Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

[Guest Diogenes]

Hello! It's me again. The friendly Jester

I'd like to ask about the casters' pre-buffing SCS component, make some very early-game observations, and tell you about a funny incident. (I'm playing BG:EE 2.6.6 with SoD, SCS on Tactical, and have only gone from Candlekeep to FAI and Beregost).

- Re: prebattle-casting :

• IMPROVED: Mages advance-cast a small number of spells with a duration of at least several hours (like Stoneskin).
• TACTICAL: Mages advance-cast any defensive spells with a duration of at least one turn per level. If they appear in sight of the party, they also advance-cast defensive spells with a duration of at least three rounds per level; if they appear out of sight of the party, they may also advance-cast some long-duration summoning spells

First of all, I don't quite understand the "If they appear in sight of the party" and "if they appear out of sight of the party" parts. I mean, if anyone "appears" isn't s/he in sight of the party by definition? Could you give me any examples of in-sight and out-of-sight appearances? (Without big spoilers, please, I only remember the game well up to chapter 5 - Davaeorn) I just want to undrerstand what this means, so as to make up my mind about the difficulty I'd prefer to play.

I'm playing on Tactical difficulty as I said (with every customizable sub-component on default), but I'm thinking of toning down pre-buffing to Improved, just from a "realism" perspective. (Except if I'm wrong in the way I'm thinking about it - please let me know.) I mean, it makes more sense to me to come across a mage who has pre-casted long-duration spells, than short-duration ones, if s/he doesn't know my party is coming his/her way. But if he's in the next room of the one where we're fighting with his guards, let's say, then it makes sense that he's heard all the noise and is getting prepared before we meet him. (Is this an example of out-of-sight appearance?)

Even though I'm playing on Tactical, though, I just met a mage who hadn't pre-casted anything, even though he came towards my party, and not the other way around. He was the Wizard of Thay who was after Neera in Beregost. (Not the named one who disappeared, the other one). When he started getting wounded, he ran away and casted Mirror Image. This spell has a duration of 3 rounds + 1 round / level, so I'm not really sure if it fits the "at least three rounds per level" part of the Tactical mode. But even if it doesn't fit, he coud have pre-casted Armor, like the mage who attacked us at FAI, right? So why didn't he pre-cast Armor? Didn't he have it in his spellbook, or wasn't he prepared to meet opposition? I just want to understand how exactly pre-buffing works and make the right difficulty choice for me.

- Funny incident :

Since I'm telling you about that encounter in Beregost... Neera casted Color Spray on a Thayan Bodyguard, making me and poor Montaron fall unconcious. We were still unconcious when the fight ended. Neera wanted to join my party, and I agreed to take her on (even though I was unconcious, lol). I only want her temporarily, she's too Wild for my tastes, but anyway... So I removed Xzar from the party, and he took Monty with him, as always. Only this time, poor Monty was still unconcious, and he turned red (hostile) while laying on the ground. That looked funny to me, haha! So we killed him, but we waited for him to regain conciousness first. Truth be told, he was right to get angry, but he should have attacked Neera, right?

- Re: "More realistic wolves and wild dogs":

I like this, it's certainly more realistic. But it can be more dangerous (no big danger, ofc, but we're still level one) because a neutral wolf (which I don't want to attack) might suddenly turn hostile when he's close to the party (like the bears, it's probably similar/same script). I wonder if we could meet again the wolf who ran away when it was badly injured - we didn't chase it down to kill it (Happy, David?). And if we met it again soon, would it still be badly injured? I guess yes.

- General observation :

It's still veeeeeery early in the game, I haven't seen almost anything yet, as you understand. Thing is, after being killed in the very beginning inside Candlekeep (as I said in my previous post), something I had never experienced before, I was "on my toes". But so far it doesn't feel hard (haven't reloaded since Candlekeep (ffs-lol). But I'm probably gonna get my arse handed to me sooner or later, lol.

 

[jmerry]

On that Thayan wizard from Neera's introduction - SCS often leaves EE content alone. In this case, the mage's combat script is "OHMADD01", which isn't on the list of generic mage scripts that SCS replaces. You were seeing vanilla behavior unmodified by SCS there.

A wolf suddenly turning hostile when right next to the party ... is that more dangerous than the wolf being hostile from the moment it spawns, or less? Also, you can prevent that hostility by having a druid or ranger along with you. On a lighter note, I do have a laugh when (with SCS) the party gets waylaid by a bunch of non-hostile wild dogs. They just wanted to be petted.

[Guest Diogenes]

24 minutes ago, jmerry said:

On that Thayan wizard from Neera's introduction - SCS often leaves EE content alone. In this case, the mage's combat script is "OHMADD01", which isn't on the list of generic mage scripts that SCS replaces. You were seeing vanilla behavior unmodified by SCS there.

A wolf suddenly turning hostile when right next to the party ... is that more dangerous than the wolf being hostile from the moment it spawns, or less? Also, you can prevent that hostility by having a druid or ranger along with you. On a lighter note, I do have a laugh when (with SCS) the party gets waylaid by a bunch of non-hostile wild dogs. They just wanted to be petted.

More dangerous to suddenly see a hostile wolf 6 feet away from the party, than seeing it 30 feet away, imo.

Afaik, that kind of hostility is prevented towards Druids and Rangers, but Druids and Rangers can't prevent it from happening towards other members of the party (i.e. wolf, dogs and bears can attack non-Druids and non-Rangers in the party). They can still charm those animls, though (The Druid if s/he has the appropriate spell ready)

Oh, yeah, that's pretty funny... I had a laugh in my unmodded game (something which wouldn't have changed with SCS) when during travelling from Cloackwood X to Cloackwood Y -- "You have been waylaid by enemies and MUST DEFEND YOURSELF!!!" -- 2 Great Wyverns attack -- My party swiftly reached the end of the small map and went away

[Guest Diogenes]

Hi there! Did anyone think this Jester wouldn't pester you again?

A) re: pre-casting

I just met another caster who hadn't pre-casted anything (Tactical difficulty), and she's an original BG encounter (not EE-added). I'm talking about the divine caster Neira (cleric or fighter/cleric) who attacked us in Nashkel Inn (we just arrived). Perhaps she simply had no spells who meet the duration criteria? I'm also wondering why she didn't heal herself when she casted Sanctuary. The way it went down for her was: 2 casting failures, Sanctuary, Draw Upon Holy Might (when in Sanctuary), then one more casting failure, then she went melee, and then we finally killed her. She had taken enough damage to justify a healing spell, and she must have had such ones memorised. Perhaps we caused her healing spells to fail when she tried to cast them before casting Sanctuary?

Also, my general questions re: pre-casting still stand (the ones in my post on the top of the page).

 

B) re: Smarter general AI - "In Baldur's Gate I, various creatures who foolishly moved up to talk to the party, or sat immobile while being surrounded, will now initiate conversation at a distance."

I don't like it much that they start talking and attacking at such a great distance that I can only see their legs. I would prefer if they made a couple more steps and their whole body was visible. (2 such encounters so far iirc)

 

C) re: Potions for NPCs - "It's not exactly unrealistic that glass bottles get smashed in the heat of battle. So by default, only 25% of potions are recoverable. You can tweak this in the ini". (There's a typo in the Readme, btw, it says "be default")

I haven't installed this, but there's still a line about it in the ini { Potion_Version(6) }. Does this affect dead enemies' potions even if I haven't installed this component?

 

D) re: Other settings - thac0_tolerance(6) - this controls how much a creature's thac0 can be better than its legal level for SCS to assume it ought to be corrected, rather than left in place as deliberate. Set it to zero to disable SCS's correction of too-good thac0. Set it to 99 to ensure that all thac0s are made legal. (Only weapon-using creatures are affected.)

So, if I set it to zero SCS doesn't correct any weapon-using creature's too-good thac0, and if I set it to 99 SCS corrects them all and makes them legal. So the default setting 6 means such a creature can have up to 6 less thac0 than it should, right? And if I set it to 2 they can have up to 2 less thac0. If I set it to 12 they can have up to 12 less thac0. Etc etc... Have I understood anything wrong?

 

PS: In case this isn't the right thread for such posts, someone should let me know and show me the right way ot do it...

[Guest Diogenes]

To the moderators: You haven't posted/approved my previous comment, so please don't post it and post this one instead.

Two more observations from me:

1. According to the Fandom wiki, Zodral (at the Nashkel Carnival) is a level 6 mage, and level 6 mages can cast up to level 3 spells. So how can he "pre-cast" a level 4 spell like MGoI? Is the wiki wrong, or has SCS (tactical) cheated in some way?

2. It's totally unrealistic for wolves to disappear in thin air while being attacked. This has happened twice so far, right in front of my party. They didn't die, they just disappeared. Running away out of sight of the party would be realistic (it's happened once), but not this...

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

Running away out of sight of the party would be realistic

This is what happens. If you chase them, sometimes you can see them disappear. But the idea is that they run away from you, and after running away they are gone.

Let's remember this is a game with 2D sprites capable of facing 8 virtual directions on a hand-painted map with edged that you cannot traverse. If they disappeared in Skyrim or something I would agree that it is jarring. But BG is a 2-dimensional low-res visual representation of action occurring in the theater of the mind based on tabletop game rules, governed by virtual dice rolls. "Realism" doesn't go very far in determining how things should work in this game.

(An aside: this is one reason I never really cottoned to the 3D successor RPGs like NWN/Dragon Age/PoE/etc. Changing the way the camera shows your surroundings from an abstract 2D grid to a "realistic" 3D environment vastly changes a number of game mechanisms that were tied to the way BG's fog of war works. You can't blithely change something like that in the name of flashier graphics and assume that the gameplay experience will be otherwise similar.)

[Guest Diogenes]

37 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

This is what happens. If you chase them, sometimes you can see them disappear. But the idea is that they run away from you, and after running away they are gone.

No, this isn't what happened to me. I didn't chase them down. They attacked, took a lot of damage, and disappeared right in front of my party, without running away (this happened twice). My party didn't move at all. It looked very unrealistic. They shouldn't disappear like that. Remember, the component is called "more realistc wolfs and dogs". (I had one wolf encounter that ran away cause of injuries and disappeared out of sight, that one looked realistic, indeed - I had posted about it).

 

On 10/22/2022 at 1:44 AM, jmerry said:

On a lighter note, I do have a laugh when (with SCS) the party gets waylaid by a bunch of non-hostile wild dogs. They just wanted to be petted.

I remembered this happening to me in the vanilla game with bears (one or two polar bears iirc).

[jmerry]

Neira's precasts and spells during battle ... low-level clerics in SCS just don't have a lot of spells that are able to be precast. And they're not very likely to memorize healing spells. SCS casters choose their spells at install time from two lists; one for defensive spells, then the remaining slots are drawn randomly from a list of "offensive" spells. Neira is level 5 with 14 wisdom - 5/3/1 spell slots. A level 5 evil cleric (assuming the vanilla spell system, not IWD or Spell Revisions) gets, from the defensive list, Bless, Remove Fear, Armor of Faith, one of Chant/DUHM/nothing, one of Spiritual Hammer/nothing, and one of Remove Paralysis/nothing/nothing. That leaves an average of 2 level 1 spells, 1.8 level 2 spells and 0.7 level 3 spells to draw from the "offensive" list. Cure Light Wounds is one of four spells at level 1. None of the level 2 spells heal. Cure Medium Wounds is one of four spells at level 3. So that's an average of about 0.7 healing spells that this level 5 cleric will have memorized. She didn't heal herself because she didn't memorize any healing spells. And she didn't prebuff because none of the spells she had memorized were eligible; Remove Fear is treated as an in-battle reaction to an ally panicking, and you'd have to go up to Insane difficulty before those round/level spells get precast.

NPC potions ... the potions added by this component get split between the normal droppable versions and newly added non-droppable versions. Potions that NPCs had in the base game are unaffected and always remain droppable if they aren't drunk first. And if you didn't install the component, no changes at all are made.

Zordral ... he's level 6, yes. SCS doesn't change that unless you do weird stuff in the ini and raise all mage levels. He doesn't have any of those items that precast mage buffs in the vanilla system. And Minor Globe shouldn't be precast at Tactical level anyway, due to its short duration. This is impossible in so many ways that I have to wonder if you got things crossed up in your mind. Zordral is the mage in the tent threatening to kill a hostage "witch" - is that the encounter you're thinking of?

[Guest Diogenes]

48 minutes ago, jmerry said:

Zordral ... he's level 6, yes. SCS doesn't change that unless you do weird stuff in the ini and raise all mage levels. He doesn't have any of those items that precast mage buffs in the vanilla system. And Minor Globe shouldn't be precast at Tactical level anyway, due to its short duration. This is impossible in so many ways that I have to wonder if you got things crossed up in your mind. Zordral is the mage in the tent threatening to kill a hostage "witch" - is that the encounter you're thinking of?

Yes, that one. I had written in a post that hasn't been approved by the moderators that he was probably either fixed by SCS cause he had this spell in vanilla even though being a level 6 mage, or maybe he was buffed as part of the "Improved misc encounters" I had installed. I just checked the list for the latter and he's not incuded, and if I understand you correctly he doesn't have lvl 4 spells in vanilla (even ones unused, I guess). He certainly pre-casted Minor Globe of Invurnerability, though. I had checked the log. It looked like 2 thick purple bands going around him in an orbit (I don't really know how MGoI looks, just saying for you to check). I would go check my game/pre-casting difficulty, but I unistalled it, and installed vanilla BG:EE again - I plan to start over a vanilla game. But for all I know, I hadn't changed the setting from Tactical, and I was thinking of toning down pre-casting to Improved, not making it more difficult.

Thanks for your help @all and perhaps some of my observations can be used in order to make a better SCS version in the future (although I played very little with SCS.)

Maybe I'll decide to install SCS again soon, who knows... But I really just want to get a game going, it's been 10 years or more since my last BG1&2 playthrough, and now there's also SoD inbetween... It's all too much for me, as I've forgotten almost everything in this decade+ ... and there have been changes even between vanilla BG and BG:EE... So maybe it's better to hold off SCS until my second playthrough of this decade

[jmerry]

3 hours ago, Guest Diogenes said:

He certainly pre-casted Minor Globe of Invurnerability, though. ... It looked like 2 thick purple bands going around him in an orbit (I don't really know how MGoI looks, just saying for you to check).

Ah. That's not Minor Globe. It's Minor Spell Deflection, which is a level 3 spell with a duration of three rounds per level. That's something that Zordral can have, and it's something that an SCS mage will precast at Tactical difficulty. You got two different spells with "Minor" in their name confused.

The overlay for Minor Globe is a bubble fully enclosing the creature with no moving parts, FYI.

Edited October 24, 2022 by jmerry

[Guest Diogenes]

3 hours ago, jmerry said:

Ah. That's not Minor Globe. It's Minor Spell Deflection, which is a level 3 spell with a duration of three rounds per level. That's something that Zordral can have, and it's something that an SCS mage will precast at Tactical difficulty. You got two different spells with "Minor" in their name confused.

The overlay for Minor Globe is a bubble fully enclosing the creature with no moving parts, FYI.

Ooops! My bad... You know what happened? I went through a list of spells at fandom wiki in order to find out how what it does. (https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Spells_(Baldur's_Gate) That list is in alphabetical order, so I went down looking for one that starts with "Minor". There's only MinorGoI and not MinorSD on that list, so I thought that MGoI was the one I had encountered. I should have been more careful... I didn't know that list is incomplete. I just found that they have MSD on it's own separate page though. ( https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Minor_Spell_Deflection )

Do you know of any better online resources for noob advice? (There must be a complete spell list on one of those pdf manuals I have, among other useful info, but it's usually easier for me to look something up online)

[jmerry]

Online resources for general information on these games? I can't help you there, as I don't use them myself. The resources I use are (a) my memory, (b) a spreadsheet I've built myself, and (c) looking things up in NI. All offline, which helps when you don't have reliable Internet access at home.

But yes, the manuals do have complete lists of learnable arcane and divine spells for the unmodded game. If you do something like install the SCS component for Icewind Dale spells ... well, that isn't a complete list anymore.

[Azoth]

Try this one (Vanilla + SR spell descriptions):

http://gibberlings3.github.io/SpellRevisions/

[KainenMorden]

Just curious, does anyone here have extensive experience soloing on Insane?

I'd like to solo BG1EE and SOD with a fighter/mage and then solo BG2ee and TOB with a sorcerer. I have never played SCS before and never played Ascension either, is that compatible with these mods? Is it too difficult to get through Ascension on Insane?

 

[Guest Diogenes]

@jmerry Thanks for replying, anyway

@Azoth Thanks, this looks good enough to look up spells online

@KainenMordenI have no such experience at all, all I can say is that Ascension is compatible with SCS (Install Ascension before SCS - the SCS Readme has this info)