Agreeing that smarter guards would be nice, but I'm not sure that it's something that is moddable.

In specific circumstances (the deaths of certain NPCs, getting caught robbing the Shrouded Hills bank, etc.) the guards will despise your PC and generally auto-attack on sight. In others, unless they see it for themselves they couldn't care less. That's probably a balance between triggering a reputation flag (e.g. "Murderer of Clarissa Shalmo, the beautiful Throwing Master") and not overtaxing the CPU with tracking the actions (and reactions) of every single NPC in the city.

is there any way to make it so guards at least protect you against generically-hostile npcs?


for instance in Tarant, you can get mugged by orc bandits (not in the Boil, there are gangs of bandits sometimes in the docks and also around the university) right in front of patrolling guards, and they just keep walking.

Not that I know of. In fact, IIRC sometimes the guards attack you for defending yourselves from the bandits.

The bandits only appear between sunset and sunrise (when the streetlights go on). Besides the pair at the docks, there's another set in the back alleys by the university, and one more in the city's western corner (by Mulligan Bones Alley).

If you do fight them, don't forget to search their corpses. Oftentimes, they have salable items like lockpicks, helms and gloves.

this seems like a huge oversight in a game where they thought of almost everything

and on a somewhat unrelated note, ive found that if i order the dog to attack guards while keeping everyone else back, as soon as it enters combat i can then say "Worthless Mutt fuck you" causing the dog to leave the party and become hostile, while the guards will go hostile only to their attackr and not the player or party, and you can even help the guards fight against your former companion.

so then you end up with a hostile dog ripping through all the guards as they charge it futilely and try to gang up on it.



also, if you emerge from a house after burglarizing it and murdering the occupants only to have the guards rush your companion, you have the option of saying "<insert name> fuck you" and then run off leaving them to die, and coming back after its over to retrieve their stuff