Creatures with Multiple Attacks

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Teric neDhalir
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Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Teric neDhalir »

So, creatures can have up to 3 attacks, and anything with a hand gets a potential weapon attack too, can anyone explain how the game engine decides how many attacks the creature uses and which ones?
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Zelknolf »

You always ask the best questions.

So, when it comes to calculating attacks, there are three places the engine looks to see if the creature has attacks:
-- The main attacks
-- The off-hand attacks
-- The haste attacks

It sums those three sources of attacks, in a big pile of bonuses and the weapons they refer to, then divides them as evenly as it can into three groups. Each group fires during a "flurry" (that is, 2 seconds-- 1/3 of a round), and if a group has more than one attack, both of those attacks fire simultaneously.

- Your main attacks come from your base attack bonus: You have 1 attack here if your BAB is less than 6, two if it's -6-10, three if it's 11-15, and four if it's 16+.
- Your off-hand attacks are calculated a little differently-- you get one if you have a weapon in your off hand, and -then it looks for two weapon fighting feats (improved/ greater/ perfect TWF give more).
- Your haste attacks come from everything else that grants you extra attacks, at the same decay of attack bonus that you get with your main attacks.

So with a hypothetical level 15 improved-two-weapon-fighting travel-domain/war cleric, because I like the lulz:
Cleric picks up a longsword: 3 attacks (+11/+6/+1).
Cleric puts a short sword in the off hand: 5 attacks (+9/+4/+1 longsword; +9/+4 shortsword)
Cleric casts haste: 6 attacks (9/9/4/1 longsword; 9/4 shortsword)
Cleric casts divine power too: 7 attacks (9/9/4/4/1 longsword; 9/4 shortsword)
Cleric casts battletide too: 8 attacks (9/9/4/4/1/1 longsword; 9/4 shortsword)
(moral of the story: prepare dispel magic... or be willing to run in circles for a minute and a half; rd/lvl buffs are scary)

Now on top of that is resolving what might be taking the place of the 'longsword' in the above examples-- the logic goes thusly:
-- If there's an item in the right hand, that's a weapon and we're using it every time.
-- If there's no item in the right hand, but there are gloves, that's a weapon (a quirky one that uses unarmed combat feats-- but note that a gauntleted punch doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity) and we're using it every time.
-- If there's neither an item in the right hand nor gloves, but there are creature weapons, those are weapons and we pick one randomly each time, but use one of them every time.
-- If there's none of those, we're fighting unarmed (and thus d3 damage unless you're a monk, and attacks of opportunity if you don't have improved unarmed strike).

And of course you can't have an offhand weapon without a main hand weapon-- so that second pile of potential attack sources are pretty meaningless on creatures.
Aaaaaand creature weapons aren't treated as unarmed attacks; your monk wyvern of doom can't flurry of blows his stinger.
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Curmudgeon »

For creatures, where does the Bite weapon figure?
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Zelknolf
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Zelknolf »

As the other creature weapons-- based on where it's equipped (NWN2 thinks "left claw," "right claw," and "other" -- in NWN1, "claws" were slightly more common in the random selection than "others", but I haven't verified if this is also true in NWN2). The engine doesn't get picky about damage types on creature weapons, though; just slots.
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Teric neDhalir
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Teric neDhalir »

Thanks, Zelk. My "take home" from that is that the weapon always gets priority and if the creature has a high enough BAB it might get a second attack from one of its creature weapons. Sound about right?

Concrete examples;
Wererat 1 with sword also has nasty disease-giving bite.
Wererat 2 has bite and two claws.
Yuan-ti abomination has falchion and poison bite.

>>>>>

Wererat 1 always uses sword.
Wererat 2 tosses a coin and uses claw 2 times out of three.
Yuan-ti has (?) 2 attacks and uses falchion and bite? With bite at -5 attack compared to sword?

Bear in mind at all times that my grasp of the actual 3.5e rules are not as firm as they could be.
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Zelknolf »

Ah, extra attacks don't "fall through" to the other types. That yuan-ti uses the sword for every attack every time. You'd have to get rid of the sword or tell it to put the sword away to make it bite-- and there are many many problems with hot swapping stuff.

That's just an engine limitation; there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Curmudgeon »

What does the Multiattack checkbox on the Statistics tab do?
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Zelknolf
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Zelknolf »

I'm not actually sure about that one-- I know there was much talk about dragging monster attacks more toward PnP when NWN2 was under dev (where each monster would have a "primary natural weapon" and "secondary natural weapons" and the BAB wouldn't actually matter), but was under the impression that didn't happen, and that monsters just got the (more-powerful) class progression treatment. Suspect that testing would be the best way to be sure; I wouldn't be surprised if it was entirely vestigial, though.
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Ithildur »

So... somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I couldn't help but notice and wonder... the above cleric looks like it should get 6 attacks/rnd, not 8? I was under the understanding that Divine Power was fixed by patch 1.06 to work per it's description, i.e. it raises the BAB to that of a fighter of the same level of the character. So in order to get an extra attack with Divine Power the above Cleric would need to be a lvl 16 character, not 15.

Or is NWN2 Divine Power broken, simply adds an extra attack regardless of BAB/character level?

Also according to the NWN2wiki Battletide does not stack with Haste as far as granting extra attacks/rnd, unless it's been changed for ALFA?

Pardon the thread necro, just trying to get clarification. *puzzled*
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Re: Creatures with Multiple Attacks

Post by Zelknolf »

That was bad math, yes. Said cleric needs to be level 16 for divine power to grant an extra attack.

I'ven ever tested Battletide + Haste personally, though it's true that multiple sources of EffectHaste() do not stack. I believe Battletide uses EffectExtraAttacks() or whateverit'scalled to accomplish extra attacks/rd, which will happily fill up with many attacks. I believe that ALFA has a custom implementation of Battletide to avoid permanent application of the spell's effects, being a bug that shipped with the game.


Also, as long as we're necroing the thread, from the 1.89 notes:
  • Creatures which use the ACR AI and have many attacks due to some property other than base attack bonus (such as hydras) can have additional attacks specified in "ACR_CREATURE_EXTRA_ATTACKS"
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