections sorta like how SCS has those weird cleric bubbles now.

Quote

If I were designing/balancing this I would limit it to ~two ‘pre-buff’ potion effects - or maybe ranging from 1 to 3 depending on level. Add an element of randomness and it could spice up warrior enemies - is this warrior going to be extra hardy? Or resistant to fire? Can’t say! Could even add effects from green scrolls i to the mix. 

I probably wouldn't run the full suite of potions either, but was giving an example of how poorly optimized vanilla warriors really were. They basically have no gear or items to the point where you give almost every single fighter a wizard-slayer kit without them having illegal gear or scripting.  And I'm a bit rusty here as to how easily they're removed, but Magic Blocking/Protection from Magic could be two interesting choices as well. Would give SCS style mages free reign to throw down fireballs and such, and prevent the anti-theft cowled wizards from chunking the legionaries with lightning bolts.

If you do make the mod, I'll install it during my next run (which will probably be 2032 at this rate tbh).

[polytope]

1 hour ago, Guest guest said:

First, EE oddly decided to give Dark Planetars and Planetars a huge passive regeneration that scales with haste.

In the vanilla game, (Dark) Planetars have a swift regeneration coded as an applied permanent effect to their .cre file. However regeneration (opcode 98) doesn't work as a permanent effect, only as limited duration or equipped through item (such as RINGWOLF.ITM).

Now the problem is, Planetars as summons were playtested (sort of) and presumably tweaked without their regeneration before the game was shipped. So the default, non-regenerating Planetar even though it is "bugged" with an extra nonfunctional buff is actually closer to developer intent and being balanced (lol, not really) as a 9th level summon.

In addition to their new regen they have (from vanilla) 3 fast casting heals, it's very difficult for 99% of enemies to damage a Planetar who's also regenerating fast enough to prevent them using their heals.

1 hour ago, Guest guest said:

 I will say though that the level 6 Conjure Animals seems pretty horribly overtuned as well, and I've reverted it back to summoning mountain bears in my install.

That's not SCS though, it's a CDTweaks component - the inaptly renamed Shapeshifter Rebalancing - and hundreds of players over the years have noticed how ridiculously overpowered that spell became. Incidentally the improved shapeshifting component of SCS itself goes a long way toward actually fixing the shapeshifter kit, not that I'm inclined to play with one.

Edited July 17, 2022 by polytope

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, Guest guest said:

Global("innate_casting","LOCALS",1) // - not sure what this one does

I assume this is tied to the casting speed reduction, to make the creature identifiable as benefiting from the bonus. 

SCS, at hard difficulty or higher (I think SCS calls it “tactical?”) applies this to all creature that have magical spell-like abilities but don’t literally have levels in a spellcasting class. Dragons, fiends, celestials, etc. It lets them use their spell-like abilities instantly and without any chance of interruption. 

If, like me, you think that “using a spell-like ability” should be functionally the same as casting a spell and should be interruptible, then you are in luck: you can turn up the difficulty but use the “fine-grained difficulty options” to make these creatures cast their spells normally. 

[Guest guest]

Quote

That's not SCS though, it's a CDTweaks component

  oops

51 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I assume this is tied to the casting speed reduction, to make the creature identifiable as benefiting from the bonus. 

SCS, at hard difficulty or higher (I think SCS calls it “tactical?”) applies this to all creature that have magical spell-like abilities but don’t literally have levels in a spellcasting class. Dragons, fiends, celestials, etc. It lets them use their spell-like abilities instantly and without any chance of interruption. 

If, like me, you think that “using a spell-like ability” should be functionally the same as casting a spell and should be interruptible, then you are in luck: you can turn up the difficulty but use the “fine-grained difficulty options” to make these creatures cast their spells normally. 

That's what I assumed at first, but setting it to 0 seemed not to do anything. Presumably because in the next block it goes and applies the innate spellcasting +10 speed buff anyway. And the "fine-grained difficulty options" (from the options menu) only disabled it if you specifically lower the difficulty for mages in general. (Unless there's some hidden console command or option in the .ini file). Reading the code, it seems to just check your general difficulty and mage difficulty then apply the extra innate casting/staying power abilities.

Like I said though, deleting the line ApplySpellRES("dw#innat",Myself) solved it for me, but I do think the more consistent solution would be to double-check against the Fiend/Celestial difficulty setting rather than the mage setting. And add a "debuff-player Planetars only" option for people who want the extra challenge.

 

[Guest guest]

On second thought, could it potentially be that the variable makes it use its hit dice as caster level for its cleric spells, since it's otherwise listed a mage?

[Guest inconnu]

Does this mod work with GOG BG:EE version? Or do I need to buy steam version?

And how to check that this mod is working? (I can still see tutor NCPs in Candlekeep so I guess something is not right)

[subtledoctor]

7 hours ago, Guest guest said:

That's what I assumed at first, but setting it to 0 seemed not to do anything

My point is, you don’t need to go to these lengths to try to do this. There are options to alter monster innate casting right there in-game, separating that particular feature from the rest of the difficulty-dependent changes. 

You go to game options -> difficulty -> fine-tune difficulty -> “fiends and outer-planar monsters” -> change their casting characteristics. 

I dunno if that works for dragons. My assumption is that changing the setting for innate casting should apply to all innate spellcasters, notwithstanding the “outer-planar” description of the setting. But I could be wrong. 

[DavidW]

26 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I dunno if that works for dragons. My assumption is that changing the setting for innate casting should apply to all innate spellcasters, notwithstanding the “outer-planar” description of the setting. But I could be wrong. 

No, it does what it says: alters fiends and outer-planar creatures. If you want to alter dragons, you need to change their AI separately. There is (at present) no difficulty-slider option to disable insta-casting separately from other difficulty-based benefits. (A brute-force way to do it is just to remove the spell 'dw#innat' from the override, though I don't guarantee that won't have some subtly bad consequence.)

 

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

Global("innate_casting","LOCALS",1) // - not sure what this one does

It keeps track of whether we've applied the 'innate casting' ability. (i.e. it gets set to 1 if it's been applied, 0 if it's been removed.)

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

ApplySpellRES("dw#innat",Myself)  // No such index - this effect seems to apply the casting speed 10 reduction

Yep.

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

ApplySpellRES("dw#inrem",Myself)  // No such index - idk what this is

This removes the casting speed 10 reduction. dw#innat is applied if you set the difficulty high enough. dw#inrem is then removed if you set it back down again.

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

ApplySpellRES("dw#fiehp",Myself)  // No such index - i assume hp

Yep, that's fiends' +50% hp bonus.

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

ApplySpellRES("dw#hprem",Myself)  // No such index - i assume even more hp

No, that removes the effects of dw#fiehp. (Again, for when you turn down the difficulty.)

11 hours ago, Guest guest said:

Probably ideally there'd be two separate options, with the main planetar changes being under improved fiends/celestials and a separate toggle to split Planetar summoning into player and NPC versions of the spell with only the NPC version getting the fancy new buffs.

I can't really do that - it violates SCS's design goal of treating PC and NPC abilities on a par.

But planetars probably shouldn't be getting the Improved Fiend/Celestial buff if you don't have Improved Fiends/Celestials installed. Will look at.

[DavidW]

9 hours ago, polytope said:

In the vanilla game, (Dark) Planetars have a swift regeneration coded as an applied permanent effect to their .cre file. However regeneration (opcode 98) doesn't work as a permanent effect, only as limited duration or equipped through item (such as RINGWOLF.ITM).

Now the problem is, Planetars as summons were playtested (sort of) and presumably tweaked without their regeneration before the game was shipped. So the default, non-regenerating Planetar even though it is "bugged" with an extra nonfunctional buff is actually closer to developer intent and being balanced (lol, not really) as a 9th level summon.

This was actually an issue in Ascension, which hands out non-functional regeneration to lots of creatures. When I was updating it I initially restored it, then had second thoughts for exactly this reason. (I think it's ini-gated now.)