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Costomizable enemy stats, more function on costume createor?
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
What I want to know is this:
I didn't see them in the roadmap, but is there any way we will be able to customize enemy stats (For the purposes of making a scene where you take out an important character with 1 shot), or add more functionality to the costume creator (Say, if I wanted to make my costume-created chars. shorter)?
I didn't see them in the roadmap, but is there any way we will be able to customize enemy stats (For the purposes of making a scene where you take out an important character with 1 shot), or add more functionality to the costume creator (Say, if I wanted to make my costume-created chars. shorter)?
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I think this feature however, is just a matter of time.
This is definitely something which could be exploited, and there for likely won't make it in. That said, more tools to customize NPCs may well show up later on down the road.
Thanks,
Stormshade
Well, how about an option to simply add special powers to NPCs, rather than take away. So, provided they are must-kill enemies, you can know exactly what the players are fighting.
(For example, a group of Borg infected bops, all of them with beam overload 3 and tractor beam, could be an interesting mini-boss - and the code would KNOW you're fighting X bops at least, and that they're of at least X difficulty)
After a certain point in the lifespan of the foundry, I could see missions getting stale due to this inflexibility and the market just getting flooded with missions that while the stories may be different, the overall feel will start to grow stale and mundane after awhile.
At any rate, love the foundry, It will make a great addition to this game, but I do have some concerns about how long the foundry will exactly keep people busy for the long term without more flexibility when it comes to customizability of mobs / NPCs.
Good point, I also would love to be able to splice together ship parts of generic race ships to create something not nec already on the books.
I would leave the Iconic ship designs alone like Romulan ships for example, but how about letting us customize the looks of the generic race ships for foundry missions.
Couldn't you just make it so if you add abilities and raise stats for characters then nothing changes. All you've done is make the enemy harder by giving them more options, so there's no possible exploit there. All the associated rewards with the enemy remain the same.
If abilities are taken away or stats are lowered, you simply have the editor auto-flag the characters to give no rewards. So whether you strip the NPC entirely, or just remove five hit points, the end result is the same... no XP, no drops. You get literally nothing for killing said NPC.
Seems like that would remove any possibility of exploitation.
Could you remove *all* rewards from any enemy npc that is customized? (and even make them not count for kill accolades).
It still looks like a big job though, and I think people will have fun with the foundry anyway.
Edit: just realised everyone else said the same thing, must read more
May? You mean theres even a possiblity that they wont? Wouldnt this just be a matter of time thing?
I think you could make added NPC options that the foundry could recognize and take into account and then make the nec subtractions or additions to the reward system.
For example: you choose story NPC from a drop down menu then the system sets a flag for that NPC and tells the server not to give any credit or rewards based on that NPC.
Once you click story NPC then you could do pretty much what ever you wanted to do with that NPC's stats, but no matter what, the flag is set and that NPC cannot give any credit to the player except in terms of mission completion or an objective solved and if you get 200 skillpoints for a mission completion under a normal situation then because you have a flagged story NPC you then get 100 skill points at the end and no mission reward item.
I think what people are saying is not out of the realm of possibilities, and I hope they give the idea some thought to allowing players to make NPC changes beyond cosmetic changes.
I think I see one of those exploitable possibilities, but I have full confidence that they could shore up those possibilities and test it out to make sure that it is working as it should.
I personally don't want to make easier mobs myself, but I can see why for story reasons some might want a 1 shotter for their mission for some sort of story effect.
I would love to be able to make insanely powerful bosses and give them abilities that could insta-pop a group if they shoot the boss at the wrong time.
And yet, I am still not seeing it. Maybe because apotential exploit is already in-game? You can add NPC ships and groups that are allied with you and will help you fight your enemies. Theoretically, this will make missions easier and killing enemies for kill accolade and cheap skill points might go faster.
But removing that functionality makes little sense. Either even these skill point rewards have to be turned off, or they are just acceptable.
It seems as if Foundry content mission rewards will be dependent on play time in some shape or form. I don't need NPCs with customized abilities to "game" this at all (and ultimately, t here is no point to it. So what, the player sits stationary for 12 hours to farm Foundry SP while some modified AI and some scripts on his machine ensures he is not going AFK and something happens that ensures the mission time is counted for skill points. Is that really the type of abuse we worry about? He's not getting massive skill points or item rewards in a short amount of time!)
I can understand the concerns, but I really suggest looking a little closer into it. For all I know, the very basic idea "no rewards for a customized NPC" might be impossible in the system and break the game and they are not going to rewrite the core engine to get there.
But in the end, I would already be happy if I can determine that this mission will contain an enemy Dreadnought even as single player mission, or my KDF mission contains the KDF player shooting at KDF ships that fire Disruptors and Photon Torpedoes and have powers, movement and hit boxes just like a KDF ship. (I could even live with the idea that the single-player dreadnought in combat abilities is just a Neg'Var with the hit box, looks and maneuverability of a Vo'Quv, but none of its dreadnought-making shields and hull and pet creation abilities.)
I don't really want to program the NPC AI myself, though I am happy to give some input on what I think can or could be done to improve it. (And I did. http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=182954
The whole loot table, scaling NPC's, etc sounds like a complicated core game mechanic. In so much as, when they created Foundry the loot table was already tied to the NPCs.
The question is, can this be done without throwing a snaffu into the whole NPC, loot, scaling tech? As I suspect, the loot table wasn't added to Foundry, it was already hard coded to the NPCs, and this is the concern of the devs. The work involved to cut the ties to the scale and loot tables might be so overly complicated (if even possible) that it's just not worth the risk. Risking a chance at breaking the main game to add features to foundry is probably not an option.
Maybe down the road when the dust settles and Foundry is a more stable platform, they might revisit this idea. For now, we must be content for the Devs to plug away at Foundry to get the features they have laid out in the Road Map working.
In the meantime, leave the Weekly Episodes and Epic missions in their hands.
What If I want 1 ship to attack another ship that I need to save? Current foundry limits don't allow this behavior.
That's not an AI problem, though - you can have two ships fight each other, they just need to have hostile allegiance (e.g. Orion vs Federation). The problem is that there is no objective type that would react to the destruction of an NPC ship. But that is not that far off, going by the foundry roadmap.
Yes right now creating any sort of boss encounter is very difficult. Even drawing in boss npcs like the scimitar we can stick a costume on a battle ship thats about it.
So, I guess that perhaps in the future this may be possible, but it will require a lot of R&D, balancing, re-balancing and extra effort from both Cryptic and community, therefore I wouldn't expect seeing this before the end of 2011.
Then again, I may be wrong and Cryptic already has plans for this.
Couldn't you just chose an extremely weak level 1 enemy and reskin it? Would that not effectively give you the proverbial-one-shot? I guess this wouldn't be effectivie if your mission is a very low level one, but who needs to be 1-shot epic at level 2?
And at high level, what's so exploitable about a level 1 getting farmed? What's it going to do? drop a hand phaser?