Balancing the mod difficulty

[devinpatterson]

I understand that I can use level lists for creatures and this will provide weaker enemies for lower level players. But I was wondering if there was a script that would count the number of allies the player has and multiply the npc's/creatures by that number. Because quite frankly some of the companions are real powerhouses in their own right. I know in my game both Cass & Veronica can deal out a ridiculous amount of damage. I suspect that Boon and Lilly can be just as deadly. Without increasing the number of enemies for players with companions most mods are going to be a cakewalk. On the other hand I'd like to make a mod that can be played by a lone wanderer type player as well, without it being a suicide mission.

 

I apologize if this has been covered by the geck tutorials etc, I am just starting.

Edited January 30, 2011 by devinpatterson

[davidlallen]

That is a good question. Some people play without companions. I play with a high charisma and two followers, and frequently I don't even *see* enemies before Boone or ED-E shoot them. The XP bar just climbs. (With charisma 8, they each do +40% damage.) There are two parts to the problem. In my recent mod, I have addressed the smaller one, for one main encounter, with a script.

 

The bigger problem is that some mods let you take any number of companions and they may add new companions to choose from. There is no way (except using NVSE) to even know how many custom companions the player may have.

 

The smaller problem is to adjust the number of enemies, based on whether the player has one vanilla human companion and one vanilla robot companion. I have done this, using a base game script as an example. There are probably many ones, but I used the Gomorrah elevator script, which is basically a "case" statement which names all the existing companions. I use a modification of this to count how many vanilla companions are there. Then in the script which runs when this particular encounter starts, I have it spawn one or two additional enemies.

 

If anybody can suggest a more general way, that would be great. I do feel that high CHA, multiple companion makes most encounters too easy. Of course one can always play on a higher difficulty when companions are present, but that seems like a workaround.