ASCII Invasion ~ playtesters requested!

Ah, okay. I was kind of hoping that was the case. Good mod, by the way!

 

Maybe I misunderstood, but:
HOW do you make enemies move more than one step each turn? This is fantastic.

 

I know the way Chronomantic Twist (and some other things) does it is just by paralyzing you, so I assume in the Giant Mechanical Axe's case you just have it cast a spell that paralyzes you at the end of your turn.

 

Several skills trees in mods do this by a whole range of means. Some even involve Grandfather Clocks and Paradoxi.(Plural of paradox.)

 

Yes, the axe just paralyzes the player for one turn when they hit anything.

Incidentally, and for an unrelated reason (CTD caused by typo), I've just uploaded a new bugfix version.

 

So... Verdant Elves are immune to sneak attacks- does that mean any attack when they're not hostile towards you? Because I'm using a Vegan character and it would seem that it's impossible to kill it because it can't aggro me. It's the last enemy in a monster zoo x.x

 

Shoot it. Throw something. There is always a way to kill.

 

Shooting and throwing does nothing, traps do nothing, AoE things such as noxious brimstone flask and acidical projector do nothing, abilities like rocket jump and rocket-powered punch do nothing. Pets and charmed enemies do nothing, tentacular wand does nothing. I have tried many things, and nothing has done a thing to them.

 

It's not that things do "nothing", it's that you need to either hit them with damage that is higher than 100 at once or debuff their health until they die. Alternatively, charming the elf and allowing it to cast a spell on any enemy (90% of the time it casts anything, it gives them a ridiculously huge debuff), and then hitting it, will do the job.

 

I can confirm that playing as vegan will generate hordes of passive , invincible verdant elves in a level 3 monster zoo. This should be fixed as there is no realistic way to get rid of them without forfeiting the monster zoo trophy. Also , charmed monsters do not cast spells.

 

I just thought of a workaround. Hit them with Polymorphic Injunction or Skepticism. Unless they've got 100 magic resist too?

 

Maybe make Verdant Elves taxa="vegetable"?
This should fix this singularity, while not changing the whole idea.

 

My thoughts on Verdant Elves: I never played a vegan, even before I wrote this mod. The impression I had them of them from forum posts was that they tended to exploit the limited game mechanics to just kill everything anyway without punishment and, if anything, more safely than non-Vegans. With this in mind, a monster that vegans are forced to actually play nice with sounds like a positive inclusion - though I'll admit unplanned. Missing out on a couple of monster zoo rewards is an annoying downside, but a rather minor one in the long run. Changing their taxa as a workaround would feel 'ugly' and cause other minor illogical spell issues. I'm more inclined to leave them as is, and sucks slightly to be you Vegans, honestly.

The fact that their debuff doesn't kick in when charmed is a core game bug, naturally. IIRC I only super-buffed the Verdant Elves' damage resistance so polymorph spells should work as usual.

 

Why not just add a proc effect which would trigger when the Verdant Elves are hit, which would have a small chance (10%, let's say) to do the same thing as their usual debuff? It shouldn't change the balance much because most players wouldn't even see it (the elves would debuff themselves before that), but that means after hitting a friendly Verdant Elf 10 or so times the monster would get debuffed.

An anti-frustration feature of sorts...

 

The paradise of auto-debuffing.

 

Add a proc effect to what? AFAIK it's not possible within DoD's modding unless you feel like manually tagging every single weapon from the core game with a taxa-restricted spell effect. Buff triggers can't be directly given to monsters, monsters can't cast spells unless they're hostile towards the player, and hostility towards the player generally doesn't change from passive unless the monster actually takes damage.

 

To Killer Vegan. It's the only skill tree with this problem, and thus the only place where you would need such a thing.

Sure, it requires changing the core files, but it's still just one file and you could make it into a "hotfix" for people who don't like this problem.

 

Invincible monsters are bad design. You can get stuck between passive verdant elves with no way out if you didn't loot a spatial instability potion. Besides , I don't think this affects just the vegans - there's a chance for any spawned verdant elf to be passive and thus invincible.

None of this would happen if verdant elves only blocked sneak attacks.

 

Define sneak attack, then.

 

I actually LOVE this. A "monster that Vegans actually have to play nice with."

Kazeto's idea is perfect. A way for Vegans to slowly and systematically kill said monsters that they're supposed to play nice with, so that you'd never do it offhandedly--only when it's absolutely safe i.e. it won't affect most meaningful situations.