Someone suggested Pillars of Eternity on my last blog, and I noticed from initial scanning of Google Images it looked like a.. Next-Gen type of DS, I suppose. Same game play style.
Then I watched the Angry Joe Review, If you haven't seen Angry Joe by the way, you'll love him, just search him up on Youtube.
I noticed something about half-way through the video that never really occured to me before. Dungeon Siege 2 has very little micromanaging. It's safe to say that most people play on Mirror or Rampage mode rather than on Wait mode, right? Well, even if you pause the game and plan out attacks, it takes a while, and the only thing you can REALLY decide with precision is power usage.
So that got me thinking; DS2 as I've heard is built similarly, if differently, from the original. Similarly enough so to where a lot of the tricks for original DS modding work for DS2.
Could we bring in at LEAST the same amount of micromanaging as the original offered?
GRRR.
Setting each characters aggression and movement individually made it incredibly easy to have them act generally how I want them to. I can tell you that healers would be much more effective if they were set to not be distracted by enemies and just heal the party, while everyone else handles the monsters. That could arguably be accomplished by having the active spell be a heal or resurrect spell while having a heal be in the autocast, but that just feels messy.
PROTECT ME, YOU FOOLS!
I've noticed, too, that whenever you set a character to be 'Guarded' and unless you're the Hero character, as soon as you switch from them they'll go back to guarding the Hero. Can we make it so that each character can be set to guard a specific character? I'd very much like Yoren or Lothar to be hanging around Taar consistently. Similarly, I'd like to have Deru or Vix watch Raymus' back while he's in the thick of it.
YOU'RE NOT AS HANDSOME AS HE IS, I CAN'T HELP YOU.
Setting independent character priorities, this will relate to the guarding feature. Raymus is fully capable of handling himself, even in a cluster-storm of evil critters gnawing at his face and body and such. Meanwhile Taar needs to have constant defense because.. well, I mean, obviously. This would tie in to the defenses that you set just fine, because even if you set Deru to watch your Hero, you can have them go to defend Taar instead when she reaches below %50 health, or something. Similarly, you could have Taar focus on healing your Hero, before anyone else.
THAT ONE!
What about that feature from the original DS where you can set each character to target a certain type of foe first? If they are the closest, if they are the weakest, or if they are the strongest? This would work beautifully in Rampage mode in DS2.
ESCAPO! ESCAPO! ESCAPO!
Have it so you can Toggle follower's bravery. If any character that you are not currently controlling falls below a certain amount of Health, or has the ire of a certain amount of enemies, you can have them flee automatically away from them. Granted, this could have your followers blundering into OTHER groups of enemies, but this could create some interesting situations and would likely work out more often than not.
HERE'S YOUR DELIVERY, SIR. SIGN HERE..
When someone runs low or out of potions, potions that you have previously decided through a menu or something that this character needs to always possess, a follower with the largest amount of those potions will give you a few. Could be a set amount, 2 or 3, could be a set size, small to colossal, could be a random amount. Etc, etc..
Because I don't believe potions can be used from other character's inventories, though I might be wrong, in which case I fail to realise the point of personal inventories at that point, Lmao.
IT'S AS EASY AS ONE, TWO, THREE! ... FOURFIVESIXSEVEN.
Macros! Have certain hotkeys activate pre-planned Macros' in which characters will use a certain spell, a certain combination of spells, a certain power, a certain combination of powers, to a certain type of enemy (Closest/Weakest/Toughest/Ugliest).
Granted, I can see this one as being skipped, and I wouldn't mind, I just figured it was too obvious not to mention.
And for christssake, make resurrect work as an auto-cast. I don't think it's beyond the power of DS2, really.
I'm sure there are others, but nothing I could come up with on the spot.
And no, these aren't projects I would pursue myself (yet) because the last thing I plan on doing (yet) is learning anything to do with coding or numbers or what-have-you. Not until I'm out of school..
... Or at least out of Math.
Comments
Resurrect can and has been made autocast before in mods... the monsters have autocast... but the thing is, autocast assumes there is a dead hero, so the spell would be constantly cast, could very well use mana....so should it really be autocast, perhaps the real answer is to make it autocast with a low chance of autocast, but the real culprit, is the mana it takes to do the resurrect, that is one mana consuming spell, nature mages mostly use up all their mana casting buffs, normal spells and summons, and don't have any left for Resurrect, at least when I played that usually what happened.
Femme made the autoengage mod, which modifies the attack similar to ds1, so it's possible to modify the UI to do some of the things u want from ds1 but like everything else, it takes time, desire, and motivation to do some hardcoded work, to change any of that..i doubt there is anyone who would want to put time into porting that code over as the game is quite old now.
I guess if one wanted the hero's to flee, changing actor_good mind to flee percentage would solve that problem... modifying actor_good can fix some of the things u want, but still wouldn't have the ui.
If u want Taar guarded, probably should make her the "Player controlled" character, that way she gets guarded, and there's nothing wrong with Taar just being healer only, after all a group of heroes healed is better than a group of heroes dead!
In DS2 Adepts I made an autocast version of Resurrect and it works well, better in fact than it did in DS1. There's no mana used until the spell is actually casted and as there's always a delay in casting it (up to 5 seconds), I believe that the spell waits for a world message that one of the heroes is dead, rather than trying to continually cast itself.
KillerGremal also made significant changes to the ai of the npcs to support a more varied repertoire of actions and I managed to make a variation of brain_hero.skrit for characters such as Ulora and Gloern so they would react when attacked during their special intro sequences, otherwise with the basic brain_hero.skrit they would just stand there like manikins while the monsters attacked them - very unrealistic. I suppose that why you never see any of the DS2 recruitable characters in those sorts of sequences.
The party system is dramatically underutilized in the DS series. It would be cool if you would have to split your party up in order to solve some puzzles like some other games do.
You would probably love the gambit system used in Final Fantasy XII, one of my most favourite games of all times - if it could be modded I'd doubt I'd ever be modding DS2 at all.
In Final Fantasy XII, you can assign gambits to each character in the party so they will respond exactly how you want them to. For instance if you use a gambit of attacking enemies weak to wire with a fire spell, then that is what they will do. You would set this gambit high up in the list so if the enemy wasn't weak to fire, your character wouldn't even try using a fire spell on it. They'd use another attacking gambit you'd set in the list. You can set when you want the character to heal somebody and with what spell. For example you could set a gambit so your healer would heal somebody when their health reached 60% (or 70% or 50%, etc).
Dragon Age Origins had it done pretty nicely with the combat tactics options. You could do the Drink a Potion, attack specific target, interrupt with shield bash, etc well in that game.
I did a bit of tinkering based on the autocastable resurrect spell I mentioned. It so happens that all spells can be made to be able to be autocasted if you add the required lines to their templates.
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/Spell_Auto_Cast_Everything.ds2res
This version has the autocast chance set to 50% for attack spells so if you place more than 1 attack spell in the autocast slots (best used in Broken World as that has 4 autocast slots), your character will randomly select one to cast. If the autocast chance is set to 100% then only the first attack spell in the autocast slots will be cast and the others ignored. This tactically may be superior than a random approach. For the resurrect spells and scrolls, the chance is set to 100%.
I don't know why this hasn't been tried before as its such a very simple mod but I can't find any reference here to such a spell mod or perhaps somebody tried to make one and found issues with it as I haven't tested this much at all.
Hi Irwin,
It appears that all the DS2 and BW combat and nature magic spells can now be autocast. I was playing through Broken World using Adepts. Now The extra spells within Adepts which are based on DS1 combat and nature magic attack spells can not be autocast. This is also true for spells created by others in other mods, but I would expect that since the necessary code would have to be added to the various mods for the spells to be autocastable.