TSL: Rebirth

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

More to come, but this is the codename for the gameplay mod I'm working on.

 

On the surface it won't look all that much different from the more recent rebalances.

 

It does use autobalance.2da, it does use modified class tables, yes

 

It also has the reinstated Alter, Control and Sense Force powers (they are granted at level-up instead of having to choose them)

 

Mines are harder to detect - Hell I've been running into them on Peragus and my Awareness is maxed out (for a Level 3 guy, anyways)

 

Enemies will not get arbitrary bonuses for being enemies. Instead, I've got a script running (similar to BeanCounter's Mod) that will level them up as you would level up your own character - They get Attributes every four levels, and of course feats and force powers. AFAIK, everything else is automatically leveled up.

 

I've also included a baseitems.2da tweak, which makes blaster rifles far more effective. Don't worry, I didn't just randomly do this, the Revised Core Rulebook has some Blasters at 3d6 for instance (a lightsaber is like 2d6). I like the outcome. It makes all the energy shields, force powers and deflect powers certainly more useful.

 

That's really what this mod is all about, making you consider your choices wisely whenever you're at a level-up. This is much different than say... the Ultimate Balance Mod because of how it cuts back choices for more engaging roleplay. Sorry bub, you aren't a Consular? No Persuade skill class for you :'(. Jedi Sentinel? You got Attack Table 2 because you're not supposed to do as much damage as a Soldier.... how silly.

 

 

More as this progresses - I can say that I'm on the Harbinger right now, and the Sith Assassins genuinely seem harder - but not to the point where I would go - Jesus Christ, why are their attack modifiers so high?

[Working Class Hero 12]

This looks really promising. I'm especially looking forward to energy shields and grenades serving a purpose.

[Guest bendarby24]

First of all, it does what my mod and the Ultimate Rebalance mod but to gever but because it is you it will be so much better but I think you have copied my name for my mod (TSL: Reborn - it is practically the same name) you D_CK jokes you are aloud to keep it because I'm one of your biggest fans and also my mod was going nowhere. you can see here http://deadlystream.com/forum/topic/533-requests/page__st__40 but I need some on to make the mod because im only good at changing 2da files. It is the last post on that page so at the bottom.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Didn't realize it was so close to Reborn. It's just a codename after all, the final product may have something else.

[Guest bendarby24]

Don't worry as I was only joking. You can keep it if you want because that mod is not probably going to be ever made :/

[Guest Zhaboka]

This is exciting! I like your clear indication that this won't hinder the roleplay aspects of the game.

[Guest HK-47]

Statement: Very interesting: I've found little use for grenades except for when fighting on Peragus, or against the Onderonian soldiers when leaving Onderon the first time. The shields are mostly useless until you fight Kreia at the end, and at that point they're mostly useless because those 3 lightsabers do so much damage that even a verpine prototype shield isn't enough. But that's when playing on hard.

[Guest bendarby24]

VP, you can take anything from my mod if you want it and I bet this will be so much better then mine.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

This is exciting! I like your clear indication that this won't hinder the roleplay aspects of the game.

 

I'm trying not to destroy the roleplay anyways. My whole goal for this mod is to make everything useful... at some point. Grenades, shields, mines, medpacs, upgrades, stims, force powers, they all need to serve some purpose in the game. Some might be more easily accessible as different classes though, that's for sure. Don't expect a Jedi Guardian to be able to make really good upgrades (well, unless you invest alot in that skill) and you'll probably rely more on stims and items. Jedi Consular guy will be able to make more use of Force powers though, which will nicely accommodate the lower attack modifiers he/she has. In an ideal game, there would be three ways of doing things - combat of course, class skills and dialog options. However, TSL does have a large amount of combat sort of stuff, so what I want it to boil down to is this basic choice - do you want to have an easier time fighting bad guys, or do you want an easier time getting cool plot elements and items? You can't have both. Well... maybe you can still, considering alot of the conditionals that allow for that sort of stuff are pretty low.

 

A cool effect I've noticed so far is how I've had to tweak my party, especially with very little to work with on the Harbinger. Since now, fighting a generic enemy is like fighting a duplicate of your own Exile, fights are much more equal in terms of damage taken and delivered for both sides. Add to that though that 5-6 assassins attack you at once, and the attacks really start to add up, especially if all of the attention is focused on one party member. What I ended up having to do was have my own party members gang up on one sith assassin and take them down one at a time. Or alternatively, I would confuse them by having two melee fighters and then having Atton mow 'em down with a blaster rifle.

 

That's another thing I'm loving about this mod already - blaster weapon damage will sneak up on you. Fighting the sith onboard the Ebon Hawk was a definite challenge for instance. Any where you went, you would have 4 guys blasting at you, doing about 2-16 damage each, making for anywhere between 8-64 damage per turn. The Energy Shields and Energy Resistance Force power were invaluable here, downright saving me from would-be-fatal shots and multiple reloads.

 

One last experience before I go - the fight with Batu Rem was... interesting. He indeed was buffed up when I fought him, but he certainly couldn't survive a 3 on 1 fight for very long. I thought it was fitting for him, but I imagine there are some who would want him to be a bit more... resilient? Any comments?

[Guest bendarby24]

Are you going to restore the choke, insane and impossible diffilculty levels?

 

If you need a short cut to get this - as I said before - you can just get ben.d rebalance... and edit the 2da difflcuty file

 

P.S.: I want to help in any way that I can because you are a legend

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

I'm not sure. My intention for the mod is that it should be a breeze on easy, tolerable on normal, and challenging for hard/difficult. If I go any higher, I'm going to start to wonder if the game's beatable.

[Guest bendarby24]

ok :/

[Guest HK-47]

Answer: I am still intrigued by this idea of yours. I often invest my powers in the Force Aura and Valor to help with my stats, and then go with Stun Droid or Shock. It will be nice to have some major uses for the shields though. As for the false Batu Rem, I think he should be a bit of a challenge. Not an "ARGH!! He's taking too long to die!" challenge, but a bit of a challenge.

 

Query: I want to make sure I'm understanding the idea behind this. It essentially makes the enemies at the same level as your character? Being a Jedi, shouldn't most be below your level and abilities?

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Yes and no. If we're going to go with that philosophy, then there would be no challenge to the game.

 

This is why the classes have been changed to be less... Jedicentric? Sure, we'll go with that. Except for the force powers, A Jedi Guardian is built basically the same as a Soldier or a Minion - so if you were to straight up fight an enemy without using force powers, it would be a fairly even battle.

 

But it's not just Force Powers that have to be taken into account. Item bonuses, weapons and feats have to be considered too. I've already made a script that grants focus feats for all of the weapons, grants dueling and two-weapon fighting tiers. They really make a difference, trust me.

 

Most of the enemies will just get combat focused feats though, so that makes it easier. I was at one point going to try to make complex system that would have each enemy essentially realistically leveling themselves up, but it would have been way too much code, especially considering most would probably just level up the same way.

 

At any rate, to compensate for the Exile's higher grade weapons, I'll just have to give the enemies higher grade weapons, a script that will be quite fun to make.

 

To compensate for Force powers though? For normal enemies, one option is to just add bonuses, otherwise I'd have to change the autobalance.2da even more.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

A bit of a snag here. Things are going well with the Rebalance - I've decided that building up enemies to proportional stats according to their levels is working fairly nice... at least for groups smaller than 3.

 

One problem that I should have foreseen coming though - when bad guys are grouped in numbers larger than 4, they become, for a lack of better terms, unbearable. Fighting against 1 guy who is around your level is okay, 2 and 3 are okay, as long as your party is capable of taking on an enemy single-handed. But more than 3 starts to get tricky especially if they all have blaster weapons.

 

So, for the sake of actually living, I decided it might be prudent to debuff some of the enemies so your chances of survival increase. I wouldn't otherwise mess with this, but seriously, it has been insanely difficult to fight some of these groups of enemies. Especially at a lower level and unable to use deflection rolls or a lightsaber.... it's ridiculous. Even with this debuff function, you're going to have to rethink your strategies for this game. The blasters are definitely killer.

[Guest Mablus25]

Good idea VP

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Change of plans - the buffing and debuffing scripts are getting to be way too complicated. I've scrapped them for the moment since simply adding the necessary attributes and feats to enemies seems to do the trick. I'm sure I'll have to do more tweaking once I can use more force powers, but not right now.

 

I've also sadly had to scale down some of the blaster weaponry damage. Pistols have been scaled down, Blaster rifles are pretty much the same, but repeating and heavy blasters are now pretty killer. If you get one in-game, you'll want to hold on to it. Melee weapon damage has been lowered a bit, so I'm thinking the blaster vs. melee is a bit better balanced now.

 

Autobalance.2da has been in need of lots of tweaking as well. Messing with the damage multiplier can have drastic results, and the level multiplier is weird too. The only thing I know that works well is the CRmod column.

 

Lastly, I was considering a new approach to personal shields. Originally, you were supposed to be able to charge up your personal shields on the Ebon Hawk, instead of them being useless once you run out of charges. Currently, I'm looking for a way to actually do this, but of course, more as that develops. If I do go through with this, I'll have to do something about the number of personal shields you get throughout the game, because having rechargeable shields isn't exactly making the game much harder. Maybe if I gave them 1 charge each instead of 5, and then you could only recharge them at a workbench or the Ebon Hawk.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

The shield recharging script works (which was WAY harder than I thought it was going to be), now all I have to do is modify the item files so they don't disappear when their charges are used up.

[7a7ec 10]

Hey VP

I was just playing TSL with Havokers ultimate balancing mod and the thing I that bothers me is how fast you lvl up, I am like lvl 12 after escaping from peragus, I know thats becouse of the incrised experience gain but it just doesnt feel right when you lvl up for like every second enemy you cut down. So how will you mod handle this you gonna get experience the vanilla way or is there gonna be some incrise in xp gain ?

 

Perhapse it would be even better if you somehow decreased the xp gain,

Anyway hope you still working on this mod, couse TSL really needs a good hardcore mod.

[Guest bendarby24]

This isn't going to be a rebalance mod but I have time at the minute and I'm good with rebalance mod and I could do it as a request. Just tell me how hard you want it and what special things you want in it.

[7a7ec 10]

This isn't going to be a rebalance mod but I have time at the minute and I'm good with rebalance mod and I could do it as a request. Just tell me how hard you want it and what special things you want in it.

I just started a new game with Beancounter hardcore mod that doesnt increase lvl of your enemies but it raises their abbilities as you lvl up, so you get xp points the vanilla way and the game is really challenging enough sometimes even too much, the problem is as I recall, from my last game with this mod, that the grenades, rockets, mines become way too weak to have any use at all, and the same goes for droid attechments like flamethrower, ion discharger ...

 

I would really appreciate it if you could do something about that as I saw that you already buffed rockets mines and grenades in your mod and also if there is some way to get some more use from droid attachments.

And how do blasters hold up in the vanilla game as you progress?

Couse if I remember corectly the party members with blasters become way too weak as you gain some lvls

 

So if you could provide something in this direction would be great if not than you could just tell me which files in your mod buff up those mines grenades and rockets that would be some welcome addition

to TSL

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Well, as it so happens, Beancounter's mod may be the best thing to do in terms of balancing out the characters. Autobalance.2da is just too wonky to give any good results. Messing with any of the damage multipliers gives insane results, for instance.

 

But yes, the idea is to change up how some items are used (droid items, energy shields, grendades) so that they are relatively balanced between themselves, and THEN adjust the difficulty of enemies according to that.

[Guest bendarby24]

OK, so I will start on the mod soon and it hopefully won't take that long.

[Dark_Ansem 12]

Would you release what you have?

[JK JA's Jaden Korr 30]

Would you release what you have?

*Facepalms* Don't even think about it, I've tried this before. Lets just say it didn't end well.