Battle Cries
Do you ever think that your party members should be more responsive to being attacked out of the blue?
Do you ever feel that the people of Kenshi are not talkative enough and that the dialogue log should be full of action and filler?
Do you ever find battles being too clear and consise, and that there should be more random distracting crap filling up your screen every time you engage in combat?
Then you need Battle Cries!
Battle Cries is an attempt by yours truly to make the game more lively by making NPC squads and player parties yell out all their lungs in hostile situations.
Before Kenshi, I used to play Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and there was an option that controls the frequency of party members speaking their lines when performing actions. I remember turning this option all the way to the max, resulting in every hostile encounter starting with a mishmash of various taunts and shouts from my party as they all rush towards some poor sap I targeted. I also remember how party members in Dragon Age would also yell out various cries upon entering combat mode. So when I started playing Kenshi, naturally I miss the adrenaline rush in the start of battle as friendlies and enemies alike all strained their vocal cords as they charge with fervor into the fight.
A preview of the mod can be seen here.
Since the only dialogue event in Kenshi that triggers when you get attacked requires the character to be already in dialogue, I needed a workaround that allows NPCs and player characters to cry out regardless whether or not they’re in combat. The way I achieve this is via using crowd triggers.
When a dialogue line that tells the speaking NPC to assault the player occurs, it will activate a corresponding crowd trigger assigned to that line that will make all NPCs in that squad to yell out their lines as designated in the crowd trigger. One of the NPCs, usually the leader of the squad in most cases, is a "trigger character"; their attack line will lead to a line spoken by the targeted player character that itself will trigger a second crowd trigger containing all the attack lines used for player characters. To reach the player trigger, the trigger NPC has to stay conscious long enough for the dialogue engine to move to the player line; this could be a problem if you want battle cries in the late game and your targets are low level bandits equipped with Shoddy gear and rusty weapons. Conditions are then added to each of the player lines as sanity checks, and also to potentially reduce the number of battle cries spoken in each trigger. Additionally, in the crowd trigger used by player characters, "has package" and "is character" conditions may be used as well so unique recruits such as Beep or Sadneil can also have their own personal battle cries not used by any other NPC.
By default, to have player characters use battle cries in an engagement, the following conditions must be fulfilled:
- The trigger NPC, usually the leader of the attacking squad in most cases, must still be conscious long enough for the dialogue engine to reach the player line.
- The player party must have at least 3 members.
- Only player characters that are in a position to fight may use battle cries. This means they must neither be sneaking or imprisoned.
- If the player character is not a Shek Kingdom recruit, they must also be in shape to fight. Your battle cries won’t be as intimidating if you’re near death or a cripple, after all.
- If the player character is not a skeleton, they must not be starving. Armies march on their stomach, ya know?
For vanilla games, this shouldn’t require an import, as it only updates NPC dialogue lines, not add new dialogue packages.
Includes patches for Reactive World by Shidan and Dialogue Expansion Project by RustledJimm and Sae. Reactive World patch simply adds the assault crowd trigger to a Western Hive attack event, as well as referencing the newly added factions in some word swaps used by player characters to mock the attacker’s weapons. The DEP patch changes can be found in the changes text file in the mod folder. Both patches are included in the mod folder; look for the workshop/content/233860/3120855204 folder and put the patches in your mod folder in the Kenshi directory.
Also included is a bonus mod, Extra Suicidal Bandits, as well as the corresponding patch, which you can activate to make NPCs more foolworthy than usual. Simply put, it loosens a lot of dialogue conditions for NPCs if the leader is either stupid or crazy, making them assault or extort even parties that greatly outnumber them. Since ESB adds new dialogue packages, it requires an import, however.
If you have a dialogue/character/faction mod that’s not supported, I have included instructions on how to create your own patch in the mod folder.
