One of the few big non-immersive aspects of SS2 is that for any given weapon/ammo, enemies always take the exact same number of hits to go down. This mod attempts to correct this predictability. Note that it has NOT been tested with a full playthrough, so may provide either too much or too little randomization.

System Shock 2 Enemy Health Randomizer
07 Oct 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 75% of their max HP, while the strongest enemies are randomized near 25% of their max HP. 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 controls 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.

I'm very interested in how popular this mod is going to be - Blood2 also has AIs that require variable amounts of punishment to go down (while this is accomplished by randomizing the player weapon damage output instead of AI health, the result is pretty much identical), and the feature is hated to death almost universally.

This is a great idea! To extend the idea maybe, would it be possible to alter the height (and width or bulk) of organic enemies, so that the larger enemies (in any given species type) tend to have more health, i.e. that two pipe human hybrids can be different heights, as would probably be the case in real life, and the taller one would cause a little more damage to you with his strikes, and would have a higher amount of health points keeping him alive.

And if the large spiders came in different overall sizes, with the larger ones having more HP points.

Ultimately, it would be great too if the humans had various colour/shades of skin as well as height, and also could be either male or female, but I don't know if the amount of work needed to add that would be prohibitive for the SCP project.

This is a great idea—thanks. Because yeah, I would like to not always know exactly how many hits I am from taking down an enemy, but after this many years playing it’s impossible not to.

Can this be used with Secmod?

Have I ever told you how awesome you are, Voodoo?

Well, you've helped me a ton, among others. So I stand by what I said.