Valdygar

I see, that makes sense. Thanks a lot for the detailed answer!

Hi! I remember reading in an older post (from the V32 release of SCS iirc) that the way enemy prebuffing worked was influenced by the difficulty slider/fine-tuning, and that if the difficulty was set to "Insane", pretty much any defensive spell with a duration of 1 round or more memorized by an enemy spellcaster would be part of their prebuffing when initiating combat. I'm currently in a BG1 playthrough with the difficulty set to Insane and I've seen a very small number of encounters that don't seem to match this behavior. In particular, the chessboard fight in Durlarg's tower features two fairly high level spellcasters (the enemy King and Queen) with a couple of defensive spells memorized that are usually part of prebuffing (shield, stoneskin, mirror image, minor globe...), but for some reason they don't seem to do any kind of prebuffing at the beginning of the fight. Is this an intended behavior for this specific fight as a way to balance it?

Small update on my previous post. After looking through the game files with Near Infinity, I couldn't understand why PfNM would behave differently depending on whether it was cast by one of my characters or by an enemy, despite both my character and the enemy having the exact memorized same spell according to the game files (SPWI311.SPL). It turns out that this issue seems to be linked to precasting specifically: when PfNM is cast as part of precasting, DWSW311.SPL is used instead of SPWI311.SPL. But looking at the effects of DWSW311.SPL in Near Infinity, it lacks some of the projectile immunities of SPWI311.SPL (which seem to be the elemental arrows and bolts). So when an enemy casts PfNM manually, it behaves correctly (elemental arrows/bolts are blocked). But when it's part of precasting, PfNM won't block those.

Hi! I'm currently on a BG1EE playthrough with SCS 33.6 installed, and I've noticed some strange behavior with the Protection from Normal Missiles spell. From what I understand, one of the default changes that SCS brings is making elemental arrows (like arrows of ice and arrows of fire) blocked by PfNM. However, in my current game, it seems to only apply if PfNM is cast by a player character and not by an enemy. So for instance: If one of my characters casts PfNM on a target (regardless if that target is said character, another player character, a friendly NPC or an enemy), the target will be immune to arrows of ice and arrows of fire (the feedback logs will record a successful hit, but no damage, physical or elemental, will be taken). If an enemy casts PfNM (as part of their instant casting to simulate precasting at the beginning of a fight), they will be vulnerable to arrows of ice and arrows of fire (they will take both the physical and elemental damage when hit, or only the elemental damage if they are currently affected by stoneskin). The last enemy I've seen affected by this was Kahrk (the ogre mage at Firewine Bridge). I think he starts the fight with Protection from Magical Weapons and Protection from Normal Missiles (amongst other things). Once his PfMW runs off, but while he still has PfNM on, I can damage him with Arrows of Ice, which shouldn't be happening from what I understand. I'm however not sure if this is coming from SCS or from my game files. Aside from SCS, the only other mod I have installed is something to add custom voicelines. I also included the arcane and divine spells from IWD during the SCS installation, though I don't know if this could have affected the behavior of PfMW in any way. Any idea where this could be coming from?

Alright, thanks again for all the answers!

Thanks a lot for the answers! But isn't the tolerance check made on the difference between 'possible' and 'current' regardless of whether or not that difference is positive (ruleset thac0 is higher) or negative (current thac0 is higher)? In that case, wouldn't that mean that this thac0 adjustment could not just worsen thac0 that are a bit too good, but also improve thac0 that are a bit too bad? For instance, with a tolerance of 6, if 'possible' is at 10 and 'current' at 12, wouldn't the final value be 10 (though I have no idea if such case could ever happen in the first place)?

Hi! I've been trying to wrap my head around the "thac0_tolerance" variable in stratagems.ini, but I'm having trouble understanding how impactful it actually is. Based on the currrent readme as well as changelogs from past versions of SCS, my understanding of it is that: It aims at correcting the thac0 of humanoid creatures that are abnormally good ( = lower than what a humanoid with that class/kit/race/weapon proficiencies should have) The higher the value of thac0_tolerance is (from 0 to 99), the higher the number of affected creatures is The default value of 6 was meant to only correct small anomalies without affecting creatures that purposefully have extremely good thac0 Based on that, I have the following questions: Is it supposed to only affect NPCs and not player characters, not matter its value? Do we have a rough idea of how many creatures are affected with the base value (6)? Is it a couple of edge cases, or does it actually correct a large number of creatures? The only file in which thac0_tolerance is used seems to be sfo/filetype/lib_cre.tpa, in the following code line: SET new=(ABS(possible - current))<tolerance ? possible : current . If I understand this correctly, this means that when thac0_tolerance is set to 0, (ABS(possible - current))<tolerance ? possible : current will always return the value of "current". Does this mean that whenever this part of the code is evaluated, "current" is always a better thac0 than "possible" (since the readme mentions that setting thac0_tolerance to 0 will result in no adjustement made to thac0 that are abnormally good)? Any information on these would help a lot!