Sword Coast Stratagems v34 (edit: 34.3) now available

[Guest Paragon]

I'm planning a new game with one of my friends and we are keen to try out SCS.

Reading this thread gives the impression that the current version has a lot of bugs. What is the overall health of the 34 version? Could we expact a stable and cohesive game or would we be faced with a fair amount of issues? We have no technical skill to troubleshoot bugs ourselves and we don't want to be faced with anything potentially gamebreaking or missing out on significant content because of bugs.

Are there any plans to release an update any time soon? DavidW the mod author has recently responed here that he is taking stock of recent bug reports which makes it sound like any future revision is possibly still at the preliminary stage.

Thank you for your help!

[DavidW]

See 

 

[pochesun]

On 9/19/2023 at 2:12 AM, DavidW said:

See 

 

thats great news  

[Guest noober]

Suggestion

For each question the SCS installation asks the user, it would be nice to have a "default" which indicates the most popular/typical choice.

Much easier for people coming to SCS for the first time.

[Guest Paragon]

On the topic of installation choices. Would it be possible to add the option to choose which IWD spells get installed? At the moment you can have them all or none. In my view they are quite a mixed bag. Some add great flavour, utility or fill serious gaps in the spell rosta. However, others are just plain weird, translate poorly to BG, are ineffective or too overpowered. I would really appreciate if we were allowed to seperate the wheat from the chaff! I realise this request might quite be labourious to implement as it would affect not just which spells players can access but the placement of spells in the world at large which might require too many iterations to be feasible. However, if there is a weidu magic way to make this happen I would be very glad indeed!

[DavidW]

On 9/28/2023 at 6:56 AM, Guest noober said:

Suggestion

For each question the SCS installation asks the user, it would be nice to have a "default" which indicates the most popular/typical choice.

Much easier for people coming to SCS for the first time.

Part of the problem is that I don't know which the most popular choice is. But more importantly, just because a choice is popular doesn't mean that it works for a given player.

For what it's worth, one design constraint on SCS is that I personally would (usually) play with all components installed. If there's something I wouldn't use myself, I don't include it. There are only half a dozen or so SCS components where the choice is more complicated than 'install or not install' and they're all fairly transparent, I think. (All this got a lot easier in v32 where the difficulty slider got included.)

 

[DavidW]

1 hour ago, Guest Paragon said:

On the topic of installation choices. Would it be possible to add the option to choose which IWD spells get installed? At the moment you can have them all or none. In my view they are quite a mixed bag. Some add great flavour, utility or fill serious gaps in the spell rosta. However, others are just plain weird, translate poorly to BG, are ineffective or too overpowered. I would really appreciate if we were allowed to seperate the wheat from the chaff! I realise this request might quite be labourious to implement as it would affect not just which spells players can access but the placement of spells in the world at large which might require too many iterations to be feasible. However, if there is a weidu magic way to make this happen I would be very glad indeed!

The main problem with this is enemy scripting. It's hard enough allowing for whether or not IWD spells are installed without allowing for the fact that any given IWD spell might or might not be installed. It's not impossible but it's not trivial.

For reference, which are the ones you think are overpowered, and does that include with SCS's tweaks? (I'm less concerned about the underpowered spells: plenty of BG spells are underpowered too!)

[polytope]

6 hours ago, DavidW said:

For reference, which are the ones you think are overpowered, and does that include with SCS's tweaks?

Divine Protection (formerly Shield of Lathander), specifically with the reduced casting time, making it instant with the amulet of power.

In terms of the comprehensive protection it provides on the fly, the closest equivalent would be a mage firing off a Spell Trigger of Protection from Magic Weapons, Protection from Magic Energy and Protection from Fire; true, all those last longer (if not dispelled) but the mage could still be killed with:

• Normal weapons
• Triple Chain Lightning Triggers, or triple Lightning Bolt sequencers
• Cone of Cold
• Acid Storm

...and of course the mage needs to be 16th level, and could do this once per rest period, clerics get DP at level 9 and have a lot of 5th level slots by mid game. Even a potion of magic shielding (another "panic button" type defense that can be used very swiftly) only grants +50% damage resistance from magical/elemental sources, no protection from physical attacks, and is rare, expensive and consumable.

I think there was a good reason why it was originally so slow to cast.

Edited October 1, 2023 by polytope

[Christian]

My experience is that stacking all the Bless/Chant spells and then Emotion Hope leads to absolutely insane ST bonuses. So it is not a single spell in my opinion but how they play together.

Divine Protection I didn´t find to be out of line but I didn´t abuse it for elemental protection in a pinch but rather as a shorter PFMW. After all priests have plenty of elemental protection at their hands with IWD spells now and they now have even ways to protect against dispelling. So I never had any use for the elemental resistance of the divine spells. To be honest, with SCS and Ascension installed and all the saving throw bonuses from the additional spells I find it very hard to get killed by spells once you get past maybe 2.5 mill XP. From then on physical damage is the main threat. Making those spells have a cast time of 7 with a duration of 3 rounds or some such would all but eliminate them from gameplay. There is no chance to cast them uninterrupted at that stage in the game.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Christian

[polytope]

1 hour ago, Christian said:

My experience is that stacking all the Bless/Chant spells and then Emotion Hope leads to absolutely insane ST bonuses. So it is not a single spell in my opinion but how they play together.

I don't regard negative saves from dispellable buffs as such a big problem per se, as there exist other fairly low level spells which give blanket immunity to certain save-or-else attacks, Resist Fear, Death Ward, Free Action etc. and it was possible even in mid-game without mods (starting with a dwarf, gnome or halfling). Mages shouldn't blithely cast at such a buffed character/should try to debuff them. Negative saves from equipped things (multiple protection items, a non SCS tweak) is honestly worse.

That said, the stackability of some of those buffs has its own problem. With Emotion Hope & Emotion Courage your characters are already at +3 to hit, +5 to damage for 1 game hour. Add in two short-duration spells, Recitation & Righteous Wrath of the Faithful (same alignment) and you're up to +7 to hit, +9 to damage, an extra attack per round which by default does stack with (Improved) Haste, contrary to the description... oh, and best of all +8 hp haha. Little reason to be a single classed warrior with that loadout available as AoE magic that doesn't have drawbacks in contrast to, say, Champion's Strength or even Aid, even without matching alignment for the more potent version of RWoTF I think I'd much rather memorize it of vanilla CS. It gives the advantage to a party of dual classed fighter->casters, or even thief->mages/clerics.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

Divine Protection I didn´t find to be out of line but I didn´t abuse it for elemental protection in a pinch but rather as a shorter PFMW. After all priests have plenty of elemental protection at their hands with IWD spells now and they now have even ways to protect against dispelling. So I never had any use for the elemental resistance of the divine spells. To be honest, with SCS and Ascension installed and all the saving throw bonuses from the additional spells I find it very hard to get killed by spells once you get past maybe 2.5 mill XP. From then on physical damage is the main threat. Making those spells have a cast time of 7 with a duration of 3 rounds or some such would all but eliminate them from gameplay. There is no chance to cast them uninterrupted at that stage in the game.

I concede it would be a little harder to get it off in the thick of combat, but then again, it's a 5th level spell not a HLA, priests can have pretty good AC and missile protection (buffs or otherwise) and a ward from single target offensive spells at least.

If it's truly needed to keep the short casting time then perhaps it should only grant +50% resistance to all damage, still more useful to the player than the AI though, and encourages stacking with other things like Hardiness, this spoils some of the uniqueness of these two spells though.

My preference would be to revert DP/GDP to original casting time and also allow touch range casting on an ally, plus it really needs to be detectable for the AI (my earlier comment on boosting resistances rather than blocking the damage opcode should incidentally accomplish this, but I know it's not the spell's original concept).

[DavidW]

Yes, I’m persuaded that Divine Protection is too much. The reduced duration is exactly for the reasons Christian gave: at CT7, 3-round duration spell is just not functionally useful.My current tweak is to block only physical damage.

I should say that my motivation in the first place was very much AI-motivated: in my playtesting experience it’s basically impossible to keep enemy priests alive within the BG2 spell set.

Detection is obviously just an oversight, and will be addressed in v35.

[polytope]

13 minutes ago, DavidW said:

My current tweak is to block only physical damage.

That sounds like a good option which still leaves the spell useful for AI priests survivability, but without enabling the player to trick a high level mage/lich into wasting their wiltings, DB etc.

The 7th level version may not need a nerf, since it's the highest possible spell level for priests being "exchanged" in that instance.

[Jarinex]

I usually don’t install the iwdification spells, but I do agree that giving clerics more survivability is good and I don’t mind the defensive spells.
 

Would one be able to go in the “spellchoices” files and remove certain spells so enemies didn’t get them? It’s a bit more work, but it sounds like that’s one way to customize. Also, if SR is installed along with iwdification, they would still use those versions of the spells versus the vanilla versions?

[DavidW]

Yes, end users can do that.

[jmerry]

And for those end users who might want to tinker with the spell choice files...

Spoiler

For defensive spells (the spellchoices_defensive folder), the file is a script written in a programming language. Go to the appropriate level, do what it says. PUSH commands give all of the spells that follow to that caster. PUSH_RANDOM commands give one of the spells in the parentheses to that caster, chosen randomly.

Then we tally up all the spell slots spent on defensive spells, and move on to the offensive spells (the spellchoices folder). These files are just lists of spells at each spell level; for each unused spell slot, we choose one of the spells in that level's list at random.

What happens if you add a completely new spell to the lists? Like, say, you want to see priests use True Seeing. Well, they get the spell ... and then they never cast it. Because there isn't any script for how to cast True Seeing in the library of components used to build caster scripts. So there's that to watch out for; unless you feel up to writing the scripts for using a new spell like that (or, in my example, converting the scripts for the mage spell), there's no point in adding anything that isn't already used somewhere.

So that's the limit on what you can do with this level of tinkering. Removing a spell from the defensive lists will see that spell replaced with an offensive spell in caster memorization. Removing a spell from the offensive lists will see that spell replaced with other offensive spells of the same level in caster memorization. Adding more instances of spells that are already there will do the reverse. But adding spells that aren't already there will result in wasted spell slots that never get cast.

(Spoilered because it's kind of a tangent)