Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

[Guest Diogenes]

16 hours ago, jmerry said:

Difficulty level is stored in the save as the global difficulty GAMEDIFFICULTY (integer-valued, so when SCS assigns new names to each difficulty that isn't a problem). Party formations are stored in the save too, as integers. Most other game settings aren't stored in the saves, and are in baldur.lua.

On reinstalling a particular component - the way WeiDU handles things, it rolls back to a state from before that component was installed, then proceeds forward. Reinstall that component, then reinstall what comes after. The IWD spells components affect later parts of the mod like enemy spellcaster scripting, so you'll have to reinstall most of SCS if you go this route.

So if both the modded and unmodded games access the same baldur.lua file - can that create a conflict between those games, or is it safe to play both games this way? (Although I probably will stick to BG:EE+SCS only when I get started - but I'd like to know anyway) No-one warned me against this, so I guess it's ok, but I prefer to be sure about it.

I'm thinking of creating another Documents folder on my 2nd drive, so as to keep them (modded and unmodded games + their saves and settings and whatnot) as separate as I can. (And also of re-installing SCS based on your answers, just to be sure)

I haven't started an SCS game yet (in the meantime, I read some serious spoilers online (I have forgotten even very crucial stuff about the story - or should I say "had"? MEH!!), although I tried not to - I have to avoid doing that)

Thanks again!

[jmerry]

I haven't had any problems with shared settings between modded and non-modded games. They're universal enough that it just doesn't come up. And when mods do add settings, like the difficulty fine-tuning in SCS, those don't go in the shared lua. The fine-tuning is stored in a bunch of variables, which go in the save.

[Guest Diogenes]

Hello again!

I just started my first BG:EE+SCS game, but sadly I have some technical problems from the very beginning.

First of all, I should say that I decided to uninstall the second BG installation I had made, the one where I had added SCS, and to install SCS on the first (unmodded) installation I had. I installed most of the components, and in the end I was told everything was installed succesfully, except for the Arcane IWD spells, which was "Installed with warnings" - just like the first time.

Then I edited stratagems.ini with the following changes: potion_version=4 (from 6) dispel_arrow_maximum=8 (from 5) and thac0_tolerance=99 (from 6 iirc)

So I started the game and rolled a new character (with 95 total score!! - not at first roll ofc). I chose Core difficulty (vanilla setting).

As soon as my character was in Candlekeep, I wanted to set the SCS difficulty. So I went to the gameplay options and clicked on the "SCS difficulty" button, which did nothing else but exit to the game screen (Candlekeep). I tried this a few more times with the same result. Then I noticed the following messages at the bottom of the screen (I probably didn't notice them the first time I clicked that button because I had paused the game)

Invalid: 34321

1: Invalid: 34322

2: Invalid: 34323

3: Invalid: 34324

4: Invalid: 34326

5: Invalid: 34327

6: Invalid: 34329

7: Invalid: 34331

8: Invalid: 34333

9: Invalid: 34342

10: Invalid: 34345

I could click on those messages, which resulted in some more (around 3-5?) Invalid xxxxx messages each time (displaying bigger and bigger numbers). I couldn't do anything else in the game. So I pressed ctrl+alt+del to exit.

I decided to see if I could set the SCS difficulty after I exit Candlekeep, so I loaded the game again and went to speak to Gorion. When Imoen came to find me, I leveled her up (I have installed the "Improved NPC customisation and management"). Then I remembered something I had read in the Readme and checked her special abilities bar. Next to the Snares icon were three squares showing "+5%". When I hovered my mouse over them, the tool-tip was showing "F2: Invalid 34309", "F3: Invalid 34309", and "F4: Invalid 34309".

Also, right below the message "Imoen: Level up" appeared "Imoen: Invalid: 34311"

Going to the gameplay options and clicking on the "SCS difficulty" button had the same results as before.

I tried once more to run the game after setting "thac0_tolerance=9" in the stratagems.ini, thinking that maybe the number should be 9 really (i.e. perhaps 99 was a typo in the Readme) but I had the same results.

Help me to start an SCS campaign, please...

[Guest Diogenes]

One more thing that I don't understand...

TL:DR version - I unistalled everything and installed BG:EE vanilla from scratch, but now I have the SCS UI. How can this happen?...

I decided to unistall SCS completely, so I could at least resume my vanilla game (or maybe start a new vanilla campaign) until I find a solution to my SCS-related problems. First, I ran setup-stratagems and unistalled everything. I loaded the game, which had kept the SCS UI. I decided to unistall the game completely, and install it from scratch. I unistalled it and made a copy to an external hard disc of whatever was left in the game folder. I also copied there the automatic saves of SCS, as well as the baldur.lua file, and deleted them from the original hard drive. My saves from vanilla BG:EE were kept where they were (I didn't do anything to them).Then I restarted my PC, and installed the game from scratch. To my surprise, it has kept the SCS UI (I checked the loading screens, the in-game UI, and the map). Also, the quick-launch icon is not what it used to be.

Now, I don't mind the SCS UI, it's pretty good actually, but I feel like something has gone wrong... Can anyone explain to me what has happened?

[subtledoctor]

There is no "SCS UI" ...?

[Guest Diogenes]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

There is no "SCS UI" ...?

Really? Then wtf is going on? The vanilla UI was very different before I installed SCS. But as I said, after unistalling SCS and re-installing vanilla BG:EE from scratch, I have the "changed" UI. Mostlly the main colour has changed from dark black to lighter grey, but there are lots of differences. The 2nd UI has an "older" feel to it. Would you like to see screnshots? Can I upload pics from my PC?

But anyhow, that's an aesthetic change, and I don't have a problem with it, as I said. I'm more concerned about the technical problems I encountered, which prevent me from playing SCS. Any help on those?...

[subtledoctor]

4 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

I'm more concerned about the technical problems I encountered, which prevent me from playing SCS. Any help on those?

Well,

17 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

First of all, I should say that I decided to uninstall the second BG installation I had made, the one where I had added SCS, and to install SCS on the first (unmodded) installation I had. ... Then I edited stratagems.ini

I think you have borked your install somehow. You have several game installs, and SCS installed and then installed again? And the UI changes from black to light? We have nowhere near enough details to figure out what's actually going on here, all I know is that this sounds chaotic and a very easy environment for wires to get crossed and mess things up. I would start fresh, reinstalling the actual game (game, singular, not games) and get a unused copy of SCS, and install SCS onto your brand new game install.

More specifics: this is just speculation but the "black UI" thing and the invalid strings lead me to suggest you have Siege of Dragonspear, probably from Steam or GOG where it is a DLC that installs onto BGEE. And it seems like you maybe uninstalled SoD. And/or did not use the DLCMerger or whatever that utility is that is necessary for installing mods onto SoD from Steam or GOG. So:

• Trash your BGEE game and reinstall it from whatever source it is from
• Figure out whether you have SoD with your BGEE game
• Figure out whether to want to play SoD in addition to BGEE
• If so, install SoD and figure out what utility is necessary to use mods with it (I am very out of the loop here, others will know better)
• Download a new copy of SCS
• Install SCS

Make sure that is all happening in the same game folder, with the same game.

Edited October 20, 2022 by subtledoctor

[jmerry]

17 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

... Then I noticed the following messages at the bottom of the screen (I probably didn't notice them the first time I clicked that button because I had paused the game)

Invalid: 34321

1: Invalid: 34322

2: Invalid: 34323

3: Invalid: 34324

4: Invalid: 34326

5: Invalid: 34327

6: Invalid: 34329

7: Invalid: 34331

8: Invalid: 34333

9: Invalid: 34342

10: Invalid: 34345

I could click on those messages, which resulted in some more (around 3-5?) Invalid xxxxx messages each time (displaying bigger and bigger numbers). I couldn't do anything else in the game. So I pressed ctrl+alt+del to exit.

...

That looks like a failure to incorporate new strings into the game properly; I saw this recently with a Spanish-language player who wanted the mod to be used on a mobile device.

In that case, it went wrong because the file "difficulty.tra" is flat out missing from the Spanish translation, which was last updated about ten years ago. Difficulty fine-tuning is a considerably newer component.

You probably could have exited that conversation, by blindly selecting options. You just wouldn't have known what you were actually doing, and might have been caught by loops. The dialogue was built, but all the text describing things was missing.

On the interface stuff ... there are notable differences between the looks of BGEE with SoD and BGEE without SoD. Did your "clear out everything and reinstall the game" go from including SoD to not including it?

All right. I see three reasonably likely possibilities for what went wrong to cause your missing string issues.

- You were trying to install SCS in a language that doesn't have an up-to-date translation. In this case, the only fixes are to use a different language or to update the translation.

- Something glitched and the installation didn't load the translation files properly. In this case, reinstalling the mod would probably fix it.

- As subtledoctor said, you have SoD, and the copy of dialog.txt in the DLC archive takes priority over the modified dialog.txt created by installing the mod. The new strings SCS added to the game are now just numbers pointed to nothing. Oops. In this case, in order to have SCS (or other mods) coexist with SoD, you need "DLC Merger". Here's a link: https://github.com/Argent77/A7-DlcMerger/releases. Install that before installing other mods. (And this seems like the most likely case to me.)

Actually, on the SoD incompatibility - some mods like Tweaks Anthology check for the issue, and fail out of the installation with a "hey, you need to do this" warning if it's detected. Maybe SCS should copy that code?

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, jmerry said:

trying to install SCS in a language that doesn't have an up-to-date translation.

Ooh, that's very insightful. This is now my front-runner guess.

[Guest Diogenes]

Thank you guys! You are so helpful..

It's probably SoD that has messed things up. I'm only using English. I'm really sorry, I didn't know I should have mentioned it, cause I haven't ran SoD at all and wasn't thinking about it. My BG:EE comes together with TotSC, Black Pits, and SoD. It's a GoG release. Now I remember having read something about it regarding the mod installation, but I thought I'd deal with it when I intended to play SoD. Silly me...

But I still wonder why I now have the "grey BG UI" instead of the "black SoD UI" (on a fresh installation from scratch)... And why it glitched when I lowered the music sound to sero, and now I have a mix of grey and black UI in one or two screens, smh lol

I might try with that DLC Merger, not sure I will succeed though. Will you guys help me if I mess things up again? Ha haha...

@subtledoctorIt's a bit chaotic, but if you read all my posts you can figure out what I did re: the various installations. But whenever I say BG:EE, that stands for BG:EE+BP+SoD. Not that it matters now to understand, but I think you can make sense of what I did if you follow my posts. And note that whether I want to play BP and SoD or not, they are being installed together with BG+TotSC.

[Guest Diogenes]

Oh, I think I said something wrong in my previous post (which waits for mod approval) I'm a bit confused with these installations... Looks like I haven't installed SoD on my last BG:EE installation. It's only BG:EE (with TotSC) +BP. And thus the "grey BG UI" now - well, except for that glitch I mentioned in my previous post, lol

So I probably can install SCS without DLC-merger now.

And if this is the case (I'll find out kinda soon) I should use DLC-merger only when I want to play SoD and install it after I finish my BG+TotSC campaign, right?

[subtledoctor]

4 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

It's a bit chaotic, but if you read all my posts you can figure out what I did re: the various installations

I honestly can't, but it doesn't matter. Rule of thumb with Baldur's Gate mods, if there is a process of install/uninstall/reinstall, whether for the game or for mods, and it is a bit chaotic, then you're going to have problems. Figure out your installation plan ahead of time, and keep it simple and orderly.

4 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

I should use DLC-merger only when I want to play SoD and install it after I finish my BG+TotSC campaign, right?

I mean, you should get everything set up before you play the game. If as you say you install SCS onto BGEE, and then later install SoD, then you're going to have problems. Make a clean install environment, and install things in the right order.

1. Install BGEE
2. Install SoD
3. Install DLCMerger
4. Install SCS

Now everything is complete, and you won't need to worry about changing anything later.

[Guest Diogenes]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

I honestly can't, but it doesn't matter. Rule of thumb with Baldur's Gate mods, if there is a process of install/uninstall/reinstall, whether for the game or for mods, and it is a bit chaotic, then you're going to have problems. Figure out your installation plan ahead of time, and keep it simple and orderly.

I mean, you should get everything set up before you play the game. If as you say you install SCS onto BGEE, and then later install SoD, then you're going to have problems. Make a clean install environment, and install things in the right order.

1. Install BGEE
2. Install SoD
3. Install DLCMerger
4. Install SCS

Now everything is complete, and you won't need to worry about changing anything later.

Point A) I had one vanilla install and a second one which I tried to mod with SCS. Then I unistalled/deleted the modded version and tried to mod the one vanilla version which remained with SCS. Then I deleted even that one and tried to re-install everything from scratch. And I'm still at this point (this time I just didn't install SoD). SCS is the only mod I'm trying to install, so atm I don't want to get into bigger trouble with other mods.

Point B) Got it. I haven't played SoD at all, so I want to try it for sure (otherwise I might chose to skip it). I thought that perhaps I could play BG:EE+SCS, then unistall SCS, install SoD, and install SCS on SoD. But since I need to use DLC-merger in order to mod SoD with SCS (right?) then I must do what you said if I want to play BG:EE and SoD with SCS.

I'm just a little hesitant cause that DLC-merger sounds (to me) like it could be one more thing that could mess things up. But it's supposed to help me, not make my life difficult, right?

I mean, if I find too much trouble with it, then I might choose to play without SCS at all through BG+SoD+BG2. After all, it's my first run after 10 years or so. I'm still re-learning the game mechanics, and don't feel like I definitely need SCS. But it sounds like a very nice mod to have.

Cheers!

May Lathander, Oghma, Tymora, and... and Ilmater always be by your side, and by the side of everyone who helped me. And David, ofc. And.... ok, I'll shut up now. Time to see what I can do with that merger thingy.

[Trouveur80]

DLC Merger is mandatory for successfully installing any other mods on a BGEE SoD installation from Steam or GoG.

Consider SoD as ToSC, when installed is part of BGEE, not a separate game.

If you install a mod on BGEE, it will also be installed for the SoD part.

Just do what Subtledoctor said, make a clean (delete your current folder and download it again) BGEE SoD install, then install DLC Merger, then install SCS.

[Guest Diogenes]

Guys, thanks for your help and support! I did it!   Woooohoooo!!!

I'm fairly certain now that I could have installed other mods, too, but i'll stick with SCS for now. I'll probably add Ascension and Wheels of Prophecy to BG2:EE (plus SCS)

I rolled a Jester (first time playing a Bard as my character) and started playing on Tactical difficulty. And I have installed all the Smarter and Improved enemies and battles components, plus better calls for help. I don't think I've ever played on harder than Core. And as I understand, even Improved is harder than Core. But I can always tone it down if it's too hard for me.

I don't remember ever being killed in Candlekeep... I remember being killed by bears right outside Candlekeep in the distant past. But this time I had to reload 3-4 times in order to kill one of the asassins there. Granted, I hadn't bought any armour or shield, only a longsword and was "Protected from Evil", but I still wasn't expecting that. I'm not sure this would be easier on Improved difficulty though, as I was against only one lousy killer. But then I managed to take down both Candlekeep assassins without reloading.

[To be honest, I was killed in Candlekkep in vanilla BG:EE yesterday, but that was because I (as a Blade) tried to pickpocket Dreppin (the guy who wanted a potion for his cow), and even Gorion killed me when I tried that on him! (very anti-climactic death, really)]

Now I'm right outside Candlekeep with Imoen. The first wolf we came across attacked us on sight, even with the "More realistic wolves and wild dogs" component installed. And right when we started fighting it, a bear - which we had passed without geting close and was out of our sight - attacked us, too. OK, we killed them both (without reloading, lol), but I'm sure we would be dead if I had installed "Faster Bears".

Which brings me to this: The readme says that "Faster Bears tweaks their movement rate (when hostile) until it's about the same as for humans. This also makes the druid's bear shapeshift less annoying". Well, I used Faldorn in vanilla BG:EE(+SoD), and when she shapeshifted to bear she had a "Fast speed" attribute (or something to that extent) which meant that her bear form wasn't at all slow. IIRC she was faster than human form as a bear.

Some other points I'd like to make:

- "Improved Deployment for Parties of Assassins" - This is one of the components I didn't install, cause the part of the description that I copy/pasted here confused me, so perhaps it could be worded better (but it's not a very important component for me)  -> "As of version 24, the assassins spawn in the usual random-encounter areas on TUTU and BGEE games, and on BGT games with BGSpawns or BGT-Tweaks spawns. (The old behaviour is fun, but a repeated source of bug reports!) If you want to hold on to the old version, you can force it via the ini file."

- The Readme suggests Modmerger, not the DLC-merger you guys told me about. The latter was pretty easy to use - haven't tried the other one.

Well, perhaps I could go on about other things, too, but I have to keep enough strength for some bard singing and stuff, ha ha