Salamanders and Giants and Gnolls (Oh My!)

strategy.tab - that might be the answer - change it so the bugbear just melees the closest enemy when his points are low instead of killing himself by drinking a cure potion.

 

Is there an explanation of how the strategy.tab works anywhere? I've only tinkered with it once, and that was a direct cut and paste of spell names for the Eye of the Deep, so it didn't require any real understanding.

Also, what's the preferred program for editing it? My first attempt, Phalzyr's Protos Editor corrupted the file, causing a CTD as soon as any monster tried to act. The second time it worked okay. (And I have problems with Phalzyr's editor in general. Any use of the sort or resizing functions inevitably corrupts the file I'm working on.)

 

Lets see if I can remember - there is combat actions and spell actions, I think the format for combat actions is "action, skip 2 colums, action" and for spells its "target(ranged/single/cloestest), skip 2 colums, cast (area/fireball/single), skip colum, spell, clear target... (or if same target) skip colum, target(area/single), skip colum, spell... have a look anyway its not to hard. its something like that anyway

 

You're not the only one. It sounded like blah-blah-spell-blah-blah to me.mg:

Well, I went back and tinkered with the Efreeti. I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, :nervous: but I managed to give him his Scorching Ray ability (shame I can't Quicken it) and added an AI set for him (using the Basalisk as the base, since it had a similiar behavior to what I wanted) that makes him chuck Scorching Rays at you if you try to keep your distance, but if you get up in his face he'll pound you physically. It seems to work pretty well.

 

In the interest of getting this protos update done sometime before we all die of old age I'm going to lay off worrying about AI issues and concentrate on just fixing the stats, barring trying to enable the special abilities of monsters. Trying to learn the strategy.tab on top of everything else is going to make things take even longer, and it's already going much slower than I anticipated. Maybe after Co8 4.1 is released I can play around with figuring out how to make the monsters fight smarter (or at least less like they're brain-damaged.) So for now raging Bugbear barbarians are just going to have to continue sucking down those bull's strength potions.

As for ye old Eye of the Deep, what would you guys prefer (and I can open a poll for this one if people think it warrants it). Make the Eye of the Deep completely rules-compliant (though advanced with extra hit dice, per the rules, since baseline EotDs would be push-overs in the Water Node) or stick with how Troika envisioned them, an ice-based beholder-lite? (Maybe with a name change to reflect it's nothing like an actual Eye of the Deep other than appearance.)

If we do go with the former, how hard would it be to cook up a stun beam "spell" for the Eye of the Deep? Cone 30' feet long/wide, Fort save, say DC 18, or be stunned for 2d4 rounds.

 

How about renaming them to Frost Eye Tyrants and changing their skin palette to be a bit more blue-ice-ish?

 

Gotta love the holidays. Just got back to work on my modding.

Okay, so Fire Toads are another head scratcher. The original fire toad was a small creature that spit tiny fireballs. The ones in ToEE are pretty much just Behemoth King Frogs on fire (so they do extra fire damage when they hit you and when you hit them.) I don't even recall fighting them during the game, so I can't really judge if they're appropriate for wherever you encounter them. My inclination is to leave them as-is with the standard skills, saves and ability tweaks instead of trying to recreate them as they appear in PNP. Thoughts?

 

Rename them to Giant Fire Toads? or Behemoth...
but just keep the stats as is, I think.

I don't recall actually ever encountering them either though.

 

Grargh. The curse of the Galeb Duhr continues. I got them and bunch of other stuff up to spec, but my protos got corrupted. So I get to redo everything I did tonight. Joy.

If that's the case, I'll just tweak them slightly to make them in-line with my changes to the Behemoth King Frog, but fiery.

 

Well damn, right you are!