Mods, mods, mods......

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I just forgot to reply to this part:

There is no +6 weapon in the game for 100,000 gp.

"Judgement Day" sword is the only weapon which offers +6 THAC0 and damage bonuses (though it has +5 enchantment or magic level). Its forging price is 250,000 gp (not 100,000!) and it requires very hard-to-attain ingredients.

The only other +6 items are a chain mail (15,000 gp + ingredients) and a shield (60,000 gp + ingredients).

Hence, I presume that Arawn was talking about a different mod, though I can't guess which.

 

Yes, I know, it sounds like a bit of a harsh jab. But in a game where writing is everything, it bothers me to see sub-par text. And while you're definitely right about complex AI not always being better (see the thread recently where someone suggests that while QP's AI is quite clever, it simply isn't working all that well), I certainly feel that IA's falls down in a number of areas when stood up against, say, Tactics. IA's battles may well be harder, but this would largely seem to be a function of the new abilities and stat changes it imparts rather than creature intelligence, and that's not really what I'd be inclined to look for primarily in a mod like this.

Right, I've noticed that this seems to get results. While I don't agree with "modding by democracy", I crave feedback, and I'll probably come here a great deal more to pitch my ideas when I need to rather than sitting on my forum waiting 3 months for someone to say "yeah, cool!"

 

Cool.

 

Sorry, I was trying for some factiousness. (+6 as a metaphore for over the top.)

Nice comeback though.

 

Which means the scripts are not written all that well.

Those who have played Improved Anvil and have encountered the smart enemies know that this is not true.

In fact, Improved Anvil's tactical challenges benefit from both kinds of enhancements: New abilities (mostly for new types of monsters) and assigning smart tactics to enemies.

 

Heh. Blunt, and to the point. It's a tradeoff though--as I observe in the other thread, sensible targetting in the BG2 engine means occasionally a creature will try to get to something they can't reach. It's neccessary to strike a balance, because while obviously if this happened all the time it would be pretty unfortunate, I think it's important to develop beyond "attack the nearest thing" in terms of AI complexity.

I acknowledge that yes, the behaviour your enemies exhibit is marginally smarter than that shipped with the game: You re-evaluate the nearest target more frequently, perform rudimentary checks for some immunities, and so on. However, targetting is still predictable, enemies still stand around between casting spells, and so on.

Combined with the stat changes you make, this might be sufficient to provide a challenge even to experienced players. However, I still think this challenge comes more from the fact that you add absured magic and elemental resistances to numerous creatures, give various people undroppable Cloaks of Mirroring, and so on, than from any great innovations in the game's AI. Given this, to claim that you've looked through other mods and found that your scripting is still the best is, to me, laudably presumptuous.

 

It is unfair to say that scripts and AI of IA enemies are inferior to those of tactics.

From what I see so far, they use so many different tactics according to situation at hand, they use their spells efficiently, a huge bonus is they do not CHEAT. Yes, the enemies in IA do not cheat AFAIK.

AND, what is more important, some enemies in SoA actually uses HLAs! (though they are rare bosses) I think this is the first time I see some enemy using HLAs in SoA part of the game, and I believe this is a massive improvement!

It makes no sense why very high level enemies in SoA (Shangalar, for example) could not use HLAs before. If you think the game as a whole, (SoA+ToB) they should have HLAs too if you have expansion, since you can have HLAs in SoA when you hit that high levels!

IA also adds new quests, new monsters, new encounters, new contents for existing quests, also fixes a lot of things which were wrong or buggy in the original game. New items are there for a bonus, you deserve something fancy after all the hard work! This is not a shop mod where you can buy the most powerful items ever thought easily, you need to work hard to force those items! Forcing items is a part of the mod's theme, it is named Improved 'Anvil', afterall, not 'All new Tactics' or 'Better Item Uprades'. IA, as a whole, is a very different concept than Tactics and Item Upgrade.

Trust me, even forcing the weakest item introduced by this mod is not easy. AND, I doubt if anybody was able to force Judgement Day without cheating up to now! I intend to be the first!

 

"CLCK26" is NOT "Cloak of Mirroring" once you install IA. And very few enemies have worn even this nerfed version of the cloak: Only 7 creatures in the entire game (SOA + TOB). The new CLCK26 merely grants 50% resistance to magic damage and nothing more.

[ November 02, 2006, 19:39: Message edited by: Sikret ]