SS2 Enemy Health Randomizer

[66565c15da74cZylonBane]

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.

[66565c15da926Dan]

Fantastic, thank you very much for this!
Goes extremely well with your vague health bar mod.

[66565c15daa89voodoo47]

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.

[66565c15daba7ZylonBane]

Well, in an FPS where you mow down hundreds of identical mooks, expectations probably tend to be a bit more mindless.

[66565c15dad49JDoran]

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.

[66565c15dae12voodoo47]

don't know about the height, but slight variations (say about three) in hybrid skins would be very doable, and as long as someone does the skins, I can make them work in almost no time.

[66565c15daf4aMisaka Mikoto]

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.

[66565c15db3f6RocketMan]

Combining "weak spot" with this would be cool in the future.  I always felt getting shot in the worm or head would be more effective than getting shot in the toe.

[66565c15db5c1Joe]

Can this be used with Secmod?

[66565c15db6eevoodoo47]

add the attached file to your Randomizer mod folder and it will. blind fix, will probably tweak it later (I don't think all those 7 archetypes actually need the NVCreateAndLink3 script - maybe TF would know).

[66565c15db801Joe]

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

[66565c15db924voodoo47]

it's not that amazing, considering how long have I been at this.

which is about a decade - I've seen people set their lives up in shorter time periods than that, schools, jobs, houses, wives and kids and everything. and I uhh, can dml mod SS2. kinda sounds like the opposite of awesome.

[66565c15dba2dJoe]

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

[66565c15dbb15voodoo47]

*tips hat*