My brother and I previously released an insane hardtype romhack for one of the best console RPGs of all time, Final Fantasy 6 (#3 for non-jap). I got him into Arcanum and so now we are modding this game, one of the best computer RPGs of all time.

Our goal is to make combat actually difficult, and equalize the different options available to the player. They can be divided mainly into: mage, melee, tech thrower (bombs), ranged thrower (boomerangs), bows, guns, thief melee. I want each of these to be basically as good at combat as the others, and I want mages and fighter melee to stop being insane.

I've already done a lot over the two days and it is so far already working beautifully.

What I want you all to do is tell us what ideas you have had for Arcanum. Tell us what you would like to see in the game as far as combat goes.

Can't wait to hear what everyone comes up with.

Here's my detailed post at terra-arcanum explaining what's been done so far and some of our plans:

http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=18235

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As far as what I've done so far in just 2 days:

divided almost every melee weapon dmg by 2 (some more, some not)
tinkered with other overpowered weapons
increased some weapons which were dissappointing late game (vendigroth bore rifle??)
multiplied thrown ranged weapons dmg by 1.5
many of the bad guns damage multiplied by 2


rebalanced armors into AC/DR strata. # is same for AC and DR:

robes 2+2/4/6/8 charm/magic/mystic/arcane

clothing/jackets are 5

leather armors are 10 (+2/4/6/

chainmail are 20 (+2/4/6/

platemail are 30 (+3/6/9/12)

some crafted platemails are 35, elite is 40

helmets are 1 thru 5, magics are 5+1/2/3/4

gloves/gauntlets are 1 thru 5, magics are 4+1/2/3/4

shields are mostly the same, special magics moved up to 30ac to compete and regular magic shields are 30ac +3/6/9/12 AC&DR


monsters hp and damage multiplied by 2 except beginner creatures and mine monsters (hard enough as it is imo).

many monsters made even stronger than x2 (stillwater giant awww yeah)


Spell damage divided by 4 for most spells, last 3 meta magic spells made uncastable 999FT, casting costs reduced to allow for more casting (and thus more fun) early on. Haste/Slow spell effects also reduced, and tempus fugit costs a lot.


There are still some things left to do, but the vast majority of the game is already very changed and playing much much much infinitely better.

Basically it's now just down to figuring out some of the monsters/items/effects which aren't easily changable, and changing some of the more esoteric stuff (like grenade effects, schematic requirements for great items, balancing bows, spells that should get more use like summons and debuffs).


I have a big list of some other ideas too, major ones are:

Giving incredible weight to metal armors to prevent casters from wearing plate and penalize them for wearing gauntlets, helmets, and chainmail.

Notable differentiation between many weapon types, so that you actually use scimitars and short swords and so on.

Reduce scope of items which can backstab (change weapon type data values I imagine), because backstab is entirely rigged.

Notable differentiation between armor types, so that elven chainmail isn't basically the same as chainmail etc.

Speed bonuses to leather armors and small weapons, cha/be/pers bonuses to clothing and jewelry, and more.

High durability on armors and weapons, because it's annoying how it is now.

Swap Divine Magic into the level 1 of the school so you can identify things easy.

Make ammo stacks much higher in shops, because it's annoying.

Make certain monsters really epic (Kerghan, Void, Lichs, Bludgeoners, Paladins in Bangellian Scourge Cave, Voltax, Lethe Wyvern, Ancient Bears, etc.)

Reduce xp gain or increase requirements, because you can get basically max damage potential for heroes around 20 (mage, gunslinger, and melee can all finish maxing important stuff around there).

I'd like the bandage alternative to magical healing to be buffed, i'd like harm spell to be more nerfed on high level chars, i'd like to ability to controll my party members.

I'd like a buff to the beauty stat as it's just rediculusly underpowered as it is, BUT I'd also like the LOW beauty&LOW charisma combination to no longer trigger auto-hostilities with "peaceful" npc's (I realise you can wear +20reaction dress or suit, but it can still sometimes not be enough if you're scarred(-1BE))

Nerf the dog...Nerf him so hard...Buff jayna stiles a little (why is she taking so much points in melle?, i can understand dodge but MELLE? seriusly?)
Garr should also be a little weaker i think, the pit fight in IOD should have the last fight be the hardest instead of the way it is right now.
Set a timeframe limit, so that you no longer can encounter some of the hardest map encounters at start and instantly die whatever you do.

Give me an option to stop the old lady at the train station FROM STELAING FROM ME, without killing her if im not in Thieves underground.

Fix that bug on which if you talk to the guy in ashbury who gives quest to stop pollock&maug at to low level, you can never get the quest sometimes.

Remove the ability to steal peoples armor, when they're wearing it, maybe force a replacement to be put at least :O

Make it so the choice between bregho and arbelah IS ACTUALLY A choice, and you can't just do both quests if you do them in the right order :o (or at least remove the blessing if you do both)

Buff archery slightly

Nerf throwing ability, throwing grenades without any skill in thrown is far to easy atm.

Buff the gnome race.
Give an option to stop "auto pickup" by partymembers.
Fix the bug where you can kill the appration on way to wheel clan by having any item hotslotted.

Give a better reward for ACTUALLY doing the prowling part of that gem quest, as it is now xp-wise your better served just failing it.

Nerf push-back of molotovs, but buff flash grenade and smoke grenade.

Make it so that silenced guns doesn't trigger the world to hear you...
Increase the npc priority of the goggled helmet, so that if the npc has goggled helmet and the +2 vision goggles HE USES THE GOD DAMN GOGGLED HELMET (it igves +3pe, instead of normal goggles with +2pe, it also gives protection so its objectively better)

Virgil is such an important part of the story, maybe we could make it so that he is a valuable partymember even if you take tech route?

Same with magnus just the opposite way, he is not as important though.

Make vollinger not count as a follower? thereby giving you a reason to pick him up maybe? as i see it now no1 ever uses this guy, [SPOILER] Especially since....well you know[/spoiler]


Remove the ability to just have a follower to steal his items, im thinking specificly of charechters such as sebastian in the boil etc.

Why is geofrey only joining evil charechters? I'd like an explanation, more lore/events on this, even if its fanmade would be nice


I feel like the disarm trap skill should just be merged with something else, no1 ever picks it up to my knowledge, maybe repair+pick locks+disarm trap should be 1 skill you skill up, would make it more fair between mages and techs.

Same with spot trap, could propebly go together with prowling. (both techs and mages have alternatives to spot trap anyway)

More conjure spirit conversational pieces please, that spell is awesome :)

I realise magic buffs must be limited for balance, but having only 2 buffs is not cool, it would be better to say "max 2 buffs can be active FROM some1 at a given time" thereby allowing you to put 8 buffs on 1 individual if you have 4 mages buffing the same individual.

Illimunate spell should be buffed i think.
Sense alignment and see contents are 2 really useless spells, might i suggest removing "see contents", i doubt no1 would miss it.

And why do we have a "charm" and a "charm beast" :- makes little sense :\


Also please remove the superlag u get when traveling the map with certain cursed items that causes debuffs or sometimes even just buffs.


Thats the things i can think of right now :p

First of all some of the things you mentioned are beyond my capability to change. I can't change the way the actual engine works, because that requires hex editing, and because arcanum was not a well known game, there is almost zero information on hex editing it. That means it would literally require a lifetime of trial and error.

So some examples of the things I can't change: game bugs, stat effects (how beauty affects reaction, etc), skill effects, follower control by player, lag issues, and things like that which aren't just "numbers in the game". What I mean is, I can change the values of ac on an item, or the bonus to str for being an ogre, and so on, but I can't change how AC affects chance to hit, or how strength affects bonus damage.

Some of the things you mentioned could possibly be changed in clever ways:

item pickup is a flag in the item files that can be changed

noise from guns can be changed in the item file

quest rewards can sometimes be changed

dialogue can be changed

follower auto-equip item priority is determined by price if I remember right, so can be changed

any actual effect of a spell can be changed but not necessarily some ways it interacts or requirements for it

some of the other bug/quest/ai type issues could be changed only if they are not hardcoded and are instead pointing to an .scr file (an ingame script file for custom execution) which can then be changed


the good news is:

almost all the weapon, item, spell, race, follower-level-scheme issues you raised can be changed. Grenades can be made better, bows can be made better, harm can be less rigged, gnomes can be better, and so on.

That is what my focus is going to be, because the UAP fixed basically all game-ending bugs and I'm ok dealing with some quests being imperfect and whatnot.

However, the combat, which is pervasive in the game but yet horribly unbalanced, is going to be turned into a very balanced, challenging, glorious good time. I want the player to be unable to just walk over monsters with ease. I want the player to have an equally difficult time playing a mage, or a tech, or a neutral melee, or a bowman, or a thrower, and so on.

And that's exactly what's going to happen.

It's already going great :)

Yea i can understand that, let me ask you this then:

Could you possibly change it, so you can use your parties collective tech skills when creating items?

Let's say for instance i have magnus in the party, and i myself am a chemist BUT NOT a smithy.
It would still be nice (and realistic) to make a envenomed axe with our collective skills of smithing and chemistry.

No, you're going to have to abuse the technical manuals from tarant university I suppose :(

One thing I was surprised I could change was the -speed from encumberance. It points to an effect in effect.mes and isn't hardcoded into the game. I could make you gain strength and speed for being encumbered (which would be hilarious).

Tweak rock golems! Right now, you will do more damage to rock golems with bare hands than with a sword or even (I think, been a while since I played) a hammer. I shouldn't find it easier to break my PC's hands, because I can just heal those, than risk damaging a weapon and have to take a trip to town for repairs (particularly if I don't have Teleport). Rock golems should be weak to at least one form of close-range weapon that deals blunt-force trauma.

All physical damage goes through the same filter, damage resistance. You may be mistaken about your damage as far as specifically affecting rock golems goes. Hand to Hand in general is a very powerful weapon, especially with machined gauntlets and 20+ strength.

I was annoyed by the whole weapon/armor durability thing though, so I gave all weap/armors 5000 durability. It's not a strategic or intelligent aspect of the game. it doesn't make you seriously consider item choices.

No one makes decisions based on fighting fire elementals/golems and therefore using dread armor or anything. That never happens, because fighting those monsters (like all of arcanum) is just not a big enough deal to go back and switch armors or carry extra weapons for that purpose.

It's just annoying.

So I fixed it.

Not true, when playing mage or some sort of melle+ranged merged charechter, you will often choose to use ranged or spells to kill them to not lose durability.

Also doesn't this change completely defeat the purpose of the repair skill ? (i must admit i never cared to drop points into this 1 anyway though)

Repair was always useless, which is why it is insignificant....

But you do agree it's a nerf to elementals though? i remember BMC being a place i brough the cheapest shit weapons i could find with me to if i played melle (or just balanced swords if i was smithy)

I am changing basically every monster in the game so far, so no it's not a nerf to elementals. It's going to be less annoying but actually challenging elementals, because that's what a good balance mod should be in my opinion.

Please stop nitpicking my posts with ridiculous replies or I will have to stop wasting time answering your unserious questions.

This. I really like the idea. Could you write a script that would increase repair + pick locks by one point if you invest one point in disarm traps (and vice versa for the other skills)? The same thing with prowling and spot traps.

Another thing is the speed problem as this stat can get ridiculously high, especially with maxed Dex, making fighting far too easy and Dex overpowered (both for the player and monsters; and dog).
Could you apply something like "speed +4, speed -50%" to all creatures and the player? This way speed could be slightly higher at low Dex and much lower for high Dex characters. For the player this could probably made by a blessing which is applied at the start of the game?
Oh and for the spells that increase speed, just make it a flat increase (so e.g. speed +6 instead of speed +100%).

Another thing i would really like to see is a change of some of the more useless schematics. Some of the things you can build are not really useful. Bullets, batteries etc. should also weigh less than they do at the moment.


Hopefully you are working with the latest unofficial patch?


Wish you good luck and fun with your modding attempts!!!

I currently can't directly edit .scr scripts because both of the editors aren't working with my windows 7.

Speed however has been reworked in a way that makes sense. Agi of fire now only gives +4 speed, not dex, and isn't stackable. Haste now is +25% speed instead of +100%. Tempus fugit costs 150 mana to cast. Haste potions I actually just reduced to 1 speed today (I made all the easy abusable potions negligible - haste, intellect, damage resist, the ones you can just buy at the start and do ungodly things with).

Encumbrance is now -4 speed per level, and weight of armor is 100 x DR. This was essential to forcing choices between survivability and damage dealing, as well as preventing the metal armors from being an option early on. With such high encumbrance and such high weight (3000 for platemail!) only a strong early hero can wear heavy armor and even then he won't be dealing much damage (so it's a huge tradeoff you have to decide on).

It also greatly reduces speed of weaker char types if they even wear medium armors like leather or chainmail. They have to get higher levels to get more dex so that the speed penalty is even worthwhile from wearing such armors (if you even want the durability at the expense of your damage dealing). Much later, when you have some points to spare into str, your thief or gunslinger can finally graduate to chainmail unhindered.

So, the average unencumbered hero with 20dx still can get around 30 speed, but there are no more 75 speed platemail wearing battle mages. The type of defense you want directly affects your speed and everything that goes along with that extremely important stat.

It's been working quite well so far in my testing. As far as progress goes, I've done basically the vast majority of what I want to do already. Spells, weapons, armor, enemies are all different. Even allies are different (they make good use of their levels now, jesus freakin christ). There are only a few limitations that I can't seem to get around - certain spells/weapons/armor/enemies which have bugs if I edit them or can't be edited by me at all. Resurrect spell for example doesn't seem to be flexible at all. But even if I can only change 95% of the game, I'll still enjoy it 495% more.

Was going to stop play testing for a bit to post how I do all this on terra-arcanum but they are down atm :(