Is enemy prebuffing purposefully disabled in some encounters?

[Valdygar]

Hi!

I remember reading in an older post (from the V32 release of SCS iirc) that the way enemy prebuffing worked was influenced by the difficulty slider/fine-tuning, and that if the difficulty was set to "Insane", pretty much any defensive spell with a duration of 1 round or more memorized by an enemy spellcaster would be part of their prebuffing when initiating combat.

I'm currently in a BG1 playthrough with the difficulty set to Insane and I've seen a very small number of encounters that don't seem to match this behavior. In particular, the chessboard fight in Durlarg's tower features two fairly high level spellcasters (the enemy King and Queen) with a couple of defensive spells memorized that are usually part of prebuffing (shield, stoneskin, mirror image, minor globe...), but for some reason they don't seem to do any kind of prebuffing at the beginning of the fight. Is this an intended behavior for this specific fight as a way to balance it?

[DavidW]

Yes. (It reflects the fact that the party are teleported in without warning, so it's implausible for the chess pieces to prebuff.)

This is externalized to stratagems\mage\override\[bg1/bg2]\boolean.2da. Setting the Boolean DoNotPrebuff turns off buffing. You'll see that in BG1 it applies to the chess pieces, to a couple of dopplegangers, to Silke in Beregost, and (iirc) to a couple of adventurers you can meet abruptly in Baldur's Gate.

 

[Valdygar]

I see, that makes sense. Thanks a lot for the detailed answer!