Well that combined with removing shaders and other signs would be just perfect I think.

Because if I didn't know the monster was summoned and it did more damage then that is how I'd respond too.

Usually you see it though when a summon spell is cast and so do NPCs see it when you cast one. And then they know it is a summon. Not that hard to remember if there is only the player and his summoned Atronach on the battlefield.

And even if they don't see you cast the spell - a human adventurer traveling around with his lich pal? If they have a brain the NPCs might make the right conclusions.

I would prefer if they tried to do the same thing the player does. Kill NPCs (or humanoids) first, then kill monsters. Even if I couldn't see whether the monsters are summons or not I'd do it that way. Killing summons is only necessary if they block my way to the NPC and I can't avoid them without getting killed. But usually it doesn't help if you kill a summon because two seconds after you killed it the NPC will simply summon a new one and you're in the same position as before.

Well a threat and agro system mod would still be pretty exploitable if you relied entirely on conjuration and never attacked the enemy directly. Only your summon would be dealing damage so only they would be attacked, and as long as you have the magicka to keep summoning you'd be in no danger.

If you wanted to make combat more realistic you would have to give enemy npcs the ability to determine whether you had summoned the monster or not. Like, if they have a high intelligence or conjuration skill (or they witnessed you summon it), they'll recognize that you summoned the monster and focus on eliminating you first, just as a human player would. Only rarely is killing a summon before the summoner a wise decision, say, if it was dealing far more damage and would kill you before you could dispatch it's master.

[Edit]

It occurs to me that putting some kind of cooldown time on conjuration magic to force you to wait awhile after you summon dies before calling up another one would prevent the "summon spamming" Phitt mentioned and make killing a summon a much more viable option. If you knew the conjurer would be defenseless for 10-20 seconds after his summon dies then it might be smarter to kill his scamp before going after him so it doesn't keep shooting you in the back.

And some amount of randomness on the NPCs side would also be good.

Based on intelligence and luck, a die roll should determine if the NPC attacks the summoner (PC) or the summon - after all, life is random, and smarts matter.

The problem is finding the player's target reference. With out it it's hard to script things like "NPCRef.StartCombat Player". How could it be done? Reference the last NPC that hit the player? What if the player avoids getting hit?

I think I could make a pretty simple plugin that would resolve most of the summon targeting issues. But how to find out the player's combat target reference?

Maybe that is the next OBSE request.

If it's not I'll make sure it is.

*zips out to post in OBSE thread*

The perfect "Better Summoning" mod, IMHO, would be one that does all 3 of the following:

1) Remove all unique features that differentiate summons from normal monsters - the prefix on their name and the shaders that make them stand out visually. Now you must witness the summoning to know for certain how permanent your opponent is.

2) Nerf summoning so it isn't so overpowered - you can no longer conjure a new summon while your current summon is still alive, and you must wait a considerable amount of time after it dies before you may conjure another.

3) Gives all intelligent npcs (but not creatures) the ability to anolyze the situation and decide for themselves, individually, which is the better tactic - ignore the summon and focus on the summoner, or kill the summon and attempt to take out the summoner before his cooldown ends and he can summon another.

All of these would not only make summoning less cheap, but would also add a lot more depth and strategy to using summons and fighting against summoners.

Well considering the player has no target unless he′s actually attacking someone, this is easy as hell with Obse′s even handlers.

Just register an event handler for "OnHit" object::Player and you can snatch the player′s attack target in the function that gets excecuted every time player hits someone.

What if they don't hit anyone?

Then also is there a way to maybe do a script where if the NPC recognizes that critter is a summon then it begins to search for the summoner and can target the summoner based on info that the creature is a summoned one.

I know the mod Passive Birthsigns has a script to determine if the creature in front of the player is a summon (so the Atronach can gain magicka from the summon).

Her, I think.

This is the Internet, silly.

oh...

And? It is "her"! A fact that I let everyone know as soon as they call me "him"

Anyway, back to the point, yes I grabbed Tejon's code for Oblivion XP's killing script. It works beautifully, but Ob XP doesn't address the issue at hand. My summoned creatures will happily go after the all the enemies - summoner and critters alike. However I still find that the summoner likes to go after my summoned critters instead of "me". In fact, I'll stand right in front of him and he'll be trying to push "me" out of the way! And I find it hard to believe that my summoned creatures have better stats than I do. At the point in the game where I am now, as soon as I get a shot in at the summoner, he's dead, so there's no opportunity for him to target my PC.

I needed Tejon's script because Oblivion XP wasn't awarding points properly when you killed a summoner that had active summoned creatures. That has been fixed. So the code knows who your target is and knows if that target has summoned creatures. If you want to see the code, let me know and I'll post it here or in a pm.

I'm not sure you understand how the Internet works. :nono:

Well I guess not then. Where I come from, if you know the gender of the person you're talking about, you use the right pronoun. Considering the board has the option to specify your gender, I actually take the time to check.

I'll give you the pronoun part, but at the end of the day we are all just bodies of text with jpeg/png/gif images as our persona.

...meanwhile, I call my girlfriend "dude" and "man" all the time. Nothing personal, and I'm being silly about it here anyway. Gender duly noted and henceforth shall be referenced appropriately. :nod:



:cookie:

To wit, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet... lest you become, er, tropelessly lost? Or rather, overly tropeful.

Regarding Conjuration, I agree with the overall consensus, such as it is. A ridiculously easy way to overcome just about any opponent(s) - this much is true.

Hahaha. I actually have a dear friend who calls me dude too And yeah Breton Paladin, you just can't win.

And back to the issue at hand, I think we've determined that there isn't much to do unless you can tweak the AI at a lower level than you can normally get at. Can you change the PC's aggression value? Just trying to think of something that could be altered to change the behaviour of the NPC's. Oblivion uses a very different dynamic than something like Dragon Age: Origins, which has a concept of threat - I think that was mentioned earlier. Just thinking that if you could alter the PC's aggression value, maybe you could simulate threat...