So I decided to teach myself a little more about modding by trying to mod in "mundane" draconequuses. That is, the pony equivalent to Discord (assuming that Discord was a Celestia powered version of a more general species).
It was surprisingly easy to do, I must admit. Got the body plan right on like the second try. That's when fun stuff started happening though, so here's a few questions the more enlightened might be able to answer:
1. Is it possible to have a magical grip type effect without abusing the system like unicorn horns? It makes sense for unicorns to do it this way, since you could conceivably amputate or injure the horn and thus cripple them, but there's no reason to believe it would work that way for draconequuses. I ended up giving them two magical horns just for the sake of making it easy, and it works, but if there's a better way I'd love to hear it.
I had some interesting experiences trying to mod in body tissues before, and I know I could possibly add a body part with no tissue that would make it impossible to injure in combat, but if I did that, wouldn't enemies waste time trying to hack the draconequus's magical grip in vain?
2. I decided to also try and give them a little bit of magic to make them more dangerous. Right now they mostly just scratch enemies or grab with one horn and twist body parts with the other.
For these "mundane" draconequuses, I ended up giving them a poison attack that mimics magic. That's generally how this sort of thing is handled in mods right now, right? It's an injected poison called "discordant magic", so it doesn't leave puddles or other strangeness, but it does have interesting combat logs to the effect of "Discordant magic is injected by the Draconequus 1 into your The Discordant Pony Blood", but I can live with that.
Anyway, I gave it three syndromes of relatively minor effect: paralysis, dizziness and drowsiness. I don't want ponies exploding into piles of gore from these mundane draconequuses, but my syndromes seem pretty weak so far. The wiki wasn't especially useful here, but I think part of the problem is that I'm making the syndromes too short lived. What exactly do the (START, PEAK, END) duration numbers mean? Should I be using scales of 10, 100, 1000? Something else?
And what are the two numbers for on the SPECIALATTACK_INJECT whatever token? The wiki doesn't really help there either. I gave it a 0-100 range, thinking that would keep the draconequuses from paralyzing everything they attack in one hit, but as far as I know that's not at all what this does.
3. I'm betting it's possible to do this, but I haven't quite figured out how to give them multiple poisons. Instead I just attached those three syndromes to an injecting attack on a punch or a scratch, with a 33% chance to fire for each on a strike. It seems to work, but I think having them as separate poisons would be better.
4. Is there a better way to use the poison? I thought about giving them another attack (with lower priority) that was specifically for afflicting their targets with magic (then I could beef up the severity), but I haven't fiddled with this yet. Do attacks have to penetrate armor to be able to inject poison? I was just going to do a sort of touch attack, but if it won't work, then so much for that.
Alright, so that should all probably have gone in its own thread, but it's sorta pony mod related.
I'm betting Nidokoenig already has eventual plans for draconequuses that will trump my little piddling though. Wish I had the raws with me right now to post.
Edit: Had another thought, it should be possible to have "magic" fields surrounding a creature that act as armor, yes? Since draconequuses don't wear anything I don't think it would be a big deal. I'd just have to make a new tissue for it (that didn't bleed and healed quickly), and add it as a new layer or something, right? Would be pretty funny if you beat up a draconequus to the point of death, then killed him by denting the magic field though.
