Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Current state of game balance?

Real time based - probably. Turn based - no.

Regards,
Thorsten

Some small changes in AI department could help a lot.

For example, have opponents never target "obviously" immune targets with elements they are immune to.
It should be common knowledge that you can not injure fire elemental with fire, or zombie with poison.

Also have them have in-combat memory, so if enemy target someone who is immune or highly resistant to some type of attack, then he or his allies should not target that person with same types of attack in the fight (if they have alternate ways of attacking).

For example. Different to RTS this game requires only tactical AI for tactical fights in a turn based environment, not one byte more. Ridiculously easy compared to the majority of game requirements, thus I assume the devs deliberately decided to make it dumb so that players feel better about themselves.

Regards,
Thorsten

Ha, I wouldn't assume so much. I'd sooner guess that information like elemental immunity simply isn't communicated to the AI decision making system, and that implementing such a thing would take up a non-negligible amount of time.

Either way,

Larian, please implement AI that recognizes elemental immunities when choosing targets!

Well if the enemy doesn't have high loremaster it won't know for certain if a target is immune or not until it tries. Or should AI work outside of that? Plenty of ways to increase difficulty beyond just adding HP's and tweaking resistances.

That's why I think that enemy AI should have in-combat memory.

Is target common fire immune creature?
If not, attack with fire.
No damage, target immune?
If target has no elemental buffs, don't attack same target with fire.
If it has elemental buffs, don't attack with fire, but monitor when buff expires.
Buff expires? Try again attack with fire (if no better option available)

Thats would be great!!!

A smart AI like that doesn't sound beyond possibility, but are players going to give it a minute or two per enemy in a battle while the game runs the necessary simulations?

I don't pretend to actually be in the know about AI programing, but I know enough to say that what's being used today forces a choice between reasonable waiting times and good AI.

While AI that remembers, knows and monitors specific effects via trial and error and such would be grand, a simple behind-the-scenes check for elemental immunity is more than enough, and quite a bit more realistic

Isnt Larian doing the proper bigger harder mod, as they recently announced? That will inculde redesigned encounters and other tweaks... so probably refining Ai too since its a part of that process anyway.

And if it is refined i would like to point out that some enemies need to be made dumber.

For example, headless zombies should charge through any elemental damage, instead of avoiding it like everyone else - since they dont have any heads to get all that. They are brainless.

Having correct path-finding is more tasking then this.
Of course, from CPU cycle viewpoint.

And since the CPU doesn't have union representation, I say exploit them.

Nullify Resistance for example is over powered, it is totally needed but it is way too strong. It becomes a I win button.

Given all possible combinations (spells, movement, melee or arrows multiplied by number of characters) we are talking of what? 1,000 easy calculations (most values stored in game engine or/and temporary arrays anyway) per turn for the AI? A few seconds at worst, not more. Yes, I am willing to wait a few seconds for a sound battle AI.

And working with e.g. my house rule (disable before anything else) even less.

Regards,
Thorsten

The AI in D:OS is actually gimped, and not pushing any limits. If it were not each engagement would be borderline impossible. Give the AI same skills, spells, feats and stats as player and we'd be fighting each fight for our lives.

This would also not be fun.. in the turned based initiative-rules-all combat system D:OS has anyway. This is why games either do real-time with pause, or turn based in a battle area and turn based or real-time with pause on an over-arching map. Anything else is impossible to balance.

Note: It is possible to balance the current game if magic had cast time beyond "instant"

To identify elemental resistances should be done within the system of the Loremaster ability. (Not sure enemies are using Loremaster, but i am assuming so here) The problem is, that it takes always a skill rank of 5 in Loremaster to get information for elemental resistances (i am assuming same for PCs and NPCs). IMHO this should be changed. If something is common knowledge like fire creatures are immune to fire, this shouldnt require a skill rank of 5!

To cut a long story short, 1) if not yet implemented (i'm not sure here) let the NPCs use meaningful the Loremaster ability and 2) change to way Lormaster ability works for things every child should know rather than implement another code check (IF elemental immunity = commen sense THAN)


Another topic about exploit of sneaking skill: I got the feeling there are bosses and NPCs who try to find you but still have a hard time to find a well hidden sneaker (which sounds imho like a reasonable and good system). If that is already implemented for some NPs why not add it to everybody in a more or less skilled way.


my 2 cents... cheers

I think the initiative bonus from Leadership is to strong, it can effectively double or triple your initiative depending on how much speed you have. It should be more like 3 and 6 or even 2 and 4, rather than 5 and 10.

To the above poster, if you sneak with no AP left most NPCs can reveal you with an AoE, if you sneak and then move halfway across the map they can't. At least this has been my experience, i use a rogue on most of my playthroughs.

I think sneak is very powerful but if it were nerfed rogues and rangers would become to weak. Besides their charm skills, rogue and ranger skills are quite weak and seem like an afterthought compared to several of the magic schools. Just look at barrage as a prime example, its single target damage per AP is about equal to regular attacks and quite a bit weaker than regular attacks if you're using guerrilla with 5 points in sneak. In general you are better off using guerrilla attacks or special arrows rather than the bow skills. Rogue skills seem to have some of the longest cooldowns in the game, at least their final skill is pretty fun if you have someone with teleport.

In its current state, the only thing you gain from high ranks of scoundrel, expert marksman, or man at arms, are traits. Man at arms seems to benefit from them a bit more though.

I'm aware that fleshing out these skill trees, and balancing the skills, would probably make the game even easier in higher levels. I just think this game needs more than just harder AI, though in some cases it needs that too.

Not really required. At least if there is trial or error logic.
AI should be able, based on final damage it does to the enemy, and what is expected damage against non-resistant enemy, to get approx. level of the resistance of the opponent, and based on that add this to decision chain, either to continue attacks with such element, or switch to something else.

One more thing, I think game suffers from way to many enemies spamming special attacks.

And players characters over time get more resistive to those, while being much less resistant to melee and arrow damage.

In fact, there is big change in difficulty due to this, when death knights are introduced that prefer good old fashioned slashing.

Not only that. If all enemies would skip self buffs in favour of diabling attacks the fights would be harder. Furthermore most groups are set up in a way that a surprise opening attack is possible even by a ranger with a special arrow (at max. 15 Mtrs.). Fights would be significantly harder only eliminating these two advantages for a human player.

Regards,
Thorsten