Question about Scripts

mforww

Who uses them? Do they actually reduce the need to micro manage, or are they just a good way of getting your characters killed?

Mathsorcerer

I use them and they are amazing for the little things I call "housekeeping". For example, if a character is damaged and they have a healing potion then they will drink it. If they don't have one they will shout "I am hurt" and some other party member who has a potion will give it to them. If no one has a potion to give then one of the clerics will hear "I am hurt" and cast a healing spell. I have a similar script running for poison and antidotes.

You would be surprised how much time it saves not having to fish for healing potions or antidotes myself.

Qbert

I tend to use the controlled thief script the most. I find it useful for auto trap finding with an easy switch for stealth mode if needed.

The rest may be more useful in multiplayer games when there are less pauses.

Frosty

I use scripts they do reduce the amount of micro managing you have to do most notable in fights were your swarmed with many relatively weak enemy's one trick I do is give cleric the wizard aggressive script, and mages the cleric aggressive script. That way the stay put and use ranged weapons but don't waste there spells.

Zarakinthish

I guess I'm a bit of a control freak. I can't stand the so called AI, and always turn it off. The only time I've left it on is way back when the original game was still fairly recent and I was playing around with creating a custom script.

Heindrich

I didn't use scripts much until recently, when after taking a break from the game, it occurred to me as I watched some of my gameplay, just how often my NPCs stand around and do nothing in the middle of battles. I still haven't found a satisfactory setup though.

If I set a NPC on 'Standard Attack', they often get in the way of my own AoE spells, and more annoyingly, disrupt their own spells to attack somebody in melee. If I put them on Passive, they don't do anything until targeted by an enemy.

Actually can somebody tell me how to customise scripts in BG 2 Vanilla? I'm assuming it's similar to BG EE? I haven't found an option to change scripts, only how to select one.

Zarakinthish

@Heindrich1988
If you have characters just standing around not doing anything in a battle, you aren't using auto-pause right. The key auto-pause conditions are weapon unusable (so that if a weapon breaks or runs out of ammo, a character won't just stand there), spell cast (so you can immediately have them cast again or start attacking), and character's target destroyed (so you can have the character focus on the next enemy). While not as critical, having it auto-pause when an enemy is sighted can be extremely useful as well, since you can get everyone doing something from the start.

Heindrich

@Zarakinthish
Actually I have auto-pause selected for everything except 'Character Hit' and 'Character Attacked'. In fact maybe I have too many auto-pauses... The problem I have (in a party with lots of spell casters) is that battles tend to get quite messy, and it's hard to keep a track of who has finished casting, because it is easy to miss a notification in amongst the stream of messages u get about attack rolls, spell effects etc. I am also a bit lazy to individually target enemies with missile weapons sometimes.

To avoid hi-jacking OP's thread, I'll probably start my own to ask my own questions about scripts and how to use them.