Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

[subtledoctor]

4 minutes ago, DavidW said:

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.)

Oh, I see. Interesting. 

[Guest guest]

  

3 hours ago, DavidW said:

>clarification on code

+

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

Right thanks for the clarification.

In terms of my "solution" I was trying to guess the intent behind the planetars and the players who enjoy them.

1)Are they meant to be an AI change for mages, like the current implementation? The Planetar AI *is* improved and enemy mages like Shangalar do heavily rely on them, so there is that. And outside of the ToB final encounter, summons are where we see 99% of Planetars in SCS. But there's not really much else to go on here, since this code is primarily throwing difficulty based innate abilities on creatures. Doubly so if it turns out it applies to Solars as well.

2)Is it intended to be an encounter buff to make the game more difficult? Fiends and Celestials are in between Golems, Dragons, and Vampires, which are all mainly tossing special abilities on enemies to make them more difficult. In gameplay, it is effectively like this as well in many cases, since disabling the innate casting is a much bigger debuff on them than debuffing their AI would be. Insect plague and heal are much smaller threats when you can interrupt them. And again, these guys are a bigger threat than most enemy mages that can summon them. But on the other hand, 99% of planetars are summons, the player can use them as well, and depending on if enemy mages can use HLAs, this could end up being strictly a buff to players until the final encounter of the game.

3)Is it intended to just be a spell revision? In practice, this is mainly what it is, but I didn't think that was the intent. If a player cranks his difficulty up, he gets better level 9 spells, and I don't really think that's why anyone is playing SCS. If a player turns off enemy HLAs, which I expect many people do in SoA, he's strictly buffing himself. SCS does have a spell revisions component, so this isn't strictly unprecedented, and there's probably some people who enjoy summoning overpowered planetars, so maybe?

I think most people who install fiends/celestials are expecting (2), but instead people installing smarter mages are getting (3). Player/enemy consistency makes the most sense logically, but I was throwing a bone to the most hardcore players that presumably like this component in the first place. It's also a pretty minimal amount of work to copypasta a spell and edit the player HLA table.

[Trouveur80]

7 hours ago, Guest inconnu said:

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)

Yes it works on any PC version.

Easy way to see if SCS is installed is to look at the difficulty slider in the options. If it isn't modified, something went wrong.

But before installing any mod on a GoG or Steam version of BGEE, you should first install DLC Merger if you also have SoD.

[DavidW]

The underlying point here is that if you install Smarter Mages but not Smarter Fiends, summoned planetars should be getting an AI boost but not the associated special abilities. That's a coding error which needs to be fixed (most of my testing tends to be on full rather than partial installs for obvious combinatoric reasons, so this sort of thing sometimes slips through.)

If you do have Improved Fiends/Celestials installed, then yes: it will boost the player's own 9th-level spells, and that's intentional (more accurately, it's a foreseen consequence of intentional changes). I probably wouldn't recommend that people play with a combination of mods and difficulty settings that means they get HLAs way before enemies - I tend to assume you get HLAs late in SoA, and my default tends to be to give HLAs to powerful mages in ToB, but if you're soloing or using loads of mods or something and get HLAs early in chapter 2, probably best to tweak the difficulty to get more enemy HLAs.

[Bartimaeus]

6 hours ago, DavidW said:

If you do have Improved Fiends/Celestials installed, then yes: it will boost the player's own 9th-level spells, and that's intentional (more accurately, it's a foreseen consequence of intentional changes). I probably wouldn't recommend that people play with a combination of mods and difficulty settings that means they get HLAs way before enemies - I tend to assume you get HLAs late in SoA, and my default tends to be to give HLAs to powerful mages in ToB, but if you're soloing or using loads of mods or something and get HLAs early in chapter 2, probably best to tweak the difficulty to get more enemy HLAs.

Yeah, it's worth remembering that the original experience cap was 2.95 million for SoA - just short of 9th level spells for a mage. If you're getting to high enough levels to receive HLAs in SoA with a full party at any point short of like Suldanessellar, your game balance is going to be messed up.

Edited July 17, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Moonboy187]

As a bit of a side question in regards to Raksha and SCS scripting in general, were the scripts created manually and the conditions set for using/memorising spells or was it generated via another program? Is it safe to say that the .2DA file stores what spells certain creatures gain access to and are allowed to use in combat or is the .2DA independent of what's written in a script for the AI to use?

[Trouveur80]

8 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, it's worth remembering that the original experience cap was 2.95 million for SoA - just short of 9th level spells for a mage. If you're getting to high enough levels to receive HLAs in SoA with a full party at any point short of like Suldanessellar, your game balance is going to be messed up.

Yes, that's why I like using EET Tweaks for reducing XP gains when I have some quests mods installed.

[DavidW]

4 hours ago, Moonboy187 said:

As a bit of a side question in regards to Raksha and SCS scripting in general, were the scripts created manually and the conditions set for using/memorising spells or was it generated via another program? Is it safe to say that the .2DA file stores what spells certain creatures gain access to and are allowed to use in combat or is the .2DA independent of what's written in a script for the AI to use?

That's actually a fairly complicated question. Almost no SCS script is literally created manually, i.e. typed as a BAF file - most are written in the SSL metalanguage. But mage (including Rakshasa) scripts are more automated than that - the code generates a list of spells for each creature (from a mixture of .tph files that specify their defensive spells, and .2da files that specify their attack spells) and then puts together their script (from a series of prewritten blocks) according to what spells they have. 

[Moonboy187]

4 hours ago, DavidW said:

That's actually a fairly complicated question. Almost no SCS script is literally created manually, i.e. typed as a BAF file - most are written in the SSL metalanguage. But mage (including Rakshasa) scripts are more automated than that - the code generates a list of spells for each creature (from a mixture of .tph files that specify their defensive spells, and .2da files that specify their attack spells) and then puts together their script (from a series of prewritten blocks) according to what spells they have. 

I thought as much, with the amount of scripts which were created in SCS for a whole load of creatures would have taken forever. Is there a tutorial available on how to go about making scripts ? I have downloaded some mods which add new spells and also created spells myself, but I dont really know an effective way to implement them in to creatures.

[DavidW]

53 minutes ago, Moonboy187 said:

I thought as much, with the amount of scripts which were created in SCS for a whole load of creatures would have taken forever. Is there a tutorial available on how to go about making scripts ? I have downloaded some mods which add new spells and also created spells myself, but I dont really know an effective way to implement them in to creatures.

For baseline scripting, there is an (ancient, but still good) scripting guide by SimDing0 at https://www.pocketplane.net/tutorials/simscript.html. (Largely ignore its advice about tools -  use Near Infinity or WEIDU). Read it, and then look at some of the scripts from the unmodded game to get the idea of how it works.

For my SSL tool, there are some informal lessons at https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/13725-coding-scripts-in-ssl-some-lessons/.

There isn't really a tutorial on how to do AI SCS-style - to be honest it's complicated enough to be beyond tutorials. You need an advanced understanding both of scripting and of WEIDU.

(The bottom line is that there isn't really a simple modular way to get lots of in-game creatures to use your added spells. AI is fairly holistic.)

[Oloriniel]

Installation of "Smarter Mages" failed:

ERROR: Failure("resource [OHBVOG05.CRE] not found for 'COPY'")

I do see this file in my override.  Am trying again manually, not in Project Infinity.

[subtledoctor]

On 7/17/2022 at 8:57 AM, DavidW said:

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.

Should I be concerned that I don't see these in my override folder...?

EDIT - crap, sorry, just remembered I have SCS v33 installed. Maybe this instant-innate-casting stuff is new to v34. I'll take a look at the changelog.

Edited July 18, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Oloriniel]

Scrolling through the debug file, I see this error:

SCS's 'mage_edits_main' function has encountered a file it doesn't know how to patch, DADROW13.CRE (probably the file was broken by a previous mod). The error message was 'Unix.Unix_error(20, "stat", "weidu_external/workspace\\ssl_out\\dw#mage.baf")'. SCS has skipped it and continued with installation, but this may cause instabilities.

The error appears twice.

Repeated for:

DADROW15.CRE
DWWOND16.CRE
EGMAGE2.CRE
ELADMOD.CRE
ELEANA.CRE
GORSTA11.CRE
GPMAGE1.CRE
GROMG05.CRE
GUAREYE5.CRE
HENVIS.CRE (this one appears 4x, not twice)
ILLASERA.CRE
JC_SEMA.CRE
KNWIZMOD.CRE
KTWIZ03.CRE
KUOMSH01.CRE
L#NI6CQ.CRE
MAGE6A.CRE
MESMOD.CRE
MGAPPR02.CRE
MGAPPR01.CRE
MGTEOS01.CRE
MOHCMOD.CRE
NIMBUL.CRE
NTDRAAGI.CRE
0#IM10WE.CRE
OHBGIT04.CRE (this one also appears 4x not twice)

While I was typing this, the installation succeeded manually, so the issue may be Project Infinity.
 

[Graion Dilach]

Changelog those. PI uses the x64 weidu installer, so it's not caused by running out of memory. I can imagine those files got corrupted by a prior mod.

[Oloriniel]