To us SCS, or not to use SCS, that is the question....
jjstraka34
Member Posts: 9,850
I've never actually installed this mod, indeed the only two I have found essential in all my searching and surfing are the BG NPC mod and the improved Wizard Slayer kit. What kind of difficulty increase am I looking at on Core difficulty?? Is it a across the board nerve-wracking every battle is knock down drag out fight, or just a more intelligent and strategic way to play the game?? And any other mods that are required to go with it??
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One disclaimer: SCS is not only smarter enemies; some fights are simply harder because certain enemies get beefed up or receive special abilities that make them significantly harder to beat. You will most likely be forced to reload in those encounters.
The good thing is that you can pick the components of the mod that you want to install. I'd recommend you to take a look at the readme and decide which components appeal to you. There is no need to play SCS together with any other mod, but you could combine it with other difficulty-increasing mods if you wanted to.
Once you've had a few playthroughs of that, I'd go for Smarter Mages/Priests *without* short-lasting prebuffs.
If, after that, you're feeling like you've mastered things you can move on to Smarter Mages/Priests *with* short-lasting prebuffs. I'm not yet at the stage where I'm comfortable with that, personally, but then I *do* play exclusively solo no-reload, so YMMV...
Accepted Garrick's job offer in Beregost. Silke's no problem, right? Just whack her 'til she falls over. Pre-buff Stoneskin, Improved Invisibility! Holy cr*p on a stick! I can't see her to attack, and when the invisibility drops for her to cast a spell, she's invulnerable! She slaughtered my party in nothing flat. I was left staring at the screen. Whoa.
However, the ai improvements are VERY fun, especially in BG1. But if you're soloing with a caster, be ready to have certain enemy casters actively disrupt you.
Basically, when it comes to mage fights in BG2, you either want to play BG2's Rock-Paper-Scissors style game of taking down various debuffs one step at a time, or you don't. If you don't (which is perfectly fine), skip Smarter Mages.
Making Dispel Magic 100% ineffective essentially states that only mages can actually take on mages, not even other casters. Imo, this is a poor design choice, but again, in vanilla bg2 it wasnt a big deal. If the developers didnt want to make Dispel able to dispell high level protections, they might have added a higher level version, ie Greater Dispel, or even Disjunction (...without the 'kill magic items' part). If Greater Dispel was a 6th or 7th level cleric or druid spell, it would allow more builds to have a tool to utilize. 5th level spells shouldnt be able to eat 9th level spells. Its bad balancing imo.
Just offering personal opinion, not sweeping universals. That said, if you're actually PLAYING a mage, something like Smarter Mages is a really good inclusion, if a bit restrictive at times. After all, you'll be using most of the protections yourself anyways!
Speaking of which, when I discovered how to fix Spell Shield I was hoping @DavidW would stop using SI:Abj and simply replace it with Spell Shield, but I think such change involved too much work to re-do all SCS defensive scripts, and he probably "needed" SI's dispel immunity.
@subtledoctor simply replacing SI:Abj with Spell Shield messes up with the AI (trust me, we tested it within the current beta for Spell Revision V4), especially if you want such tweak to work together with SCS (you'll end up with SCS mages wasting spells by casting multiple Spell Shields at once). Some of your other suggested tweaks are a problem too for a competent AI script because it cannot cope with some changes making it behave sub-optimally.
I didnt blame anyone but whoever did the original designing of the Spell Immunity spell. I stand by that specific spell being unbalanced, and Dispel being unnecessarily nerfed vs spell protection. In PnP spellcasting defence and counters certainly exist, but in 3rd edition at least they are costly to cast. The best example of spell defence in PnP dnd iirc is Chromatic Sphere, which is a pain to dispel and protects the caster rather thoroughly. I can disagree with someone's choice to use a spell in a certain way in a mod, and as this is a thread where someone is asking for opinioms on said mod, I am fully justified to bring up this in a negative light, provided I am polite. I have been polite.
In PnP, the classes arent anywhere near as unbalanced in 2nd ed as they are in BG2. Divine casters and bards are both very weak compared to mages. In BG1, a similar level fighter can have a decent shot when fighting a mage, but in bg2, they cant scratch a mage played properly, LITERALLY. Clerics and druids are also helpless, and bards really not much better, since 6th level isnt high enough for the big counters. Heck, if the game had skipped contingencies, triggers and sequencers the game would be vastly more balanced.
However, whats done is done. The game is what it is, and as such, I likely wont play improved mages when not soloing a mage. I recomend the same to most people that ask.
I'm happy to concede that if you're playing a solo non-mage, SCS might not be a good idea (to my surprise lots of people do solo SCS with a mixture of classes, but it's not really what it's designed for). Protection from the party's nonmagical weapons, which they would be well advised to bring as spares for exactly this situation. (If you're a vampire, rakshasa or lich, then absolutely there's no advantage in casting Mantle rather than PMW - though actually there can be some advantages in *learning* Mantle rather than PMW, as 6th level has a number of absolutely crucial spells.
SI:Abjuration protects the mage from Breach, so the usual combo SI:Abjuration, Spell shield, PfMW (that's the usual spell trigger of SCS mages) need 2xsecret word followed by breach to dispel both spell and combat protections. I'm I wrong? I'm I missing something? I swear that's how I deal with those f*ing smart mages (kidding, I really love them)
Sorry for grammar mistakes :-)
If "difficult" implies "worse" in your opinion, that's fine. I'm curious -- have you actually tried it? (Perchance with only the "Better calls for help" and "Smarter general AI" options?)
I tend to find that RRR works pretty well -- I don't think I've ever seen a mage cast SI:Alteration in SCS. (Finally a use for it as opposed to the vanilla game!)
As for the topic, SCS is good if you're (unsurprisingly) a tactical player. It's very difficult to strong-arm your way through many encounters or use the same tricks every time to guaranteed success without your party being flat-out more powerful than the opposition. Because of this, you MUST use every advantage available if you want to win a fight because the AI is not "stupid". If you can't win a fight, you might not be using enough potions/wands/buffs, etc.
That said, there are some options which flat out alter gameplay (e.g. moving certain items like Robe of Vecna and giving unique abilities to certain enemies) but SCS is good in that almost everything is up to your discretion. It gives options on whether or not you want to add in basically all of its content individually. At least, that's my experience with the mod. Not to say it isn't INTENSELY frustrating at times, I rage a little in every lich fight. Odamaron and his lich apprentice makes me want to rip my hair out.
Vanilla is alot better imo.
But you can use any mod/cheat/trainer etc that you have the most fun with. To me its like pissing on a Mona Lisa.