First, I mean Second, try at a big(ish) EET install

[Graion Dilach]

Wow, that also sounds like SotSC, but I never even met up with that one. I'm not sure how I end up constantly avoiding it then. And you can try throwing the lua block in to override as a M_D5TEST.lua as well (the M_ prefixed files are parsed along, so that should work)

Edited July 15, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[subtledoctor]

There’s a component of ExtraExpandedEncounters called “badgering bandits” or something like that, so I assume it is responsible for the populations of werebadgers I am seeing. I don’t mind it, I just think making them immune to nonmagical weapons - and especially putting one in the first map - kind of fails to “read the room” of low-level BG1 gameplay.

Good call on the M_*.lua thing, I forgot about that capability. 

Edited July 15, 2022 by subtledoctor

[Graion Dilach]

The Badgering Bandit component just adds one more bandit to the bandit encounter above the Nashkel carnival map. That will bug out on your game though, because I overlooked/introduced (notsure by now if I introduced it during the EET recoding or WithinAmnesia put it there to begin with) a typo on the scriptname which will lead to that guy not reacting along with the group. I fixed that more than a month ago though, but I guess you froze the mod versions beforehand.

SotSC imports a fair amount of mobs using IWD source art.

Edited July 16, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[Trouveur80]

On 7/16/2022 at 1:18 AM, subtledoctor said:

There’s a component of ExtraExpandedEncounters called “badgering bandits” or something like that, so I assume it is responsible for the populations of werebadgers I am seeing. I don’t mind it, I just think making them immune to nonmagical weapons - and especially putting one in the first map - kind of fails to “read the room” of low-level BG1 gameplay.

Good call on the M_*.lua thing, I forgot about that capability. 

Well, the werebadger in the first map didn't bother much since it is not on the usual way for High Edge, Crossroad Way, Xzar and Montaron or Gorion's corpse.

If you don't explore carefully the map, you will not find it.

On the other hand, the werebadgers in Fire Leaf area were more annoying.

And I play with fine weapons instead of magical ones, so yes start of the game is harder. But I'm fine with a low level charname having to run for his life.

 

By the way I checked your weidu, and last time I tried it, the vanishing of Skie Silvershield wasn't compatible with EET.

[subtledoctor]

On 7/15/2022 at 8:33 PM, Graion Dilach said:

The Badgering Bandit component just adds one more bandit to the bandit encounter above the Nashkel carnival map. That will bug out on your game though, because I overlooked/introduced (notsure by now if I introduced it during the EET recoding or WithinAmnesia put it there to begin with) a typo on the scriptname which will lead to that guy not reacting along with the group.

Oh heh heh I think I noticed a guy that stays blue-circle, but I had a quick trigger finger on a Snowball Swarm spell and killed him anyway. 

On 7/15/2022 at 8:33 PM, Graion Dilach said:

I fixed that more than a month ago though, but I guess you froze the mod versions beforehand

I keep mods on my computer, and then check for any updates when I do an install. But it’s checking by hand, I don’t have the use of a PI-like program, so I guess some can slip through the cracks. 

3 hours ago, Trouveur80 said:

If you don't explore carefully the map

Does anyone not clear wilderness maps when playing BG1???

3 hours ago, Trouveur80 said:

By the way I checked your weidu, and last time I tried it, the vanishing of Skie Silvershield wasn't compatible with EET

Yeah I was going to get to that. Note, that is a bit weird, because it means the mod, designed solely for standalone BG1EE, installs with no errors onto the BG2EE app…

[subtledoctor]

On 7/15/2022 at 3:55 PM, Graion Dilach said:

Valerie will leave Nashkel if you clear out the mines, since she's there to investigate it as well.

Circling back a second: this is kind of weird behavior. How would she know I’ve solved the mystery before I even get back to Nashkel and turn in the quest to the mayor? And given she is standing five feet away, and that “solving” the mystery just points you in the direction of Mulahey’s bosses, I would expect her to maybe overhear and ask to help you go after Tranzig & Tazok. That after all is still part of investigating what happened in the mines, which is her assignment. 

[Trouveur80]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

Does anyone not clear wilderness maps when playing BG1

Sure, but I don't do that right away with only Imoen at my side just after escaping an ambushed and seeing the powerful Gorion killed.

I first gather a full party, do some easy XP quests, found some magic weapons just in case, and then start exploring.

But I tend to play noreload run theses days, so I,m probably more careful than most players.

[subtledoctor]

Continuing: I head to Nashkel and Pick up Minsc. Now my party is:

• Charname, ranger/psion
• Minsc, barbarian
• Helga, fighter/cleric
• Rose, mage/thief bard
• Finch, cleric/mage

We are looking for Dynaheir, who is held captive by gnolls. We have also been asked by a distraught mother to look for her son Aaron, who has also been captured by gnolls. And we are looking for the spellbook of someone who was almost captured by gnolls and stashed her spellbook in a shadow version of the gnoll fortress. So, we head southwest. This is a bunch of fine wilderness adventuring with a party getting toward 4th level - BG1 really hitting its stride. The parties of 2-4 that you meet around this time are actually challenging, and what's more they always offer up a special item or two! Unlike in BG2 when you are loaded to the gills and loot from fights often just gets shoved into a bag of holding, here we have almost no magical gear, so every piece I find is exciting and useful. We face Sendai, Vax & Zal, Albert & Rufie, Larry Darryl & Darryl, and some gnolls and bugnears, with varying degrees of violence. We save a dryad's tree, meet a ghost in a waterfall, and fight more gnolls.

Then we arrive at the Gnoll Fortress. And, man, is this thing in fighting shape right now. It is affected by at least two mods that I know of: Romantic Encounters and ExtraEnhancedEncounters. Maybe more. There are at least 25 gnoll spawn points around the fortress, and they come at me in groups of ~8. A couple gnolls, but lots of gnoll slashers, lots of gnoll elites, a fair number of gnoll veterans, and occasionally a gnoll lieutenant, gnoll bodyguard, and gnoll chieftain. The place is freaking swimming in gnolls. I put all my protective gear on Minsc and have him tank; the rest of us mostly try to use missile attacks. Minsc uses many dozens of healing potions, probably enough to wipe out my entire supply; luckily the gnoll elites carry one and I can salvage it if I focus fire and kill them fast enough. In the end, we get through more than 200 gnolls and walk out with just about the same number of healing potions I entered with, plus thousands of gold and enough XP to get to 5th level. This was super satisfying. The gnolls just did not let up, and sometimes three groups would be alerted at the same time and I would be mobbed by ~25 enemies of like 3-4 hit dice. It's like the xvart. village, only if there were four times as many xvarts and each xvart was four times more powerful.

We find Dynaheir and find Aaron, and find the portal to the shadow realm but we are too exhausted to go there yet. We send Aaron to the bridge in the east, and find a place to rest. (Actually we rest on the bridge, because it creates a bottleneck for enemy ambushes.) Then we explore the caves below the fortress, and find a tome that boosts my Charisma. Nice. While down there, I touch the path too close to the edge, and before I can do anything the party is warped to a different wilderness area. Weird. Here there are snakes and bugbears, and two nice but dead "ormyrrs" who want me to decorate their corpses. Okay, I'm game. Time to go on a map-wide hunt for components. I go back to the map transition point and find that I am in a whole new area on the world map, 4 hours away from the gnoll fortress. Hrrmmm, that was not evident from the way I got here.

I go back there, and. head into the shadow realm. Here we fight shadows and shade wolves, like in the Umar Hills quest in BG2. It's fairly challenging for a BG1 party... but not too challenging. I find the spellbook and pages, and head back to Aaron. He conveniently teleports me back to Nashkel, where I turn in some quests. Then head back out to finish exploring the areas in the southwest of the worldmap.

[subtledoctor]

Okay I might interrupt this and do a reinstall, because I just found tipun's HoW-in-BGEE mod and I kind of want to give it a go. So rather than the long exposition I'll catch up more quickly and mention some issues that I saw:

I kept Minsc & Dynaheir around long enough to find Dynaheir's journal, and I found the Ogre King with Helga which was... underwhelming. Then Minsc, Dynaheir, and Helgha went off to live their own lives. Sirene, Kivan, and Branwen joined the party in their place, and we began the quest to find Tazok and his Merry Bandit Band. Right away i noticed something weird about Branwen: her 5E spellcasting seemed to be malfunctioning. When we rested, her spells would not be restored. They would only be restored if I used the "Change Spells" ability first. But every other caster has been working fine. It was almost as if her fatigue level was not working correctly. (Something the 5E spellcasting system needs to function.) I inspected a savegame in NI, and sure enough, she has a permanent op101 effect protecting her from op93, which is what modifies fatigue. The engine must use an internal version of op93 in the normal course of things to increment all characters' fatigue, because Branwen's simply would not ever change to any value except 0. What's more, Branwen also had:

• op101 immunity to sleep
• op101 immunity to fear
• op101 immunity to charm
• op101 immunity to stun
• you get the point

She is immune to everything. I can only assume this is something to do with protecting her while she is in stone form, before she joins the party? But all those effects stayed on her, permanently. My best guess: an EE patch applied a bunch of immunities to her, and set the green Stone to Flesh scroll to undo them. But Item Revisions overwrites that scroll, so it failed to. remove those effects. Weird thing is, though, that when I look at them in NI, they have no parent resource.  So it doesn't seem like a case where op321 is used. I'll have to take a look at unmodded BGEE to see what's going on. If this is correct and IR needs an update, it should be easy enough.

Looking for another cleric, I went to Beregost and found Drake. Drake is a great character and a great mod, and a very useful cleric for a Good-aligned party. But the mod is not EET-compatible, it had to be installed on BGEE/SoD before EET imported the resources. And unfortunately, a good portion of his .tlk strings are messed up. So No Drake this game.

Worried, I beelined north to the bridge to Baldur's Gate, to check. on Tenya. Tenya is perhaps my single favorite BGEE NPC mod, but likewise had to be installed on BGEE before EET. And in this case it was simply inactive - she cannot join the party. Sigh.

So now I'm having trouble finding arcane casters and divine casters! I went to the Friendly Arm Inn to check on Eldoth since The Vanishing of Skie Silvershield places him there... but it turns out that mod does not work on EET (weird because it installed just fine, onto what it thought is a BG2EE game...)

Foo.

Eventually I picked up Indira and uses NPC_EE to make her a dual fighter 3 -> mage instead of a multi fighter/mage. And I picked up Emily the Archer and changed her a a cleric/ranger. And Sirene for the front line. SO now the party is:

• Charname, a ranger/psion
• Sirene, a paladin
• Emily, a ranger/cleric
• Rose, a mage/thief bard
• Finch, a cleric/mage
• Indira, a fighter->mage

This is actually quite a good party. I could see keeping it more or less like here through the rest of the game. Maybe switch out Sirene for Ajantis* or Yeslick* at some point, and maybe drop Rose for Safana and/or Coran and/or Skie* and/or Imoen.

(Incidentally, notice that it's all women. Seems like there are more female NPCs out there than male ones. Or maybe most of the male NPCs are evil? That seems a bit weird...)

* One of the pressures to make all these party membership changes is because I anticipate meeting so many of these people later on in the trilogy, when they will act like they know me. Jaheira/Khalid/Minsc/Jaheira of course have roles in SoD and early BG2; Skie has an important role in SoD; Sirene and Yeslick and Ajantis and Xan will be around in BG2, and Kivan will actually walk right up and be like "dude I've been looking all over for you, let's continue our travels together!" Et cetera. So there is a list of characters who I would like to spend at least a chapter with.

BUT! I also want to install HoW-in-BGEE. And honestly I kind of want to take another shot at messing around with BP-in-BG, now that I am a bit more skilled with scripts and dialogs.

Maybe I can fix Drake? And Tenya? Maybe I can make The Vanishing of Skie Silvershield compatible with EET? Maybe I can get that stuff fixed and then do a relatively quick reinstall, and get back to this point. We'll see.

Edited July 19, 2022 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Hmm. Maybe I'll just push through this run and then make another, bigger install afterward. I'll keep this brief though, making sure to mention any mod issue I spot.

I went west to the coast and picked up Safana. I set her up as a Shadowdancer, as revised by Might & Guile. But, not every aspect of the kit seems to be working properly. (Note to self!) Rose went back to Beregost.

We cleared all the hobgoblins. (I remember this group being a challenge once, but this time it was completely uninteresting... I think some mod needs to diversify hobgoblins the way some mods have diversified gnolls.) We talked to Sil the Sirene, and she wanted me to talk to some fellows bunking in the lighthouse to the south. I tried going into the building to the southwest of the lighthouse - hard crash. I restarted the app and tried going into the lighthouse - hard crash. I restarted the app and went into the building northeast of the lighthouse, and there I could talk to the guys and complete the quest. I think this is the "Lure of Sirine's Call" quest? I remember some talk of being crashy once but I thought the problems were ironed out. Evidently not? At any rate I finished the little quest but I hope nothing in the future needs me to go into those other two buildings...

I also got the cursed bracers for Thalantyr in The Calling, and I noticed that in the course of undoing the curse, he made some comment like "you are a mage, come and join the incantation." Of course I am not a mage, I am a ranger/cleric. Don't know if there is some quirk in the dialogue that returns a false positive for being a mage, or if this is intended. I vaguely recall that this quest is meant to give special treatment according to class? (I also ended up with a small magical item that would be useful for. mages... though also for ranger/clerics. Don't know if that reward is variable or not.)

Anyway now we are hunting portals to find some orbs, for some guy, because that is the life of a Charname. At some point we'll head up toward the Cloakwood Forest.

[Graion Dilach]

The lighthouse areas are practically empty but they worked for me on Windows. Could be capitalization.

Calling currently enables that quest for everyone because the other classes lack their quest.

[Nathan82]

58 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I think some mod needs to diversify hobgoblins the way some mods have diversified gnolls

Im not sure exactly which mod does it, but in my BGT game there are loads of different hobgoblins - shamans (shamen?), wizards, slayers, captains etc

I'll have a lok in a bit and see where they are from.  They usually spawn in mobs of 8/9 with a mixture of the different types.

[Graion Dilach]

Yeah, that's BGSpawn. I've also started a run with it right now and I'm collecting the bugs it causes atm.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[Guest Morgoth]

Wouldn't this mod add the diversification you are looking for? 

 

[CamDawg]

On 7/15/2022 at 11:37 AM, subtledoctor said:

Okay I'm going to go a little bit out of order here and give some mod feedback because it just popped into my head. Slight spoilers ahead!

I'm sorry I didn't see this sooner. First, thanks for the feedback, and I'll try to explain where I was coming from with the parts you have issues with. Spoilers in reply!

The Calling was intended to be a series of class-specific quests that I'll probably never get to; in its current form it's just the quest intended for mages, but made available to all classes. The idea was to try and emphasize class-specific elements--in the mage part specifically, I tried to emphasize research and intelligence-based puzzle solving. It's why the end bit is pattern-matching spell challenge with Thalantyr and Melicamp, and the gem selection.

I'll be honest, I didn't think the gem selection was that much of an issue, as the answers are in the descriptions. The 'correct' answers are Black Pearl, Rogue Stone, and Water Opal. The Water Opal description states:

Quote

It is rare and valuable in the realms, where it is used in scrying devices.

The Water Opal description was the bit that prompted the whole gem selection puzzle, as it's in the unmodded game.

The Calling adds Black Pearls, one guaranteed on the Lighthouse area plus a chance on any given sirine. Their description includes:

Quote

 Black pearls are highly valued for their unique magical properties, particularly by diviners.

Granted Rogue Stones aren't as explicit, but even getting the other two correct guarantees you to the third-best scrying result ("solid choices") out of five, and one good selection from the second-best result ("excellent choices"). Even picking the three most expensive stones should get you "solid choices" at worst.

I felt it was in character for Thalantyr to let the player twist: he strikes me as the swimming instructor who throws you into the deep end and, if you can't hack it, is not sure if he should rescue you.

Thanks for the feedback--I'll think about it and see if I can give the players a bit more guidance without compromising the puzzle.