Dragon Age: Origins Catch-All

Does anyone know of a mod that will let you trigger, or at least increases the frequency of, party NPC conversations (i.e. when Morrigan randomly talks to Sten while walking around, etc)?

I feel like I'm missing content if I leave them unlistened to. I want to hear them all. I looked around but couldn't find anything.

Deadron: I agree completely. Even though I have tactics set up, I much prefer doing things myself. TBH, I find the tactics system bit lacking, esp. since the conditions can be bit unclear. Also, there is no way to have something like: " Cast Death Cloud on enemy clusters only if EITHER the enemy cluster contain friendly players OR if the casting it requires the caster to move out of a set range from the main character."

NSMike: There is no mod yet. However, I have found a place to "cheese" it, so to speak. Like you I wanted to hear more banters, and by accident I found that the bridge in Orzammar that leads to the fighting arena to be a guaranteed trigger for banter.

It is optimally located too, since you can easily zone out/in to reset the "banter trigger."

Needless to say, I... well, I am over 100 hrs into the game and I've just got to the

Spoiler:

Elven Alienage

... Yeah, apart from completing every quest, and try out various conversation options at key points of the game, I spend a lot of time running across that bridge... IT IS SO WORTH IT THOUGH. Be sure to try Shale + Zevran combo too.

Hope that works for ya.

Just got an update, couldn't see any changes posted though.

Man, I've really gotten an itch to go back into Dwarf Fortress while doing the Orzammar section. Great stuff

NathanialG wrote:

Just got an update, couldn't see any changes posted though.

Can you expound on this a bit? What do you mean you got an update? I checked the Bioware patch page and it's still 1.01b.

Gunner wrote:

Man, I've really gotten an itch to go back into Dwarf Fortress while doing the Orzammar section. Great stuff :)

Same here! Really enjoyed it, even though it was long.

Damn NathanialG. Put a warning label on that last post, lest the entire community be blinded by KNOWLEDGE!

lethial:

That is precisely why you cannot use the Tactics menu as auto-win. The modifying function is to help you manage your guys - it's not optimal as a complete replacement for micro management. As far as I can tell, it's MOST useful if you manage it on the fly, turning functions on and off and moving them up and down as necessary. A line for Health < 50% - Chug HPotion is probably not very useful, but a line for Health < 25% - Chug Potion is extremely useful because the AI queues the action faster than you can as soon as the condition is met. This line is particularly useful for casters since they're quite fragile and Lesser Health Poultices do them a lot of good.

For instance, you can have a line that says "Attack whatever Alistair is attacking." It's a great function for a Rogue assist because he automatically goes to a position where you can take him and move him just a little bit for a Backstab.

As another function, you can have "Attack whichever visible enemy has the lowest HP." This is great for conserving mana and so Morrigan and Leliana pick off the mooks nearest death one at a time. You can then focus on your melee and queuing up only spells that really matter, assured that leaving the AI to its auto-attack routine will focus-fire the way you want it to. You can always turn off the function or override with with micro'd commands.

Here's another useful line: "Shale < 25% Health - Force Field." The line that goes with that is on Shale herself : "Enemy cluster > 3 enemies, use Quake."

Here's the scripting function:

Shale:
"Enemy with Lowest Health - Attack."
"Nearest Visible Enemy - Attack."
"Enemy cluster > 2 enemies, use Quake."

Morrigan:
"Shale < 25% Health - use Force Field."
"Enemy with lowest HP - Attack."

With this simple setup, Shale goes to the nearest enemies he can see (when not on Hold), then if there are more than 2, he pounds the ground, attracting aggro. Then he proceeds to attack the one with the lowest Health, as does Morrigan, allowing them to FF effectively.

When Shale's health drops below 25%, Morrigan protects him with Force Field, then continues to kill the enemies, weakest ones first.

You can always interfere with this script with micro-commands. Once Shale goes into Force Field, you can turn off the command line on Morrigan, and then turn on a Health Pot command line on Shale. The Tactics menu is essentially a way to queue commands.

If nothing else, you can turn off everything, then turn on command lines one at a time like this:

Self: Any - whatever you want
Self Any - whatever you want
Self: Any - whatever you want

Say, you just finished CoC with your Hero. You want him to use Stone Fist, then disable the Elite with Horror. Queue Stone Fist with your micro, then queue "Nearest Elite - Horror" on the first command line.

Bullion Cube wrote:

Damn NathanialG. Put a warning label on that last post, lest the entire community be blinded by KNOWLEDGE!

Done!

Jeff-66 wrote:
NathanialG wrote:

Just got an update, couldn't see any changes posted though.

Can you expound on this a bit? What do you mean you got an update? I checked the Bioware patch page and it's still 1.01b.

At Bullion Cube's request I am smacking a warning label on this post for mad knowledge

I started Dragon Age, then there was an update. There didn't seem to be any notes though, I spoke to Blacksheep he said that he had started a game 20 minutes earlier and hadn't had an update. There were no notes in the update section on a Dragon Age update. EXPOUNDED ON, FOOL!!

The Giant Spider pet is deliciously creepy.

Having started into the Redcliffe castle as a Rogue, I encountered a character who turned out to be very significant when I got there again as a mage -- I was completely surprised at who this person turned out to be, and as a mage had an important relationship to the character that completely changed my reaction to the situation and caused a rather different conversation tree.

A warning for anybody trying to use the toolset with Steam installation. READ THE INSTALLER WIKI PAGE troubleshooting section! Specifically follow the link on Installing with Steam. It'll save you a lot of grief and time.

Hmm...I tried installing the toolset (without knowing there was such a page) and it errored out on installing MS MSQL...this is Vista, so maybe that's related.

However I am tempted to learn the toolset, so I'll have to check that out.

What I came to post: Some notes I made on first playing the game:

Improvements:
- Static camp you can return to instead of annoying sleep mechanic.
- Good/Evil replaced by individual character's opinions of you.
- Story/character interaction feels much more part of the world and is engaging.
- Rogue skills are actually useful and smoothly integrated, including traps!
- Don't need individual arrows, but can improve arrows.
- You can engage in some micro play to get poisons and potions.
- Playing top-down is a very different experience than over the shoulder, and both are enjoyable and useful (no "always zoomed out" syndrome).
- Additional AI slots as they level is brilliant -- characters get smarter.

Bad:
- Lack of potions? At least lack of ingredients at all vendors.
- No respec, causing me to restart game.

Speaking of traps, I'm curious: has anybody actively used traps in their game? I kept trying but found that the time and effort involved in setting up traps, vs the damage they inflict, was generally not worth it. Has anybody had a different experience? Maybe on higher difficulty levels?

In my very biased opinion, the only good traps are the ones that have been disarmed and gave me XP.

When (if) I finish my first play through with my mage (I am spending so much time on this playthrough since I am trying to finish everything and try out as many dialog options as possible... ), and continue my rogue, I definitely plan to give it a try.

If trap laying doesn't break stealth, then they could be even considered to be overpowered...

At the end of the Redcliffe Castle jaunt, I'm told I have limited time to do the next step. Does anyone know if this is actually true?

I'd like to drop some stuff off at Warden's Keep and do the Stone Prisoner first...

Deadron wrote:

At the end of the Redcliffe Castle jaunt, I'm told I have limited time to do the next step. Does anyone know if this is actually true?

I'd like to drop some stuff off at Warden's Keep and do the Stone Prisoner first...

There are no time limits in the game at any point.

Sinatar wrote:
Deadron wrote:

At the end of the Redcliffe Castle jaunt, I'm told I have limited time to do the next step. Does anyone know if this is actually true?

I'd like to drop some stuff off at Warden's Keep and do the Stone Prisoner first...

There are no time limits in the game at any point.

Perhaps not, but there are repercussions for not doing some things on time. For example if you get to Redcliffe, you need to stay at Redcliffe. If you leave the village, even to go to your camp, it will have a very significant effect on the town's future.

Jeff-66 wrote:
Sinatar wrote:
Deadron wrote:

At the end of the Redcliffe Castle jaunt, I'm told I have limited time to do the next step. Does anyone know if this is actually true?

I'd like to drop some stuff off at Warden's Keep and do the Stone Prisoner first...

There are no time limits in the game at any point.

Perhaps not, but there are repercussions for not doing some things on time. For example if you get to Redcliffe, you need to stay at Redcliffe. If you leave the village, even to go to your camp, it will have a very significant effect on the town's future.

It's going to depend. If you've gone into the castle and reached the plot-specific cut-scene where a choice is made, I think you can do as much as you like before completing the off-site plot-point.

If, as Jeff-66 puts it, you're still in Redcliffe Village before that particular plot-point is reached, I do think the significant effect has an impact.

I hope that's vague enough to avoid a spoiler-tag.

Mod list updating time. Well, actually there is just one mod, but it is a important one:

Auto Highlight : A configurable mod that will save us from having to press the TAB key to highlight usable objects all the time!

Edit: I lied, there is actually one more mod that I think is worthy of going onto the mod list:

Stamina Potion Recipe Mod. ( I can hear fellow warrior and Rogue players rejoicing right now. )

lethial wrote:

[*]Orders of rules can be changed in DRAG-N-DROP fashion! I didn't know this at first, and it has caused me a lot of grief whenever my characters got more tactics slots. Just left-click and hold on the number button associated with each rule and drag it to a higher or lower postion.

That's good to know! I'd seen where LarryC was saying to 'move things up and down the list', but kept thinking 'gah, that's a lot of work resetting each one!'. I'd tried to drag n drop, but it never worked, but I didn't know about pressing the corresponding number key.

Thanks again for all your game information, lethial. You are the man!

Jeff-66 wrote:

I'd tried to drag n drop, but it never worked, but I didn't know about pressing the corresponding number key.

Don't press any keys. If you look at the tactics screen, each tactics slot has a little + next to it that you click to enable/disable it. This is followed by a number for this slot (i.e. order of execution), then followed by the action. Basically each rule looks something like:

+ 2 "Enemy: Any" "Attack"

Each one of those things is a clickable button. + disables/enables the command. Target and action parts are obvious. And clicking/dragging the number allows you to reorganize the command importance.

lethial wrote:

Orders of rules can be changed in DRAG-N-DROP fashion! I didn't know this at first, and it has caused me a lot of grief whenever my characters got more tactics slots. Just left-click and hold on the number button associated with each rule and drag it to a higher or lower postion. (Console players: please let me know how this is done for the consoles.)

It's done in almost exactly the same way. Move the cursor over the number icon, select it with the "A" button, then move it up or down in the order.

Thanks, MD, I misread what lethial said.

Sorry for the confusion there Jeff. Thank you MoonDragon for clarifying it more.

Thanks Scaphism, I will add that in the post.

To keep the OP from getting too long, the explanation of tactic system will be posted here. To start:

How to make good use of the tactics system:

There is an extensive post on the Bioware Forum detailing how Tactics system works in DA. And our own member, LarryC, also made couple great posts (here, and here) about how the tactic system worked.

I will summarize some of the key gotchas:

  • Tactic rules are simply a set of IF...THEN statements. These rules are checked constantly by the computer in a top to bottom fashion.
  • That said, the higher positioned rules will always have precedence over lower ones. Unless the action associated with the higher rule is on a cool down.
    (ie:
    rule 1: IF {enemy any} THEN {sit around and do nothing} rule 2: IF {enemy any} THEN {do something}

    Rule 1 will always be excuted first, and since has no cool down rule 2 will never be excuted, and the character with the rule will always be idling about when everyone else's fighting!)

  • Orders of rules can be changed in DRAG-N-DROP fashion! I didn't know this at first, and it has caused me a lot of grief whenever my characters got more tactics slots. Just left-click and hold on the number button associated with each rule and drag it to a higher or lower postion.
    For Console players: (thanks to Scaphism)
    It's done in almost exactly the same way. Move the cursor over the number icon, select it with the "A" button, then move it up or down in the order.
  • IMPORTANT: Whenever a rule is excuted, the order which the computer checks the rules will be reset! So the "emergency" type rules should be listed as high as possible.
    {ie: don't put rules like
    [b]IF[/b] HP < 50% [b]THEN[/b] {Cast Heal on self or use HP pot}

    on the bottom, below bunch of other executable rules.)

Lethial wrote:

Orders of rules can be changed in DRAG-N-DROP fashion!

Dragon Drop: Origins?

Ban Lobster!

From what people have said, sounds like I'm safe to take my time post-Redcliffe.

LobsterMobster wrote:

Dragon Drop: Origins?

That makes me wonder, what would you think Shale would say if a dragon were to leave his droppings on it?