Killed by Friendly Fire
Permidion_Stark
Member Posts: 4,913
My latest no-reload run just came to an end in the most frustrating of ways. I have been playing with SCS installed for the first time and was quite enjoying the added challenge it presented (I am only playing on the 'Improved' setting so it is nowhere near as hard as it could be). All was going well, I had reached Chapter Seven, my party had cleared the Ice Island and the Werewolf Island and the upper stories of Durlag's Tower, and I figured it was time to attend the coronation of Sarevok. I handed over my invitation, listened to the nobles blathering on and waited for the Greater Doppelgangers to appear. I was confident I would be able to destroy them in pretty short order but instead what happened was my party was wiped out in the first round of combat. When the Doppelgangers appeared Grand Duke Liia Jannath launched a Cone of Cold spell that killed my Charname (an 8th level Cavalier with 93 hit points who was wearing the Helm and Cloak of Balduran) and totally destroyed three other party members. Presumably, she also killed all of the assembled nobles as well but I wasn't able to check the combat log because by the time I had picked my jaw up off the floor the 'game over' hand was filling my screen.
And there was me thinking the whole point of SCS was that it made mages smarter . . .
And there was me thinking the whole point of SCS was that it made mages smarter . . .
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I can't help but feel that Grand Duke Jannath is going to take an awfully big reputation hit after this one.
It also does make me wonder whether to persevere with SCS because this seems pretty nonsensical to me.
I’ve played a couple runs with SCS now, and have settled in on Improved as a good balance of things. I do avoid any “difficulty” that takes things away from Core AD&D, and I dislike immersion breaking things like too much pre-buffing by enemies (how do they always know when to cast their short duration buffs?!) But I find at Improved, enemies are a little smarter, but not prescient. I like that. I’m not sure why you had such a spectacular malfunction.
I never play “no reload”, I put way too much time into my character and team builds for that. But it might be worth replaying that to see if it was glitch of some sort, or if Liia has gone full on homocidal. I’ve not had such a thing happen.
As @atcDave mentions, SCS uses a few shortcuts and subtle cheats to help the AI, and I agree with him in disliking the way enemies pre-buff. There's nothing up for Breach to dispel one second, and the next they're fully protected and ready to fight. It feels like you're expected to wait politely while they finish tying their shoelaces before the duel can properly begin—holding yourself back from, you know, just ending them instantly with a single backstab or Power Word: Kill, before their defenses make that impossible.
Still, it's the best AI mod out there. Just don't expect it to be smart in a human-like sense. In my view, it's a huge improvement over options like Legacy of Bhaal or other brute-force difficulty mods that just inflate HP and damage.
Ultimately, it's a matter of choosing your poison:
1. A game that isn't a challenging.
2. A game that is hard purely through inflated stats, turning fights into long, tedious slogs.
3. A game that creates difficulty through somewhat artificial and questionable design tricks.
Personally, I'll take option 3, and I build on it with self-imposed roleplaying limitations (and a few special abilities, because they're fun).
I think what you say is fair and I have been enjoying the challenge that SCS adds but the problems with this particular encounter are nothing to do with the AI scripting. Since it would never be appropriate for Liia Jannath to cast an area of effect damage spell the problem could have been completely avoided by not assigning any to her. Why give her Cone of Cold when she is bound to kill her allies when she uses it?
@atcDave
Apologies for not replying before. Now, a day or two on from the tragic event, I can sort of see the funny side!
I have been scouring the internet to see what went wrong with Grand Duke Jannath and she does seem to have caused problems in the past: https://gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/37126-scs-fighting-script-makes-duke-liia-use-aoe-magic-which-turns-the-other-dukes-hostile/
I am using Endless BG1 so I don't know whether SCS still adversely affects Liia Jannath's behaviour when used in conjunction with @jastey 's mod.
Sorry if I was too harsh. As someone who just laughs and reloads it’s never a big thing to me.
You weren't too harsh at all. It was funny. It just took me a while to get the joke! I now wish I had managed to get screenshots of the original incident because my party was there one moment and in the next they were just chunks flying across the screen and I sat there staring in disbelief because I had no idea what happened.
Let me add:
4. A game that creates difficulty through blatantly artificial and questionable tricks and cheats like the constant use of the reallyforcespell script so spell casting can not be disrupted, enemies with abilities that they are not supposed to have (a lot of them can naturally see trough invisibility, mind flyers that teleport themselves near the weakest party members even if you keep them in a far away room of the dungeon, a Kensai with infinite PFMW scrolls use, an Illusionist with 2 familiars that cast spells much better then most vanilla mages up to the final SoA boss that splits himself into 5 parts, one of them is a level draining Dragon, and other a super mordy sword. I am talking of playing with Tactics Mod (BG2 only).
Personally in the past I had a lot of fun with option 4, solving "impossible" battles with the engine and enemies that cheat and finding my own ways to do it in different solo or party runs.
Now I am playing vanilla, but I suggest to give a try to Tactics Mod at least one time in the life once a player is enough skilled and proficient that vanilla has become too easy, Tactics was all about the engine cheating and ScS was born to give a different approach, difficulty obtained trough a smarter IA that does not cheat ( for what the limitations of the engine allow to do ), to have the full experience a player should try both of them.
Hi @jastey Thanks for your reply. I figured it probably was something like that so I have disabled SCS for my latest run because I want to keep using your mods and I don't want to risk Liia turning my party into chunks of ice again.