SS2 Enemy Health Randomizer

[67425eb78edb9ZylonBane]

Here's a test version of a new minimod. I always thought it was kind of non-immersive that every enemy of a given type has exactly the same HP. This mod tries to fix that by randomly varying enemy HP values.

Note that this version displays some debug information regarding what it's doing. This won't be in the final version.

System Shock 2 Enemy Health Randomizer
09 February 2019
by ZylonBane

Requires SS2 NewDark patch v2.46 or higher.

This mod varies the health of all non-boss enemies by randomly adding or subtracting a percentage of their default HP. The percent of HP change is linearly scaled based on the max HP of the enemy. By default, weak enemies have their health randomized by around 50% of their max HP, while the strongest enemies are randomized near 25% of their max HP.

The reason for the scaling is so the HP change is noticeable for weaker enemies, without making the stronger enemies overpowered. For example, a hybrid with only 25% more HP would still take the same number of wrench hits to kill.

CUSTOMIZATION
There are three config variables in this script, CHANGE_PCT_MIN, CHANGE_PCT_MAX, and BIAS_PCT.

• CHANGE_PCT_MIN and CHANGE_PCT_MAX define how much to randomly change an enemy's HP, as a linear range from the weakest to the strongest max HP values.
• BIAS_PCT influences the probability of hit points being added vs subtracted. 0.5 provides an even chance of gaining or losing HP. Setting this to values outside the 0.0 - 1.0 range will  have unintuitive results.

To make it so this script only makes enemies stronger, set BIAS_PCT to 1. Contrariwise, setting BIAS_PCT to 0 would only weaken enemies.

[ss2_enemy_health_randomizer.7z expired]

[67425eb78f059Marvin]

Nice that you exposed alle the relevant variables for tinkering.

[67425eb78f3c3RocketMan]

I think this is important to have to prevent people from calculating their way through the game and also so that someone playing the game on a really high difficulty level might still stand a chance after losing a lot of health if he happens across an enemy that got randomly nerfed.  This sort of chance factor makes the game better IMO

Actually I think most stat parameters should have a level of variability to them from weapon damage to hp to speed... anything that you might expect to vary in real life.  The averages would remain the same but it would allow for some fringe cases that would either be really hard or really easy.  I guess the only risk is getting some lightning fast immortal enemy 1% of the time.

[67425eb78f54aJDoran]

This sounds really interesting, and I'll probably use it on my next play-through, thanks. How easy is it to place dead humans/enemies/blood splatters/etc? I mean, you could set up a scene where a dead human (with a weapon) is surrounded by dead spiders, and it's obvious that there's been a big fight there, which the human ultimately lost, and there can be a groups of spiders left that have mostly low health left since they were injured in the fight.

[67425eb78f685Kolya]

Pretty sure you could do all that with the editor. And it doesn't relate to this mod which is a randomizer, not a health setter.

[67425eb78f7c6voodoo47]

it could even be dml added, but yeah, no idea how does that relate to a health randomizer mod.

[67425eb78fa6dJDoran]

Pretty sure you could do all that with the editor. And it doesn't relate to this mod which is a randomizer, not a health setter.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I Just meant that (to me) it might be a good idea to use the set-enemies-to-different-healths feature to set up some special case situations to add atmosphere to the game. I know that that would be 'hard coding' some health statistics, instead of randomising them, but it's sort of relevant (if you squint  ).

[67425eb78fb5bZylonBane]

Randomly twiddling the HP of enemies is not even remotely in the same galaxy as coding in any sort of special encounters.

[67425eb78fc2bKolya]

That being said, go ahead and create that encounter!

[67425eb78fd16voodoo47]

NVCreateAndLink few spiders somewhere, an explosion (place it so that it would damage the spiders unequally), all the corpses you like, a gun, and a couple of spent casings, there's your event/scene.

[67425eb78fe92Dan]

That's a fantastic concept! Would you be so kind and re-upload the original archive? The link has since expired and I am most interested in giving this a shot.