Enemy Difficulty & Scaling Question

[AOD333 1]

Hello everyone, I'm currently in the process of making a very simple mod that increases enemy difficulty. 

I was inspired to do this by SAO1138's Hard Mode patch for their Sleheyron Story Mode mod. I (and I'm sure most people) simply find the game too easy. I do play with the Darth Souls difficulty mod by ChabdlerJ47, usually on the hard setting (200% damage), but even this isn't enough. And setting it to even higher damage just feels odd, as some encounters become medpack spam fests and the ones I would truly like to be more difficult (common enemies) are still too easy.

Anyways, I found SAO1138's Hard Mode patch to be a good difficulty increase. It increased the difficulty without making things feel unfair, so I compared those files with the original ones.

After playing through the game I decided that a 1.5x increase to the Strength and HP of most enemies would be a fairly balanced change, but I'll probably make a 2x version as well. In some cases I will increase other stats, and maybe add better weapons here and there, but the idea isn't to make things feel unfair, just more challenging. I am currently in the process of creating this, and I will of course share it when I'm done.

Now my first question (and main concern) has to do with enemy scaling. For instance I know that the sand people you face at lvl12+ are much stronger than those you face at lvl1-11. I've looked all over but so far haven't been able to locate a list of which enemies scale, by how much, and at what player level the increase takes effect. If anyone has this information and would be willing to share it, it would be much appreciated. 

Even without this info I still think that 1.5x will be a fair increase overall, as even with the scaling things feel too easy. And if there are encounters or enemies that end up feeling too tough, we have a difficulty slider for that.

My second question, is whether or not there is anything else that affects enemy difficulty. Are there any scripts that I should be aware of? I know that there are spawning scripts, but my assumption is that those scripts spawn enemies using their UTC files within the module, so the 1.5x stat increase would affect the enemies spawned through scripts as well. Again if I'm wrong about that can someone please let me know.

I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to modding, but this shouldn't take that long, and I plan to release it within a month or so. Answers to my questions will help me know if I'm on the right track, or if I'm missing anything.

Also, on an unrelated note, does anyone know of a detailed tutorial on creating tslpatcher instruction scripts? Perhaps there's one on this site and I've simply missed it. I would like learn this, as tslpatcher (or holopatcher) seem to be the standard, and I have mods I've created that I'd like to share, but I want them to be as compatible as possible (some require 2da edits). 

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

[JCarter426 1,288]

KOTOR 1 has essentially two types of level scaling:

1. Spawning more and/or different NPCs. This may be done either through a script or through an encounter object.
2. Buffing NPCs when they are spawned. This may be done either in an individual script or with the global script k_def_buff.

With the first, I would expect the change in stats to feel consistent regardless of PC level. With the second, you will experience diminishing returns at higher PC levels because enemies will be getting the same flat bonus added to a higher base stat.

[DarthParametric 3,938]

For specific examples of #1, you can see how the Wraid spawns in the Dune Sea are gated by a simple player level check in the module's OnEnter script:

https://github.com/KOTORCommunityPatches/Vanilla_KOTOR_Script_Source/blob/master/K1/Modules/M18AA_Tatooine_Dune_Sea_tat_m18aa/k_ptat18aa_enter.nss

For UTEs (encounter templates), you can check one of the Taris Lower City apartment modules, M03AB or M03AD. One of them uses UTEs to spawn the gang mooks. Although I can't recall if they have level variation.