Difficulty of the mod, and party composition

[Guest LD]

I want to say how much I enjoyed replaying the game with SCS and SR. It is maybe the 2d or 3d time I do it, though the previous times I was a bit discouraged by the difficulty (particularly the non-Tactics final Irenicus, even with him not attacking during Time Stops). I'm not a newbie, but I guess there are much better players than I. Thus I had been thinking about what party could be the most succesful and fun for surviving through SOA and TOB and a Berserker 13/Cleric x + F/M + Sor was my best bet. I would be very interested in alternative suggestions.

 

This party has indeed been quite successful, though I guess I passed the Irenicus fight mainly because the protagonist Be/Cleric was stunned during most of the fight, and hence of little interest to Irenicus or the demons! I was especially impressed by the following very, very fun fights which felt at the right difficulty for my player talents and my min-maxed party: the Demon Knights in the Underdark (difficult), Shangalar & friends (very difficult), Kangaxx, Ascension Gromnir (wonderful), Ascension Yaga-Shura (wonderful), Sendai (a bit easy), the dragons in Abazigal Lair, Ascension Abazigal (difficult). I would be interested in knowing how you can beat the Demon Knights, Irenicus and maybe Abazigal without a F/M or maybe a F/Druid with stoneskins, and more generally with a Protagonist and 5 Bioware NPCs.

 

If you want to improve the accessibility of the mod, I would like to suggest some "easy" options for non-uber players like me. First, reduce the melee power of some difficult physical opponents like the Demon knights in the Underdark, final Irenius, Abazigal. The latter two are especially deadly because of their Improved haste which is very hard to dispell in the case of Irenicus (yes, I know the player can use the same strategies, nevertheless they are very, very hard opponents in my experience). Second, allow some saving throws against the ability of Beholders to dispell all your buffs, or at least against the arrows of Illasera and those of that unnamed soldier of Gromnir. Damn, this soldier was one of the most prominent threat in the Gromnir fight. Third, and this may be a somewhat "fair" option in your mod: allow some merchant in Athkatla to sell ALL spell scrolls from Lvl 1 to 6 in Chapter 2 or 3. And ALL spell scrolls from Lvl 1 to 8 in Chapter 6. For instance, and if I'm not mistaken, the only chance you have to obtain the scroll Remove magic is after a fight against a Lich in the Underdark. I very much doubt that all enemies that cast this spell on you have faced the same challenge.

 

Finally, let me add this : your mod is not how the original game should be, indeed it may be much too hard for newcomers. I think it is however how the original game should have been with its "hard" or "realistic" option for veteran players. The fact that it is moreover modular and that all component are optional is a quite an amazing feature.

[Guest LD]

For instance, and if I'm not mistaken, the only chance you have to obtain the scroll Remove magic is after a fight against a Lich in the Underdark. I very much doubt that all enemies that cast this spell on you have faced the same challenge.

Again I may be wrong, but I think that PfMW is only dropped as a random treasure, so that you can play the whole SOA game as a solo F/M without access to it.

 

Oh and Firkraag against my 2,500,000 XP party was also a very, very nice fight (I installed the improved staying power component).

 

Finally, I think your ease-of-use party AI is a very good idea, though I did not use it for the following reasons:

1. I do not trust scripts that cause my characters to engage fight withouth me giving explicitly the order. Unless I'm wrong, your script does.

2. Autocasting Melf's is a good idea, except you don't want to do it once your mage has obtained the Staff of the Magi.

3. An important (and long and repetitive) part of the prebuffing sequence in TOB consists in shorter buffs: Mirror Image, SI, True Sight, Improved Haste... Making these spells part of an automatic buff sequence would be a very good incentive to use this ease-of-use script. Of course, because of the shorter duration, casting these all at once may be seen as a cheat. You may want to propose this as an "easier" option for the mod, though I don't think it will have an impact on the gameplay of most players.

[DavidW]

Thanks for the comments. I'll leave others to comment on party composition as they're probably better positioned to do so; for what it's worth, though, one my one playthrough of the mod I had an Undead Hunter protagonist and my party was Aerie, Anomen, Imoen, Haer'dalis, Minsc (replaced by Sarevok in ToB).

 

I think the idea of making spell scrolls available through something other than random drops is interesting - I'll think about it. Having said that, I've never been much moved by the idea that it's unfair that your enemies have access to more spells than you. Your character, after all, advances from L8 to L30 in about five months. Your opponents take decades. That just puts them in a different category as regards getting hold of spells.)

 

I'm less sure about the other suggestions. I don't want to make the standard versions of Irenicus (etc) easier, since I don't have the impression that they're too hard for everyone. And at some point it just becomes a bit unmanageable for me to maintain indefinitely many versions of each component. So I wonder if the better advice is just that not everyone should install every component. (I'm somewhat persuadable that I ought to try to give a clearer impression of exactly which components are hardest - on the other hand, it appears rather subjective just which fights people find hard or easy.)

 

I have played around in the past with adding short-duration buffing to Ease-of-Use, but the problem is that the buffs you need seem very dependent on (i) playstyle and (ii) the particular fight, and I'm worried about cutting down on flexibility.

[Mike1072]

Having said that, I've never been much moved by the idea that it's unfair that your enemies have access to more spells than you. Your character, after all, advances from L8 to L30 in about five months. Your opponents take decades. That just puts them in a different category as regards getting hold of spells.

I've heard you say this before, and I'm not sure I completely agree. If experience level is a measure of ability, and spellcasters' most important ability is spellcasting, a higher level implies more spells and more spells implies a higher level. This is represented in the game with experience gains for learning spells. If a level 8 mage quits adventuring for a few years to build up his magical knowledge, he should become a level 9 or level 10 mage if he increases his spell repertoire twofold rather than become the most powerful level 8 mage around.

 

My concern is not that there are too few scrolls available to players, but that it's unrealistic to expect every enemy mage to know every spell potentially available to them in the campaign setting. Occasionally giving enemies suboptimal spell selections in the name of realism would make encounters easier, but I wouldn't mind having an easier fight every once in a while.

 

Getting back to LD's comment, if the difficulty of battles varies wildly based entirely on the random chance of a scroll drop, you might consider altering that behaviour to provide a more stable tactical setting.

[Guest LD]

Getting back to LD's comment, if the difficulty of battles varies wildly based entirely on the random chance of a scroll drop, you might consider altering that behaviour to provide a more stable tactical setting.

For me, it wasn't that important: I had a Sorceress, and besides, PfMW or Spell Removal are probably more useful in TOB anyway, at least for a non solo party. I just wanted to stress the following: in SOA with SCS installed, everyone and their little dog too have access to these spells, except your party (and that raises the following question: how many enemies have access to these spells in vanilla?)

 

Even Imoen has Spell Removal in her spellbook at the beginning of the game, if I'm not mistaken.

 

It is true that DavidW has a fair point when he compares your scholar experience to that of enemy mages. However in Chapter 6 Ribald offers you access to all the "uber" Level 9 spells, but these Level 3 and 6 spells remain mysteriously unobtainable. So, in my opinion, Bioware "fixed" this issue by making a merchant sell ALL spell scrolls in TOB. Similarly, SCS could give the opportunity to buy all Lvl 1-8 spell scrolls in SOA, maybe only in Chapter 6 so as to have the same vanilla thrill about gaining some new, useful spell scrolls in Chapters 2 and 3.

[DavidW]

Having said that, I've never been much moved by the idea that it's unfair that your enemies have access to more spells than you. Your character, after all, advances from L8 to L30 in about five months. Your opponents take decades. That just puts them in a different category as regards getting hold of spells.

I've heard you say this before, and I'm not sure I completely agree. If experience level is a measure of ability, and spellcasters' most important ability is spellcasting, a higher level implies more spells and more spells implies a higher level. This is represented in the game with experience gains for learning spells. If a level 8 mage quits adventuring for a few years to build up his magical knowledge, he should become a level 9 or level 10 mage if he increases his spell repertoire twofold rather than become the most powerful level 8 mage around.

 

I hear what you're saying, but the problem is that it's thoroughly established in-game that the way you acquire new spells isn't through acquisition of power, it's by spending gold at the marketplace. Enemy wizards who've had years or decades to shop around ought to have got around to acquiring basically everything they need by now.

 

I'll concede that I have an ulterior motive here. The reason I don't want to allow for spells not being known isn't that it would make the game easier, it's that it would make coding SCS much harder. So I'm happy if I have a plausible in-game explanation of why that's reasonable.

 

... none of this is to say that I'm unsympathetic to some way of making the spells available more systematically, though I wouldn't want to lose the excitement of getting new spell scrolls by making it too easy.

[DavidW]

Getting back to LD's comment, if the difficulty of battles varies wildly based entirely on the random chance of a scroll drop, you might consider altering that behaviour to provide a more stable tactical setting.

For me, it wasn't that important: I had a Sorceress, and besides, PfMW or Spell Removal are probably more useful in TOB anyway, at least for a non solo party. I just wanted to stress the following: in SOA with SCS installed, everyone and their little dog too have access to these spells, except your party (and that raises the following question: how many enemies have access to these spells in vanilla?)

 

Basically all of them, I think. I can't think of a vanilla mage who doesn't have access to basically any spell he feels he needs.

[phordicus]

you might hate this, but for BG1 i went back to the original concept of spellbooks that can be obtained after defeating a mage.

 

i removed all places that sold spells. most game economies are shit to begin with, RPGs worse, and CRPGs the worst of all. the reasoning isn't important and would lead to a rant. suffice to say that i gave every mage you could fight a spellbook with all their spells, usually on their person and not stealable. assuming you killed them there was a % that the spellbook survived the fight. after that there's a variable % to learn each spell in the book.

 

in the end you might not end up with every spell you want but for me it was far more satisfactory. it was also too much modding to do it for SoA/ToB (multiple scroll ITMs for each spell, mostly).