Altering npc scripts

tl;dr - skip to the last sentence.

I recently finished my second playthrough, although considering how many errors I encountered I decided to quit after Zuggy. Now I would like to go through the NC as well. Everything is installed afresh. Now, one of my most irritating bugs were 100% guaranteed CTDs during overland traveling. To my surprise this got fixed by hiring barbarian PC from tavern ledger, after this I started getting survival prompts and the game never crashed again during traveling. Even special encounters like the rewards for temple rescues that were impossible to get before despite meeting all the conditions loaded fine. However, my dislike for PC's should be well known around here by now so I decided I would merge the two PC's I had into one this time around and create a cleric of Ehlonna (Sun/Plant) with 2 levels of ranger for free longbow proficiency and rapid shot (elven chain, no manyshot) The character has enough intelligence, wisdom and charisma to keep all the face skills and turning at healthy levels and the 2 ranger levels would provide a nice boost to them too apart from giving me more survival points than I would ever need for error-free traveling (considering that was the true reason for crashes and not lack of other PC's)

Problem with this though is a lack of muscle... I need at least 1 melee tank apart from Elmo. I only want NPCs with compatible alignments to my PA (NG) who wouldn't leave/suck/demand me to marry. I figured that Kobort being TN could fit in nicely w/o that evil whelp Turuko poisoning his mind... Say if I could get a rid of Turuko (accidents happen all the time) Kobort would make pretty brutal tank with Moradin's soulhammer... However I don't want him to turn on me so I'm thinking about altering his script to prevent that, how could I do that?

 

Firstly, I'm pretty sure that Kobort will never turn on you. In my experience, all evil recruitable NPCs behave almost as if they were just PCs in your party, so you won't have any problems with them. That person who created the walkthrough for The Temple of Elemental Evil that is at the Sorcerers Place website and who stated that Turuko and Kobort may turn on you if you are losing a battle is most likely wrong. It's only having "good" recruitable NPCs (like Elmo) in your party that causes lots of problems - they WILL turn on you during combat if you attack or accidentally damage a neutral NPC who didn't have it coming. So you should be fine to recruit Turuko and Kobort and then murder Turuko before Kobort's very eyes. Having stated that, I personally would keep Kobort out of line-of-sight of Turuko when you murder Turuko, just to be on the safe side.

Secondly, I tried playing the Keep on the Borderlands module with a party that consisted of just 1 PC, but the game and my computer would always permanently hang as soon as my PC had a random encounter while travelling on the world map. I had to reboot my computer whenever I experienced this hang because it locked up my computer and made my computer no longer responsive. Therefore, if you are playing the Co8 Modpack with a party that consists of less than 3 PCs, then I strongly advise that you:

Always play the Co8 Modpack with a party that consists of AT LEAST 3 PCs in order to ensure game stablility and to minimize or prevent unnecessary CTDs.

If you are currently playing the Co8 Modpack with a party that consists of less than 3 PCs, then I am almost certain that if you start playing the Co8 Modpack with a party that consists of at least 3 PCs, all of the CTDs that you have been experiencing (and you have reported experiencing MANY CTDs while playing this game) will cease.

 

Getting Kobort & Turuko and then getting Turuko killed should do it.

(They do have scripting for betrayal, when your group is < 30% HP on average and when they are > 70% HP, and indeed only when Turuko is present. Likewise for Zert BTW)

 

So that crashing during random encounters while having only 1 PC is a known thing? Why nobody told me lol I did read at several places that having only 1 PC can lead to bugs but not what bugs exactly. Even in a thread where some guy asked specifically about what NPCs to pick for single PC run nobody mentioned that... That led me to believe having more PCs was more of a convenience thing (no game over when the one PC dies, no door blocking etc.) not that it is such a crucial thing for CTD-free traveling. If that's the case, no wonder that hiring second PC fixed that the last time. Arghh... I guess I will still give it a shot, at least now I know for sure what to do when problems appear. I wish there was a way to make it so that the game treats NPCs as PCs, at least for some purposes crucial to comfortable gameplay.

Thanks for your tips regarding Kobort and Turuko. So Kobort will never ever turn on me with Turuko out of the picture, that's good to know. I still wish there was a way to check the scripts out of sheer curiosity. I never had any intention of murdering Turuko, let alone with Kobort watching. That's just so excessive and being rotten do-gooder in games never even occurred to me. He would just accidentally run into that giant in Moathouse or some-such. Also I wouldn't label Kobort "evil npc". Indeed, according to protos.tab hes true neutral and everything in protos.tab is perfectly logical and error-free /endsarcasm. Seriously though, I think he's just simple guy who is too easy to manipulate and got mixed up with the wrong people... Give him good example to follow and he will make a fine hammer of justice.

EDIT: Was still writing by the time Ted posted the explanation... wow that explains a lot! Strange how can something glaring like that pop up after so many years.

 

I have completed a few full games with one PC, and in one of them, I dominated all 7 of the slavers to finish the game with me. Never had an issue. Must be my old hardware is very compatible with this game..

 

Well, that's great to know now that I rolled my traveling circus of Heironeous... paladin, cleric and monk... to avoid CTD's. Bah, could you guys make up your minds? Is the traveling possible with single PC or not? I can't fathom how would the game scale the random encounters differently for different players... For me any attempt at traveling with 1 PC and 4 NPC's from about level 5 resulted in automatic CTD and only after hiring second PC the crashes ceased. But now I'm hearing that single PC can be OK and afaik there were many people who played solo, assuming w/o such problem... so I'm wondering, is the problem with CTD's on random encounters actually caused by presence of a single PC or a single PC with addition of NPC's?

 

It may be a hardware/driver issue your having. I have an old PC dedicated for playing older games. Here is a pic of my single PC game with the slavers dominated.