Hi everyone,

does this mod make the game a lot easier or is it bearable? From i´ve read so far vanilla shadow run hong kong is already kind of easy.

Thanks. :)

While I haven't tried the mod, from what I've read it appears to buff all your abilities so I'd be surprised if it didn't make the game easier.

And yes, SRHK is pretty easy even on the hardest level - overall easier than Dragonfall by a significant amount.

ah ok. is there a similar mod that fixes as many bugs but doesn´t alter the gameplay? i know there is the slap patch but it is incomplete. do mods exist that make the game harder and work well with the overhaul mod?

No idea as I haven't looked. Not sure which bugs you're referring to - the only one I noticed last time I played was the one where you don't get a payment for some data you submit via your terminal (only happens in one occasion). Apart from that everything appears to work as intended.

I don't think there are any mods that actually increase difficulty for any of the original campaigns.

Oh, i don´t refer to specific bugs. i just use bug-fix-mods on every game i can. ;)

i´ll just update this thread:

this mod makes the game a lot easier. Swalzibar anounced that there will be some nerfs to rebalance the game and make it harder again. But if i remember correctly, this was in July. So it seems to take some time until these changes will be made.

Is it possible to make the game any harder after installing the mod? Maybe if you use the editor? Is this a difficult task or is there an easy way to make some quick changes?

Apparently the best way to make the game harder is to set the AI to use 2 attacks per turn, instead of limiting it to 1. I actually don't get why they didn't do this in the first place (and balance the game around that), as it always feels like I'm cheating by being able to fire more often than the enemy.

I say "apparently" because I haven't tried this, although I have heard there is a mod that does it. Unfortunately I don't recall what it's called or where it is.

In theory it shouldn't be that hard to mod in the editor - from looking at the text files just now (which you get when you "save as source" from the editor), the AI routines are all located in data/ai, and the files to edit are gumbo_<charName>.gumbo.ai, e.g. "gumbo_adept.gumbo.ai".

Most of them should have something near the top of the file like this:

{number, MAX_ATTACKS, 1}

Simply change the 1 to a 2 (or a 3 if you want to go nuts) and it should hopefully work.

Note that some of them already have this set to 3 - leave those alone as they're boss AIs, you don't want to make them easier. Also you'd probably want to leave the matrix-related AIs alone, or change them a different way (depending on whether you want the matrix to become more annoying or not).

Of course you can also go nuts and edit other stuff in the AI here - weapon types used (AOE vs direct), etc.

Hope this helps - and hope it works the way I think it does, as it's possible you may need to do more than just up the number of attacks. There's a doc about the scripting language used for the AI here: SRHK_Data\StreamingAssets\ContentPacks\shadowrun_core_data\ai\gumbo_doc.gumbo.bytes. Despite the AI files in this dir being ".bytes" they're actually text files. Also some of these might need to be edited too, since I believe they form the "base" AI files (they might be used directly by some characters).

Now that you've made me think of this, I might mess with this myself and see how it goes - when I feel like playing HK again that is.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I believe no mods or UGC actually have their own AI files - they just reuse the ones from the base campaign (HongKong) or from shadowrun_core. So AFAIK you'll have to edit those directly, unless you want to have to go through and edit every single campaign/mod instead (which will take more effort).

Update: OK now that I was thinking about it, I modded my version of HK - edited the "gumbo" text files as described above, giving all enemies at least 2 attacks per round.

Turns out you can actually just edit the gumo.bytes files directly, since the editor doesn't actually compile them - it just renames them. Probably best to make a backup just in case, but I edited them directly and it worked!

Now this isn't using any other mods - it's just HK with enemies that can now fight properly. Started a new game on hard, and in the very first battle I went through two Doc Wagons and a medkit.

Sure I didn't try that hard with tactics etc., but normally I can do this in my sleep without much of a scratch. Having two shotgun blasts fire at you twice in a row at close range is definitely making it a bit more of a challenge, that's for sure! I'd recommend anyone who thinks the campaign is too easy to give enemies 2 attacks per round.

So far I haven't done anything about late game - that is, when your team gets 3 AP. Whether or not upping late-game enemies is even necessary is something I'll only find out once I actually play through it again with the 2 attacks mod - I'm thinking probably not. At any rate, since enemies reuse the same AIs throughout the game, adding more AP/attacks to late-game enemies will likely be much more work than the simple hack described above.

Conclusion: Anyone who finds base HK too easy on hard, go ahead and make all (basic) enemy AIs use 2 attacks instead 1. Should up the challenge a bit.

Note that if you play any UGC, unless the UGC specifies its own AI which doesn't rely on the ones that come with HK, all of those UGC will inherit the 2 attacks per enemy rule.

this was the best answer i´ve ever received on gog. well done, sir! thank you a lot!

i think i´ll give this a try. it is an awesome game, but it needs to be tweaked a bit.

You're welcome! And thank you for jogging my memory about this game, which motivated me to look into the 2 attacks thing some more. Until now, I hadn't realised how simple this actually was to do.

Makes me wonder why this wasn't a thing (or at least an option) in HK, considering how easy the combat is otherwise.

Well, there was something I´ve recognized when playing Resident Evil Operation Racoon City (buggy as hell but fun). A lot of people were complaining about the difficulty on the highest setting. So instead of trying a lower difficulty level they blamed the devs for making the hardest mode too hard (By the way, with a bit of practise the hardest mode was perfectly fine. You might die a few times but that´s it).

I think the devs of SRHK wanted the game to appeal to a wider audience. Maybe they were afraid of people complaining about the difficulty spike on a very hard mode, so instead ,they left it out.

Man I seriously don't understand this - but I've seen the same exact phenomenon in other games (generally on Steam forums). One example is Space Rangers HD, which like non-HD version before it had very tweakable difficulty levels, where totals would add up to a percentage between 50% (I think?) and 200%, with the game being "designed" (more or less) for 100%. Personally, in that game I never played at 200% (and I have completed FTL on the hardest level, albeit not many times).

One would think that 100% being "standard" would be obvious, and that anything above that is for people wanting a challenge, with 200% effectively being "insane mode" for hardcore vets only. The amount of people that complained about "balance" who had set it to 150% or 200% was staggering!

IMO devs should take cues from the Iron Tower Studios regarding game difficulty. Not saying Age of Decadence didn't have its own issues with combat, but it only had one difficulty level which was basically hard AF (the idea being that how the character was built would govern the difficulty of combat, which is mostly the case - so playing as a hybrid was much more difficult than a pure fighter or pure talker, provided one didn't try to fight with the talker).

So yes people whinged and complained about AoD being too hard, or too reliant or RNG, or "the game won't let me play like I want to!" (which has got to be the most ridiculous complaint ever - does anyone complain that Call of Duty won't allow them to play as pacifists??). In the end though, ITS stuck to their guns (for the most part), and over time some of the whiners actually played it some more and got into it. Which is at it should be.

TL;DR: Too many gamers these days are whiny precious snowflakes - maximum inclusion (wrt player ability) should be handled via difficulty settings.

Actually that reminds me - only recently there was a whiny article from some "journalist" on Kotaku (or something of that calibre) whining that the difficulty descriptions in the latest Wolfenstein "made him feel bad for choosing the easiest level" so he felt like he "had to" choose one of the harder ones. It wasn't a small article either...