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Huh, 2000:30000 worked. The wiki claimed 5000 to be about as high as this goes, guess that's not how it is then.
Anyhow, after generous use of a toad leather whip on a very unfortunate test subject, I obsidianized my lasher and watched the test subject crawl away and pass out right as the syndrome ran out.
Neat!
There is still a bit of an issue with the AI occasionally failing to actually get the syndrome after performing the interaction. Anyone have an idea what happens there? When I take control of the creature the interaction shows as having been used, but no sign of the syndrome.
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Re numbers, 32767 = (2^15)-1 so higher numbers than that overflow
Re Syndromes/AI:
- Test syndromes should always incorporate the zombie flash, so that you have visual proof that it has hit
- Time is different in Arena oversight/Dwarf mode than in Arena direct control/Adventure mode. This can screw with syndrome start and end times.
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The best way to do this would still be just altering the creature attacks one way or another, but that involves changing every single creature entry in the game, as well as any modded ones that might be added. Not looking forward to that.
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Why not mod just the creature attacks on the intelligent civ races, especially the playable ones? Does anyone care if *random animal* kicks too hard? Actually, alligator vs cow natural attack modding is a topic of its own.
Thanks for the number info, guess I went a little overboard with that then (its percentual increase + arbitrary increase).
For the syndrome I used [CE_DISPLAY_TILE:TILE:'U':1:0:1:START:0:END:1000], mostly because it was the first thing I ran into. It consistently fails to show on creatures who have actually used the interaction. What I have noticed is that the failure seems dependent on the target, if I sic a whole group of creatures onto a single creature then either the whole group lights up, or none light up at all.
It happens both in arena mode and arena 'adventurer' mode, switching back and forth does seem to mess up the phase count yes.
I am beginning to suspect this might be something buggy with the arena AI since I have had several cases where creatures simply refused to attack or even defend against things trying to eat them.
I guess the entity creature attacks would be the most important ones, but there is also things like war dogs, trolls and the occasional incident where my fully armored adventurer gets trashed by a donkey or something.
What I have done now is hijack the crawling gaits creature variation entry, which conveniently is used in just about every creature that can move at all. Tested by switching every tissue to spleen tissue, which was funny
It works for increasing the surface of various melee attacks and keep the worst sillyness at bay and keeps standing armored humans safe from a grand master puncher/kicker, except for the occasional fluke which only bruises the head but still knocks them out. It's a bit radical as it is as it just takes every attack surface token that is 100 and makes it 1000, but for the stock creatures it should not result in anything too weird.