Party automation

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I prefer playing with a party...the interaction, dialogue and being able to use all their skills is something that keeps me playing.

I really struggled to 'get into' Neverwinter nights because I felt I was on my own. I know that there are character's who you can get to help you, but they pretty much did their own thing and you had little control over them. I felt either their scripting wasn't good enough or that they took too much control away from the player.

Having said that I like to play with a party, it is nice to have some sort of semi-automation for their actions.

Personally I want to control everything they do apart from:-

Attacking in basic situations with melee and ranged weapons i.e. when there aren't any monsters that need to be thought about tactically.

Defending themselves. Party members should have an instinctive defense mechanism. They should cast stoneskin if they have it, they should run away if they are injured etc.

All healing...I believe that the party members should be automated in healing, i.e. they see an injured party member and heal them.

Basic actions:- Finding traps, Hiding in shadows.

I have written my own scripts to deal with all this, and it is enjoyable watching the characters do their own thing whilst I role-play the lead character (and control all their actions).

What are peoples opinions on party automation. How much or little do you want? If you have full automation do your characters do what you want? If you have no automation do you get tired of having to manually do even the most tedious of tasks?

 

I like to do things myself. One thing that can be automated is attacking with melee/ranged weaponry. Usually they can pick the next enemy to beat, but sometimes I have a different opinion and that is when the hand of god comes into play. Other than fighting I will do myself. Spellcasting automation is no-no. After all, it's a computer game, not a movie.

 

There's only two things that should be automised:
1) A party member that's attacked should be defended by the whole team (including the attacked party member)
2) Someone who has finished of his enemy should automatically "lock on" another enemy.

I find the provided scripts not good enough to my taste, the character always does something I don't want him/her to do. But since I'm to lazy to write scripts myself, I turn of the AI and do everything myself.

 

I've always been used to having a party of six, with me in control of everyone. But that was back in the turn-based RPG's, so it was not tedious to make decisions for everybody. In today's real-time games, it IS a pain for me... I end up having to pause a lot in one battle to make characters do stuff. And when I say I pause a lot, I mean pretty much every time one of the options in the "Autopause?" menu arise - so enemy killed, spell casted, weapon no efect, end of round, etc...

So scripting would seem appealing to me, but I can predict some problems. Like how the optimum decision for each instant in combat would probably not be the same which makes it hard to script a character. Eg: you might not want to cast stoneskin automatically when you encounter some measily goblins, or cast "Heal" on barely injured allies.

But some simple scripts would be nice. Especially that auto find/remove trap thing for thieves out of combat. Or some others like switch to melee weapon when in melee, or run when near death (although panic does cause them to run around sometimes).

 

I once played all the way through BG2 and ToB just with the uScript for NPCs and then control my own sorcerer. I find it highly entertaining and it, in some weird way, added to the feel of having a real npc with ya.

 

I agree with Trillex on the part where it sometimes hightens the feeling of having actual NPC´s. Although in the long run it get´s boring, because if you only control your PC you dont really have to do alot. So basically I set "Standard Attack" and just press A when I dont want my characters to keep attacking.