The World of Dreams

How difficult would it be to teach henchmen to always rearm in a certain order? My henchmen have three sets of weapons: a one-handed weapon and a shield, a two-handed weapon, and a crossbow. When they're using the bow and one is attacked, he/she automatically rearms to a melee weapon. Though after the mob dies the henchman will go back to using a bow, this ALWAYS messes up the order in which they rearm.

What I mean is one will now rearm to the two-handed (say, the one that was attacked) while the other rearms to the one-handed, i.e., they're not synchronized anymore. "All rearm" will thus leave one using a bow while the other stands there with melee weapon in hand waiting for the mob to get close enough (I use bows to wear down spellcasters from a distance). I either have to command them individually, which is not practical in the heat of battle, or have to "reset" their rearm order by opening their pack, taking a weapon out, and commanding the one henchie to rearm.

I was hunting vampires in Vesper last night and 9 out 10 times the mob would switch to one of my henchies causing this problem. Taunting is no help here because it takes (at least) 3-4 seconds for the mob to realize it has been taunted. This significantly offsets the benefits of using henchmen if I have to constantly stop to teach them how to rearm.

while wehave a small playerbase, it would be relatively easy... once we got more players though, the sheer amount of data might cause issues.

The amount of data added would be minimal. However the scripting to add that to the AI would not be a small task.

I handle this problem by limiting the choices to two in any given situation. They all have a bag inside their packs and I put one all of their weapon sets into the inside bag except for the ones I want them to use (usually that is shield and one-hand plus a bow. They all have a two-handed weapon, as well, but it is kept in the sub-bag unless I'm going into a situation that is going to call for heavier hits. With just two choice, they sometimes still get out of step, but one individual command straightens it out. You appear to want more flexibility, but if that isn't practical from a programing standpoint, maybe my approach would work 90% of the time, or at least once you get out of synch it's quicker than retraining completely.

I just poked around in my old copy of the scripts, there do seem to be a few rearm options built in

all rearm - I think it just uses the first valid weapon combo it sees
all rearm bow - equips (the first?) bow it finds
all rearm shield - equips a shield and (the first?) one handed weapon it finds
all rearm two handed - equips (the first?) two handed weapon it finds
all rearm twohanded - same as two handed
all rearm weapon - same as two handed

Wow, Edison, that is great info. The all rearm bow command will come in handy.

Edison wrote:I just poked around in my old copy of the scripts, there do seem to be a few rearm options built in

all rearm - I think it just uses the first valid weapon combo it sees
all rearm bow - equips (the first?) bow it finds
all rearm shield - equips a shield and (the first?) one handed weapon it finds
all rearm two handed - equips (the first?) two handed weapon it finds
all rearm twohanded - same as two handed
all rearm weapon - same as two handed

Ask and you shall find out. Thank you, Ed. This is very helpful.

@Xan, maybe this should be added to the manual.