Where are the tech enemies?

Where are the quests to defeat the mad scientist (rather than the evil mage)?
Are there any enemies which throw grenades?
Are there enemies which use tech potions to harm the player?

Apart from a bunch of automatons and a handful of arachnids, I can't really think of any tech enemies in the game.
Even enemies which you would think are tech, aren't really.
e.g. Bate's bounty hunters which use guns. They have 0 tech aptitude.

To me it seems a waste considering the main theme of Arcanum is magick V tech. It would have been easy to tie a script to them to make them tech aligned (I know this because I've just done it and it took all of 2 minutes).

Forgot to mention: The gun wielding characters that I have looked at have 0 firearms skills which explains why they are so hopeless at shooting.

 

Only evil tech enemies I can think of that might actually have technical aptitude is the gang you fight in the Firearms quest. Other than that, unless you play a bad guy and piss off Doc Roberts, I don't know of any.

 

You're right, there are no real tech enemies - unless you count the assorted mechanical arachnids and automatons.

You know, that would make a decent mod for this game - create the mad scientist and his "High-Tech" henchmen.

 

That would be something to see. I never thought about the lack of tech enemies in Arcanum, only the abundance of magickal ones. I guess the closest you can get to a group of tech enemies anywhere would be to piss off a clan of dwarves. Even then, not every dwarf is super tech-oriented. A mad scientist enemy, showing the "bad" side of technology would definitely be a plus. It would be pretty cool to see a new controversy. Mages would say something like "See? Look at what technology has wrought! You're better off with magick."

 

Amazing, all this time and I never noticed there's no tech enemys!
I guess cause I always play a techy, I just didn't notice. You'd think Vendigroth would be crawling with a few tech bad-asses....

Thats it, a half-man/half-automoton mad scientist that miraculously survived the destruction of his city, and patched himself up with his tech. Plus, in his madness, he's created an army of automotons and arachnids to dispatch the evil wizard, (or other hapless adventurer), in case he ever returns....

 

AWESOME! I think he should have his own portrait. He should be horribly scarred due to the intense heat of his steam driven automaton parts. Well...now that I think about it, the kind of half man half automaton I'm thinking of is a direct metal to sinew/muscle attachment. He might be a torso sitting on an automated platform of some type, or maybe a man with automaton limbs superficially grafted onto his body. It's still fun to think about.

 

Or a googled eye. Half of his face should be.. somewhat metal. A giant metal jaw is a beginning. Or no! Wait! That jaw could be on his huge half-ogre bodyguard, who he've found and moded ^^
This is really a cool idea.

 

Vormantown major spoiler:

Spoiler

Vorman's son is the monster at the end.

He is half tech and half magick.

Done and done. Tech random encounters have been added. I won't spoil the surprise by telling you too many details. They scale and by the time the character is level 40 the enemies are wielding a special version of the tesla gun and wearing machined plate. MUAHAHA!

Sadly no. I've checked a few and they just seem to be neutral (apart from racial bonus). It annoys me. They set up this great tech/magick theme with a powerful world editor and then they never used it.
Another example of this is that in WorldEd you can make an area magick or tech e.g. the train station in Tarant is slightly tech aligned and the magick district is slightly magickal. The thing is I can't find any other examples!
Qintarra = Neutral
T'sen-Ang = Neutral
Vendigroth = Neutral
Dwarven clans = Neutral
Ashbury Scientician Basement = Neutral
Surely slinging spells should be easier in the elven lands than in Vendigroth?!
I find it insane that they never made use of this feature. It involves a right click and then moving a slider. It really is that simple.
It adds a whole extra dimension. Some bad-ass mage finds his spells failing half the time in Vendigroth or a technologist finds that his pyro-axe malfunctions when killing dark elves in T'sen-Ang.

 

Hey, guys!

Over the weekend, I unpacked the Arcanum DAT and there does seem to be a mad scientist quest in the game. I found module maps of Scientitians Level 1 and 2. (Not that little one in Ashbury - this is a lot different.)

???

Does anyone know anything about this?

 

It's simply an abandoned version of the Ashbury scientician level.
The version you are referring to has no teleport scripts attached to the exits which means the level is definitely not accessible in the game.
I assume they abandoned this version because it didn't make sense for there to be a big dungeon under a little residential bungalow.

 

Or it makes TOO much sense. So obvious, it boggles the mind. Like a how a deer stands still in the road once it sees your headlights.
To be honest, since there's really not much going on in Ashbury, I'd like there to be something more to the town. I mean, it's pretty cool if you're a Magicker, but being a Technologist in Ashbury really isn't all that great.

 

Shit. I'm *so* looking forward to you mod TONGS.

 

When d'you reckon it'll be finished?

 

Hey Tongs:

Do you have any problems with using a ready-made set?.......

Perhaps add the necessary links from - say Tarant?

 

I am also very much so looking forward to your additions TONGS, so much i stopped playing so I could save what I haven't covered yet for when the games even more interesting

 

Ah crap, now I have to make it good...
:roll:

Version 1 should be finished soonish.
As for version 2, I have no idea.

Version 1 is the addition of new schematics, items, bug fixes, new random encounters, etc but no new quests.

Version 2 is the same as version 1 plus new quests.

I had a minor disaster recently and lost 37 protos. I was mucking around with the official patch (in a completely separate directory) and it managed to clear all my protos. Re-making them was a lot easier than making them, but still it was a major pain.

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean re-connect the abandoned ashbury levels?
The trouble with that is that any change to the world map (even 1 tiny change) will add ~30mb to the download. The only way to get around this is to add it to diaogue of an existing character.
e.g. Mr Plough says "There is a basement under my warehouse, do you want me to take you there?"
Anyway the ashbury levels aren't anything special. They just have a few arachnids and 2 automatons.

 

Now that I've had a little time to take a good look at them, you're right - they are a bit wimpy. When the time comes, I might do something with them in my mod. I hate to see anything go to waste.

As for the massive file size addition - have you considered leaving out the speech files? Unpacked, that's almost 300 MB right there.

 

The speech files are separate from the map files.

There may be a way for me to only include updated parts of the map to vastly reduce the download size but I'd have to investigate it.
At the moment I am concentrating on churning out protos.