Something that doesn't seem to work very much for me is Charm Person/Monster/Dominate Person. Well, it works to a point. It stops them from attacking me. Most of the time a charmed foe will just stand there and do nothing for the round. Which is a boon of course, but it doesn't bring the big benefit of attacking their former allies and helping me in combat. But I've noticed many times when they DO attack, they spam area of effect spells that clip more of my guys than the enemies. And many times "charmed" monsters straight up attack me even though the game still says they are charmed. VERY occasionally they behave as expected, and attack their side, but it that seems to be an exception and not a rule. Is charm broken?
And while Im on the subject, Explanar Ally is one of the most irritating experiences for backup. When the Ally DOES act and not skip his turn, he does something totally useless like cast mirror image or some miscellaneous 1rst or 2nd level spell and doesn't help at all. I'd stopped using them altogether after 10 or so times of being let down.
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/charmPerson.htm The way Charm spells work in DnD is that charmed creatures do not instantly become your slaves that obey every command to the T. What they're supposed to do is make creatures more friendly/inclined to view you positively and likely to do things you ask them to do, that aren't too unreasonable. Several well known CRPG DnD adaptations (the Infinity engine games most notably) changed that so they did become virtual slaves (the tradeoff was nerfing the duration of said spells), and a lot of people have seem to become used to that. I may be remembering wrong, but I think TOEE vanilla charm (or at least earlier C08 versions) also did something similar... which made spellcasters who focused on enchantment game - breakingly powerful, essentially giving you a potentially powerful yet disposable extra party member for free on top of stuff like Tasha's, etc. If you know what you're doing (i.e. choose your victim wisely) it becomes incredibly overpowered at TOEE's levels. tldr if charmed creatures in more recent versions of C08/Temple Plus are not always acting exactly as you expect, that's probably a more accurate implementation (although it's possible something is bugging out). If you want more thorough control over creatures, you really ought to be using spells like the Dominate x (person/monster) spells. In TOEE game terms you have full control over a dominated creature's actions as if they were a party member.
This is true. In all editions of D&D I've played, Charm Person would be like if you ran afoul of me at a bar when I was hanging out with my best buddy, and we were were going to beat you up.... after I fail my save, I see you as an old friend or this whole thing as a hideous misunderstanding.... and I would stop my friend from attacking you.... but if you told me to pick up a knife and stab him, I'd say no way and it probably would break the charm. However, this nuance can't be replicated in a computer roleplaying game. Like so many spells, they have to be watered down or generalized into either damage or affecting AI. HOWEVER, I've noticed that when I'M charmed, I have no qualms about attacking my own side.
Charm effect is either bugged or just not scripted properly for all kinds of combat situations. There is the bug report here with a couple of examples: https://github.com/GrognardsFromHell/TemplePlus/issues/772 Even though charming spells are inconsistent, they're still very powerful spells which I always use. If you're lucky enough you can get a strong addition to your party with just a level 1 spell. Just avoid charming casters and keep your charmed characters as close as possible to the front of your battle (in case if you already had them before combat start) - this way they will contribute much more. Also sometimes charm effect becomes permanent, faced that a few times. For example, this happened to Rannos Davl, so he was assisting me till the very end of Co8 additional content. He stuck to my party even in a dead state and I was able to reincarnate him multiple times using Jaroo. One of the most interesting runs I had is when I got 9 (that's the limit) charmed NPCs following my 8 PCs+NPCs. That setup required a lot of patience and dozens of reloads though.
I'm not an expert on ToEE AI, but from what I can read quickly, this is about the quality you can expect from casters: First it decides it wants to do a fireball, because the options above fireball in its AI list failed It calculates a 'fireball score' for each unfriendly target to figure out which is best If the best fireball score is greater than 0, it does the fireball The fireball score gets +1 for each unfriendly target, unless it's resistant to fireballs, in which case it's +0.2. The score gets -1.1 for each friendly target, unless it's resistant to fireballs. So, they basically don't care about friendly fire as long as there are more unfriendly targets than friendly targets (maybe 2 more if you have a really large party). I'm not certain, but I think it basically centers on the target, too; I don't think it tries to calculate a position that includes enemies and excludes allies. ---- Reminds me of Baldur's Gate mages, where I swear they give every one lightning bolt, and it always does equal damage to both sides of the fight. But they cast it anyway, because their goal isn't to win/survive the fight, just to do enough damage to make the player reload.
Heh, I always assumed if you said 'cast fireball' rather than 'cast area' it would try to minimise allies.
They'll minimize in the sense that if one target includes a better ratio of enemies to allies, they'll pick that target. But if everyone's in a cluster I think they'll just let it rip, as long as it's doing marginally more damage to the enemy.
