v35 comments / questions (report a bug in a new topic, not here)

[Mera]

Hi DavidW,

First of all, congrats on the new release! 
Quick feedback / suggestion / question, not really sure how to call it, regarding the "Ease-of-use party AI" component.
Do you think it would be possible to had to the script the "thief auto detect traps when idle" part of the advanced AI you're replacing?
There are a bunch of other toggles that are present in the advanced AI (hide in shadow, bard song, turn undead) but I feel like this one is way too convenient to pass up.
In any case, a big thank you for everything you've done for this community! 

[DavidW]

I'll consider, though it wouldn't suit my own playstyle so it would need a toggle.

[Mera]

3 hours ago, DavidW said:

I'll consider, though it wouldn't suit my own playstyle so it would need a toggle.

Oh right, absolutely, a toggle is perfectly fine! Exactly like in the Advanced AI script  
I'm super used to have it on on my party thief. I just find it extremely convenient to not have to manually click the detect trap button all the time. Plus, it kinda makes sense for a thief to actively look for traps when in a dungeon and not doing anything else.
I would use your AI on my other characters and the advanced AI on the thief but not possible since you completely replace it  
Anyway, thank you for considering it  

 

[subtledoctor]

On 12/10/2023 at 4:21 AM, jmerry said:

part of the problem is that the stats are out of whack. Aerial Servants are just plain beefy.

I don’t know where that STR score came from, I just glanced at wiki entries based on the Monstrous Compendium and I don’t see a stated STR score anywhere. I do see a line about if an Aerial Servant tries to hold or grapple you and your STR is 18/00 or higher, you automatically overpower it. Which makes the 23 STR score pretty suspicious. 

Of course as noted, the source material also very clear, in multiple sources, that clerics cannot command aerial servants to fight. (In fact if they do so, the aerial servant will turn around and attack the cleric!)

So given @jmerry’s data above, and that @DavidW is apparently taking spell tweak requests, here is one: just replace the Aerial Servant cleric spell with Conjure Air Elemental. Boom, several problems solved on one fell swoop. 

Edited December 12, 2023 by subtledoctor

[RoyalProtector]

It would be a pretty significant loss to not have aerial servants though. Those things hit extremely hard, chunking enemies left and right. But anyway.

[jmerry]

From the spell descriptions in BGEE:

Quote

... the caster opens a special gate to the Elemental Plane of Fire, and a fire elemental is summoned in the vicinity of the caster. There is a 60% chance that a 12-Hit-Dice elemental appears; a 35% chance that a 16-Hit-Dice elemental appears; and a 5% chance that a 24-Hit-Dice elemental appears. The elemental will do the bidding of the caster until it is slain or the duration of the spell runs out.

OK. Sounds like a big chunky summon, and it even tells you how big. Definitely something I'd be willing to spend a sixth-level spell slot on.

Quote

This spell summons an Aerial Servant to do the caster's bidding for the duration of the spell. The servant will attack any enemies that the caster decides, staying until the duration of the spell expires or it is slain.

By contrast, this one doesn't tell you anything. Sure, it'll fight for you, but how big is it and how hard does it hit? Until I looked it up because of this discussion, I didn't know. I knew that it was an air elemental that started invisible from fighting against them, but I wouldn't have guessed it was 16 HD and 23 strength. You could radically change the creature's combat stats without changing the description at all.

And then @subtledoctor looked at sources outside these games, and the pen and paper spell isn't a combat summon at all. Sure, that's not something you can really do in the computer game ruleset, but to just flat out turn it into a combat monster with inflated stats? A very weird decision.

Thinking about that original version of the spell, here's another direction that could be taken for modifying Aerial Servant: deflate the stats, but give it an opcode 268 "clear fog of war" effect. That way it could scout for you invisibly, and then fight once it's revealed. Just not as well as the dedicated combat summon at the same level; maybe this one is always 12 HD and 14 strength.

(There's some AI abuse potential when encountering foes outside the sight range of any actual PC. But familiars are pretty much always better placed to abuse that, since they can do more than just attack)

[Guest Zhalimar]

So the conversation was about bassilus and him apparently super stronk/unfair. Strongly disagree.

Next  discussion is Aerial servant OP?  Because of 1 complaint that Bassilus maybe just maybe has it as a summon  and it otherwise never shows up? Don't get that at all. Aerial servant is fine as it is.   

Felt the need to voice my opinion  otherwise the nerf department takes over ( the squeaky wheel...).

 

Scs is geared for players that want a challenge.  I agree that some stuff needs to be more clear like what lvl increases enemies get.

But overall  SCS is there to increase the challenge and pretending that Bassilus is unfair fight/ not in the spirit of SCS playing fair is not true.

 

[subtledoctor]

Would an air elemental really be a nerf? Fire elementals and earth elementals are fantastic summons. Why wouldn’t an air elemental be equally fantastic? It would just be less… wrong. 

[jmerry]

Oh, hey, I found another thing about the Aerial Servant that's out of whack - its animation compared to its stats. The Aerial Servant uses the ELEMENTAL_AIR_SMALL animation. There are seven other creatures that use that animation in vanilla BG2EE. Six of those have 8 HD. The seventh has 12 HD; that's the creature you summon if you roll low on the mage Conjure Air Elemental spell. And then the Aerial Servant has 16 HD.

I also checked the small fire and earth animations. Lots of 8 HD elementals there, a few 12 HD elementals, and nothing at all bigger. The Aerial Servant is the only creature with more than 12 HD that uses any of the small elemental animations.

[DavidW]

4 hours ago, Guest Zhalimar said:

So the conversation was about bassilus and him apparently super stronk/unfair. Strongly disagree.

Next  discussion is Aerial servant OP?  Because of 1 complaint that Bassilus maybe just maybe has it as a summon  and it otherwise never shows up? Don't get that at all. Aerial servant is fine as it is.   

Felt the need to voice my opinion  otherwise the nerf department takes over ( the squeaky wheel...).

 

Scs is geared for players that want a challenge.  I agree that some stuff needs to be more clear like what lvl increases enemies get.

But overall  SCS is there to increase the challenge and pretending that Bassilus is unfair fight/ not in the spirit of SCS playing fair is not true.

 

Just to give a bit of context for lowering Bassilus's level: it's not directly because someone complained. But the subsequent conversation makes clear that Bassilus is getting a power boost from being 12th level that's quite a bit higher than I had in mind when I playtested that component (some 15 years ago!) due to the more generous spell environment. Since there are also more ways to protect priests in the spell system I'm using than there were then, I want to try easing the level down slightly. (I don't find 'get him not to use Aerial Servant' a good alternative, partly because it's actually quite fiddly to enforce technically given SCS's spell system, partly because a lot of the point of SCS is to get spellcasters to use their resources intelligently.)

Happy to keep getting feedback on this; in the meantime, Bassilus's level is controlled by human-readable code in stratagems/tactical_bg1/bassilus.tpa, so feel free to tweak it back to what you want it to be on your own install.

[DavidW]

Just now, jmerry said:

Oh, hey, I found another thing about the Aerial Servant that's out of whack - its animation compared to its stats. The Aerial Servant uses the ELEMENTAL_AIR_SMALL animation. There are seven other creatures that use that animation in vanilla BG2EE. Six of those have 8 HD. The seventh has 12 HD; that's the creature you summon if you roll low on the mage Conjure Air Elemental spell. And then the Aerial Servant has 16 HD.

I also checked the small fire and earth animations. Lots of 8 HD elementals there, a few 12 HD elementals, and nothing at all bigger. The Aerial Servant is the only creature with more than 12 HD that uses any of the small elemental animations.

If it had occurred to me, I would have repurposed Aerial Servant as Conjure Air Elemental in SCS/ToF's Revised Elemental component. Something to consider for v36.

[ArtificialEnthusiasm]

I don't have anything to add concerning design choices but I did want to express appreciation for SCS itself. I can't possibly guess how many hours you've put into this mod over the years but thank you for creating and updating such an important part of our games.

[DavidW]

Thank you!

[polytope]

On 12/13/2023 at 1:37 AM, subtledoctor said:

I don’t know where that STR score came from, I just glanced at wiki entries based on the Monstrous Compendium and I don’t see a stated STR score anywhere. I do see a line about if an Aerial Servant tries to hold or grapple you and your STR is 18/00 or higher, you automatically overpower it. Which makes the 23 STR score pretty suspicious. 

Of course as noted, the source material also very clear, in multiple sources, that clerics cannot command aerial servants to fight. (In fact if they do so, the aerial servant will turn around and attack the cleric!)

Iirc some cleric faiths in FR could command their servants to attack (Cyricists? Not going to try and find the reference) Still, there are plenty of things you can do in game contrary to the rules (like cast-and-attack) and most of the play is both generally more combat oriented and featuring creatures (and even spells, like Flamestrike) scaled up in power.

I have a feeling that the strength score is extrapolated from one of the splatbooks possibly regarding ship towing capacity of summons like djinni, water elementals being the best but aerial servants pretty high, I think. It doesn't really make sense to derive its "strength" from the rules on escaping its grapple either though, for a non-humanoid creature: I'm sure there are animals much weaker than elephants which still could break free if held by an elephant's trunk, conversely an octopus can grip quite hard, doesn't mean they can move weight around as easily as a man.

Not that big monsters generally get a strength bonus to damage in 2nd edition, they simply use more/larger dice, but that strength bonus on top of damage dice is an accepted and baked in part of this game's general power creep over the original material.

FWIW in the original sources aerial servants are referred to as fighting (when necessary) as "double strength invisible stalkers", in game they have 16hd vs the stalkers' 8 and base damage 4d8 vs 2d8 (btb, should be 8d4 vs 4d4 but who cares...). Invisible stalkers have a +3 damage bonus from strength, which would indeed seem to argue for a +6 in the case of a servant (18/00 strength as you said). It depends upon your interpretation of "double strength" when 25 is the maximum, like say something with 16 strength (14 points below 25, when percentile categories are counted) could reasonably be argued to be half as strong as something with 18/100 strength (7 below 25), using that logic we'd get a strength of about 20 for the servant.

I'd leave it alone though tbh, unlike the 24hd earth and fire elementals, earth should definitely be stronger (lorewise and game balance, since there are other advantages to fire).

20 hours ago, jmerry said:

Oh, hey, I found another thing about the Aerial Servant that's out of whack - its animation compared to its stats. The Aerial Servant uses the ELEMENTAL_AIR_SMALL animation. There are seven other creatures that use that animation in vanilla BG2EE. Six of those have 8 HD. The seventh has 12 HD; that's the creature you summon if you roll low on the mage Conjure Air Elemental spell. And then the Aerial Servant has 16 HD.

I also checked the small fire and earth animations. Lots of 8 HD elementals there, a few 12 HD elementals, and nothing at all bigger. The Aerial Servant is the only creature with more than 12 HD that uses any of the small elemental animations.

Does this need a fix though? Aerial servants are stated to be merely "large" whereas the higher HD elementals are "huge", since elementals come in 8,12,16 and 24 HD variants it sort of makes sense for the latter two to use the larger animation, which the aerial servant need not match.

Edited December 14, 2023 by polytope

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, polytope said:

have a feeling that the strength score is extrapolated from one of the splatbooks possibly regarding ship towing capacity of summons like djinni, water elementals being the best but aerial servants pretty high, I think

Agree. Given that they will not fight for you, they are basically a mule. Best I can tell, you are meant to use them the way Hodor was used in Game of Thrones: “carry stuff/people!” “hold the door!” etc. So very strong in some contexts, but not necessarily translating into a high score generally - your descriptions make sense.

1 hour ago, polytope said:

Iirc some cleric faiths in FR could command their servants to attack (Cyricists?

Priests of Bhaal, in fact, as I mentioned in some post way up-thread. So I actually don't mind a Cyricist like Bassilus doing it, if I squint real hard and figure it somehow goes along with Cyric taking over Bhaal's domain. Maybe? (And there is therefore a decent case to be made for Charname to order them to attack as well! But, er, Aerie not so much.)

Edited December 14, 2023 by subtledoctor