Decane
Player gets a quest on defending Scientists' Camp on Yantar arrival even when loners are enemies to him
Yep, it's possible to just make the quest not appear if player's reputation with loners is low enough, but I can think a better way of solving this situtation — making them have relationship = friend or relationship = neutral, as you said in #33 you had done to Lefty's squad.
It makes little sense that player has to slug the whole group of scientists' security guards just to get to Sakharov.
BTW, if this group gets killed, how would new squads coming to Scientists' Camp react to player? Would they be enemies like the others? Or would they become friends as soon as they capture this point?
Task bug and, possibly, regression, if you decide to return their relationship from vanilla?
The vanilla squad_descr_yantar.ltx uses the invalid-for-squads relation = friend. In the SRP, I corrected relation to relationship, but then commented out the fixed code with the justification:
There is no reason for this squad to be friendly by default.
Net effect: No difference between vanilla and the SRP.
I wish I had respected GSC's intention and not exercised my self-proclaimed 'right not to fix' in this instance. Now I am haunted by questions like:
if this group gets killed, how would new squads coming to Scientists' Camp react to player?
Answer: The relationship parameter applies to a squad, not to a smart terrain. So if the new squad is a non-scripted squad, they would have no special override on their disposition towards the player like the original bodyguards had.
Fortunately, GSC seems to have anticipated this by endlessly respawning-on-need scripted squads yan_default_stalker_1 and yan_default_stalker_2 at the 'Far frontier' and 'Output', respectively, and making the latter target the scientists' camp if one of the original bodyguard squads perishes. Both of these potential replacement squads also have relation = friend in vanilla.
Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that a non-scripted stalker squad or two won't join yan_default_stalker_1/2 at the scientists' bunker if both of the original bodyguard squads perish. So, worst-case scenario: you'll still end up defending the camp with hostiles stationed there even with the relationship parameter typos corrected.
Perhaps I should implement support for a smart terrain -specific relationship parameter. That might be necessary to fix some other disposition bugs still in the game, like the stalkers at the Agroprom stalker base periodically getting alerted by their renegade captives because they are hostile to the renegades. The same thing happens with the Cordon stalker base replacement squad(s) if the first batch is killed by the player and Sid bails the player out - they'll be hostile to Khaletskiy and consequently run around like headless chickens because the initial squad was made non-hostile to Khaletskiy in a way specific to that initial squad, which then isn't applied to the latter squad.
