Third - I mean, fifth! - attempt at a large EET game on a tablet

[Endarire]

The skeletons made me realize I should spec blunt weapons early for IWD1.  I understand that sort of ick.

[subtledoctor]

Actually archery is surprisingly effective. Even here where the skeletons have 2-3x more hit points than in vanilla IWDEE, I’ve been occupying the masses with 1-2 tanks and then focus fire with missile weapons - 1 sling, 1 crossbow, and 2 bows. Everyone but the sling only does half damage, but I’m still doing ~25 per round ranged and ~15 per round from the tanks, which is enough the eliminate a skeleton every round. Temple guardians take longer, and the spectral guards are still like trucks, of course. 

This is with MiH Corporeal Undead, which I think sets skeletons’ piercing/slashing/missile resistance to 50%. YMMV of course.

[Endarire]

Thankee!

[jmerry]

10 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

This is with MiH Corporeal Undead, which I think sets skeletons’ piercing/slashing/missile resistance to 50%. YMMV of course.

Definitely makes a difference. The vanilla standard for skeleton resistances (in the BG series, don't know about IWD) is 50% piercing/slashing and 90% missile, so your missile weapons are far more effective than they would be without the mod. Yeah, the tanks should still go for blunt weapons if that's a reasonable option for them, but this change means your back line isn't tempted to charge forward and beat the enemy with sticks just so they can get any meaningful damage in.

[subtledoctor]

Considering the preposterous number of skeletons in the Vale of Shadows, and the fact that their hit points are inflated to 2-3 times their normal value, I don’t mind that MiH is making things a bit easier. Anything to make this slog less of a slog. 

On the other side of the making-things-easier-for-myself coin, I decided not to give my mages unlimited 1st-level spellcasting, instead opting for the ‘Wand of Cantrips’ option in TnB. This drastically limits my spell slots in the early game. But the Cantrip Wand has a few particular benefits:

1. The abjuration cantrip is basically a 2-round MGOI. It is of decidedly limited utility… but it lets the bard harmlessly absorb those magic missiles from imbued wights! Nice. 
2. The alteration cantrip is a 2-round single-target Entangle effect, which is extremely useful to keep bombardier beetles away from me. It’s been very handy in Dragon’s Eye.

[subtledoctor]

Darn it. Shield Bash and/or Dirty Fighting are bugging out. Need to re-think how these work. Opcode 232 is just so fiddly...

[subtledoctor]

I seem to be under-leveled, which is making things a bit annoying. Hitting the 4th level of Dragon's Eye, my party members are only 6th level. (5/5 for multiclasses.) That can't be right, can it?

I just killed a mess of trolls and they gave me 130XP apiece. Isn't that supposed to be like 1,400? (Checks IWDEE... yes it is.) That's less than 10%. My own mod cut monster XP in half, but tipun must have cut the monster XP to 1/4 or 1/5 or something before my mod was installed. The scripted XP rewards are fine but monsters are giving me bupkis! Not sure what to do about this, aside from periodically give myself extra XP to keep pace with what the game expects...

After 7th level or so it will be better - I don't mind being underleveled in the middle levels, you have plenty of tools to use there. But at 5th/6th level, having one Fireball spell and facing four successive legions of cold wights (cold wights with inflated hit point, no less)... it is painful.

The oils of fiery burning, or whatever they're called, that the lizard man shamans carry - their range seems to be extremely small. Several times I tossed them among gaggles of cold wights and saw an impressive explosion on the screen, but nobody was damaged in the combat log. Need to take a look at the item/projectile... idea: maybe they should cast the cleric spell "Produce Fire" at the impact site? The spell isn't that strong - they would still be far weaker than Potions of Explosions - but it would make them a b it more fun. An idea for my Random Tweaks mod.

[subtledoctor]

Done with Dragon’s Eye. The yuan-ti were… kind of pushovers? I remember this being really tense and tough. But they succumbed readily to some basic tank + crowd control + archery tactics. I got through the entire 4th and 5th levels, barring Yxunomei, in a single waking period. Then rested, then took down Yx without much trouble. The 3rd level was by far the toughest, and I actualky had to reload there since I was only 5th level and Presio managed to instakill three of my party members with a Cloudkill. 

Of course, the last time I played through Dragon’s Eye, I was playing with specialized parties - one party of all clerics, one party all druids and rangers, and one party all bards. Coming back to it a couple years later, just after finishing SoD in my other game, and with a very well-rounded party, might be why this seems easy. 

Anyway up yo this point, I have had basically zero bugs (except some from my own mods being tested). I went back to Kuldahar and got the correct transitional cut-scene with Arundel. Everything IWD-related seems to be in really good shape, apart from creatures giving very small XP rewards. 

Rather than moving forward to Severed Hand, I think I’ll switch gears and start a BG2 campaign. There are a couple things that need testing there. Then I’ll come back and maybe have the energy to tackle IWD2 monsters. 

[subtledoctor]

So I started a BG2 campaign, and recreated the character from my recently run that I interrupted to create this install: a Mage Hunter ranger dual-classed to a Scion of Bhaal cleric.

And I'm having this problem, where stuff seems to be disappearing from joinable NPCs' inventory. Specifically, the Scale of Balance 'Combat Skills' component adds more low-level proficiencies for all classes, so it adds a book that you can use when a character joins the party to give them the missing proficiencies without completely recreating the character. Likewise, the NPC_EE mod adds a book to every joinable NPC which in fact lets you completely recreate the character in any class from level 0.

When I look at the .CRE files in Near Infinity, both of these books are in the inventory. Minsc7.cre has them, Minsc8.cfre has them, etc.

But when Minsc joins my party in Irenicus' dungeon, no books.

Now, I can console the book into my inventory and change Minsc into a Barbarian Ranger as he should be. But, that should not be necessary. And many players may not have the wherewithal or motivation to do that. To the point, something in this install is blatantly breaking two of my mods. And that's not nice.

This didn't happen in my last run, so it is something I added. Moreover, this seems eerily familiar! I feel like this happened to me before, maybe a couple years ago? (EDIT - looks like this version of NPC_EE is only a year old, so maybe it was fairly recent? But damn my poor memory, I can't recall what problem was identified, if any, or how it was addressed.)

[Alywena]

27 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

When I look at the .CRE files in Near Infinity, both of these books are in the inventory. Minsc7.cre has them, Minsc8.cfre has them, etc.

But when Minsc joins my party in Irenicus' dungeon, no books.

Now, I can console the book into my inventory and change Minsc into a Barbarian Ranger as he should be. But, that should not be necessary. And many players may not have the wherewithal or motivation to do that. To the point, something in this install is blatantly breaking two of my mods. And that's not nice.

This didn't happen in my last run, so it is something I added. Moreover, this seems eerily familiar! I feel like this happened to me before, maybe a couple years ago? (EDIT - looks like this version of NPC_EE is only a year old, so maybe it was fairly recent? But damn my poor memory, I can't recall what problem was identified, if any, or how it was addressed.)

This is a small incompatibility between NPC_EE and EndlessBG1.

[jastey]

Thanks for linking, I forgot about it again. I think I know what I'd need to change in EndlessBG1. Is now on my ToDo list.

No wait, I did the changes n v14. Which version do you have?

[subtledoctor]

Ah ha! Good to know. Yoshimo just joined and he has the tomes, so it makes sense this only cropped up in NPCs that are continuous. 

And it’s very likely I have an outdated version. I just reinstalled the same mods from my previous game, which was built in November. I didn’t download anything new this time. 

So basically not an issue. My favorite kind of issue! 

[subtledoctor]

Sigh. I can't fix the Scales of Balance Shield Bash or Fighting Dirty feats. I don't know why, when I send files to the iPad to overwrite what's there, nothing happens. Could be that I neglected filename capitalization at some point? I don't know. But every thief in the game is constantly casting the Fighting Dirty subspell, which is not discriminating between allies/innocents/enemies or whether any combat is occurring. So random citizens are being injured. I can't even talk to Gaelan Bayle without half my party getting blinded or knocked down.

And somehow the subspell is causing a visual effect, which is is not supposed to do:

Spoiler

I believe that is an IWD visual...? So maybe it could be some kind of interference with one of tipun's mods? I really have no way to track this down at the moment.

Meantime, I have made a bunch of updates to improve my own mods just in the short time this thread has been up. And I have a 'half-done' clone of the game install with all quest and NPC mods installed, so i can pick it up and reinstall my standard set of kits and tweaks, with a solid weidu.log right here to guide me. Shouldn't be difficult. Maybe a day or two, depending on how much real life gets in the way

Edited March 15, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Oof. I got just about all the way to EET_End, then right before it I tried to install Trap_Overhaul for faster trap detection. The installer ran for ~15 minutes instead of the expected ~1 minute, and spat out thousands of script parsing error warnings about GET_UNIQUE_FILENAME_BCS.IDS or something.

Fearing the state of the install, I uninstalled it. Looking for another option, I tried to install TnT v8.25.  Unfortunately this mod must use the same method as Trap_Overhaul, or something like it, because the installer took even longer, spat out thousands of the exact same warnings... and then crashing my Terminal app window without finishing the install or erroring out, and without adding anything to weidu.log!    

Well. Not good. Now I have an untold number of changed files or scripts in my game, which may or not work (but the gobs of parse warnings don't fill me with confidence) and no way to uninstall them. Fuuuuuuuuu...

EDIT - updating the Trap_Overhaul mod from v0.14 to v0.20, and installing it much earlier - immediately after the IWD components - resulted in it installing with no errors. Rebuilding the install is now going smoothly. Almost back up to Tweaks Anthology. If I can get SCS installed this evening, then I can let A7TextureConvert run overnight and be back in business tomorrow.

Edited March 17, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

There is one file in my override folder that has a space in the filename: "MONKTU 8.DLG."

This seems weird. I think the game does not work with files that have spaces in the filenames?

./weidu --change-log says no mods affected the file, but I think the space in the name might be tripping up Weidu, because the file is in /override so some mod must have put it there...

Similarly-named files like "MONKTU8.DLG" were added by EET. Could this be a bug in EET? Or could it be intentional and fine and I'm worrying over nothing?