Help with altering enemy attacks

[nweismuller]

I've downloaded KotOR Tool with the intent of increasing ranged damage across the board in KotOR 1. I was able to figure out where the base items were to increase the damage of weapons used by the PC and their party, but a little bit of play appears to show that enemy creatures must not be using these items (unless you can roll a 2 on 3d6, anyhow.) Could I get some assistance in figuring out where the information to change for enemy attacks would be, since the character blueprint section doesn't seem to have it, that I can see...

[vanir]

most regular enemies are Minion character class using the listed base weapon types (blaster rifle, vibroblade, etc.).

baseitems.2da should get you the effect you're after

 

but there is a rare occasion where the weapon stats aren't loaded from baseitems.2da, which is something I noticed in TSL with the mining lasers. I manually edited them all for the -1*die dmg (originally everything but the pistol is no different to blaster damage) but only the ones actually picked up adhere to it, if they're spawned on a character they run at the default damage (not the new baseitems in Override).

 

can't speak for Kotor because I only poke around in TSL in recent years.

 

I can say one thing though, with the base damage for Kotor the theme Bioware was working on is roughly Wizards of the Coast damage guidelines (aurora shell, ~3.5 core rules), adjusted for the Old Republic period.

So each of the base weapon damage for OT-era WotC SWRPG is reduced by a die-size for the Old Republic era, blasters normally 1d8 now do 1d6. This is canonical with the RPG Sourcebooks and represents the earlier technological age.

 

The idea is that power packs are much larger in the Old Republic era which restricts weapon damage. In fact lightsabres are supposed to be attached to a belt mounted power supply by an electrical chord in this period.

The main weapon used in the Old Republic era, according to canon are firearms, railguns, grenade launchers, basically the kind of weapons you see in Aliens, high tech assault rifles which are tough, but not energy weapons.

Body armour in this era for this reason is far more effective, since hyperalloys can turn glancing hits by even high powered projectile weapons.

 

Bioware knew this, the reason the rest of the character template adheres to the WotC core rules but the energy weapon damage is reduced across the board by a dice size.

 

You can see for example the melee weapons retain their high damage dice from RPG (1d10 vibroblade, 2d6 vibrosword, etc.). Only energy weapons have had their damage dice reduced, for canonical reasons.

 

With the lightsabres Bioware made a judgement call and decided it would be better to have them like movie lightsabres (without the power chord) and just reduce their damage dice the same as other energy weapons. This is a little awkward however as Jedi are supposed to be able to influence lightsabre damage using the Force, so they kind of should be regarded as a general exception.

 

The mistake which has been made is there not being a lot of projectile weapons that should be in the era to take up the slack left by low powered energy weapons. There should be powerful special weapon types which do physical damage equivalent or better than contemporary energy weapons, but their drawback is being less effective against armoured targets (on the plus side they would ignore most personal energy shields).

 

Basically everyone in the Old Republic ran around with armour and advanced assault rifles, disruptor guns, grenade launchers and only wealthy aristocrats could even afford energy weapons, and they were low powered and oversized.

 

In TSL Obsidian took a different tact and just returned damage to OT-era core rules across the board, as well as added more projectile weapons. Canonically TSL should probably have all its damage die for energy weapons reduced, rather than Kotor having its increased.

[nweismuller]

I actually edited baseitems, as you said, in order to alter the stats of all ranged weapons. It's only after I did that that I noticed that tutorial enemies weren't using the increased damage. And as long as they have blasters as the dominant ranged weapons, I'd at least like the standard guns to do more damage than a freaking longsword. Thus the modification. I was wondering why minion enemies weren't using the edited baseitem stats. If anybody can help me ensuring that minions use the edited stats, I'd be grateful.

[vanir]

you'll probably find after the tutorial section they'll use the adjusted stats. it probably has something to do with how the tutorial is loaded, since as I said I had a similar problem with the mining lasers in TSL. The ones spawned on npc's used default damage, the ones picked up by the same npcs used the adjusted damage. So it must have something to do with how that bit is being loaded into game memory.

 

can you check it from a later save, one that's into the game.

[nweismuller]

I'll have to get myself further into the game, then. I left off for a bit until I could figure out how to fix that issue, but if it fixes itself after the Endar Spire, I guess I can live with it. I'll report on my findings later.

[nweismuller]

I've determined that the failure of enemy attacks to load from the modified baseitems file persists long enough to truly annoy me, but I have an idea I'd like to try to fix it. Would anybody happen to know how to compile .2da files back into a .bif archive? If I can create a .bif archive, I'd like to see if this idea works.

[nweismuller]

One last call on my part to see if anybody can help me, either with telling me how to force spawned NPCs to use modified baseitems stats or how to compile .bif archives. Any assistance would be much appreciated.