17 réponses à ce sujet

[Ygramul]

 So, what is the current "best" BG2 game experience for a no-reload adventure (BGTUTU to BG2 to TOB)?
I was thinking the following mods (not counting patches & tutu):
tweaksfixpackspell revisionsSCS
(avoiding Ascension etc. for a no-reload game)
Is this sensible? Is this the correct install order?
*** important question:- Once I screwed it all up with antimagic (spell thrust etc.) NOT targeting improved invisible enemies. How do I avoid it? By not selecting that option in SCSII and trusting SR to do it? 
What do YOU do?
Thanks!
Ygramul

[ussnorway]

I don't like/use fixpack but tweaks has to be after fixpack if you have it... so the order I use is game, patches, ascension & fixpack (if you use them) then any romance or other mods that add a npc to the game... spell revisions tends to be a wild card but scs should always be at the end apart from any item random mod and finally the widescreen mods must always be last!

I dispel/ cancel the invisibility (with 'True Seeing' or perhaps 'Detect Illusions' ) first then target them with spells because that's the way that the game engine was designed to work.

Note that some spells don't require that you target them... eg, 'Insect Plague' can be cast on yourself/ any one and will jump onto any enermy that happens to be around at the time the spell is cast regardless of invisibility.

[Ygramul]

Wait, I thought SCS AI had mages running SI:Divination. That would be a game ender against mages in a no-reload game as you can't take down their defenses. No?

Don't you essentially NEED antimagic being invisibility-proof?

[Jianson]

I haven't played a full campaign with SCS yet. What you desrcibe does sound scary.

When they start a spell, they become at least partially visble. Can´t you disrupt their spells with elemental damage then? There are both magical (MMM and such) and non-magical weapons (e.g. Heavy Crossbow of Searing firing regular bolts) that can do this.

In places with lots of space to work with, I can think of several methods. Magic resistant summons to deplete the spells, area-of-effect damage and disabling. Or just give them some fodder and hide until the Spell Immunity (and maybe other buffs) expires (an 18th-level mage's Spell Immuntiy will last 3.5 minutes).

Yeah, and the Insect Plague thing is good, too.

Modifié par Jianson, 17 octobre 2012 - 08:05 .

[ussnorway]

Yes scs uses ‘SI:Div’ & no it’s not the end of the world for a no-reload... you just have to step out of your comfort zone and try non-Div spells like eg. ‘Glitterdust’ (conjuration/ summoning) or as I prefer the thief skill of ‘Detect Illusions’ (there is no counter for this skill)!

[Thrar]

My install is, in order:

• Official patch
• Fixpack
• Weimer's item upgrade
• NPCs as desired (I like Amber, G3 has a bunch of other nice ones)
• Unfinished Business
• Tweak pack with whatever components you like (most important imo unlimited stacking and turning off the "you must gather your party..." sound)
• SCS2 as much as you dare
• Item randomizer

I'd be very interested to hear what reasons there are to go without the fixpack. To my knowledge, it fixes a ton of bugs while staying in the background and hardly influencing gameplay at all. ussnorway, did you run into any issues?

I can see item upgrade as controversial here because some of the upgraded items are more powerful than what you'd normally get at that point in the game. They're pretty expensive to make though.
I love the randomizer, but I suppose it's an unusual pick, especially for a no-reload. It randomly rearranges item drops (following certain criteria), which makes the game a lot more fun for me. Slightly nerfs item upgrade because you can't plan around getting the right items to upgrade.

I must add though that I've never completed a no-reload even through SoA. I have a run in chapter 6 but it has been on hold due to lack of interest for the past year or so. My SCS install is pretty light too, I wouldn't get far with a full install.

[Ygramul]

Many thanks, everyone.

For BG1, do you use BGT or TUTU?

Also, which SCS options do you enable? (I haven't "memorized" the battles; so I don't plan on Ascension, but just fair play challenges.)

[Ygramul]

Another question: where does spell revisions sit in this install order?

[Satyricon331]

For BG2, I follow the install order in the BiG World pdf, which is nearly comprehensive (except if you were to install Ascension, I'd pick the original Ascension rather than BP Ascension, and I'd install it right after Tobex).  In particular, BG2 Tweaks is supposed to come after SCS2, although Thrar's luck might suggest this rule isn't absolute.

For BG1 Tutu, I use this install order.

[ussnorway]

I use easyTutu, mostly because I’m always testing mods and the fact that BGT sticky tapes the two bg’s together makes it less forgiving of things like mod order... these forums are full of people that discovered their game broken after reaching level 15. I’m not saying don’t use the mod if the idea of playing the whole game appeals to you but just that it’s worth investing in an extra days research to insure that your mod order is going to be (hopefully) compatible.

SCS;
This is very customizable but the basics are smarter general ai & allow mages/ priests to use all the normal abilities.
Improved = cheese, eg. Imp; spiders can teleport & the vamps have a bat fetish so if you add this stuff then don’t get upset when the game wins against you by cheating.
All tactical challenges are wild cards with everything from a constant level drain aura to the ever popular two black dragons drop onto your head as you step through the door and yell “SURPRISE”!

1st time balance issues = 3 things;
1. Don’t allow pre-buffing, apart from being very buggy it will scur the tactics.
2. Potions should break when dropped because everyone and her dog now carries two dozen heal/ invisible pots and even if you just sell them off then the extra resources WILL break your game.
3. Only allow select Mages/ Priests to have HLA or you can expect that nameless slaver to drop a Deva and firestorms on your head two hours after escaping the starting dungeon.

Side topic = issues with Fixpack (in order);
1. There are about two dozen coding errors with it that I have discovered in my testing so far but these are very minor thing like incorrect target variables and don’t really impact the game beyond making your wand of lightning do less damage or simply not fire.
2. IMO Several of the things it fixes weren’t really broken, e.g. Valygar has a suit of special leather armour which allows arcane casting... the fixpack removes this ability because he is a ranger (a class with no arcane) however the armour is a family tressure & once you do his spear quest then I argue that it isn’t a huge stretch of the imagination to believe that a family of mages would have arcane armour in their vaults... the armour is very popular with bards or mage- thief type characters.
3. My final issue is the lack of documentation... it’s perhaps understandable because it is more of a collection of individual band aids than a patch per say.

p.s. I’ve play four no-reload games with fixpack installed and got as far as Abazigal's Lair.

[touch_of_the_void]

What's buggy about the SCS pre-buffing exactly?

And there is a fair amount of Fixpack documentation here (although I agree that the definition of fix is a little loose sometimes):

http://www.gibberlin...k/docs_core.php

Modifié par touch_of_the_void, 18 octobre 2012 - 07:31 .

[Jianson]

2. Potions should break when dropped because everyone and her dog now carries two dozen heal/ invisible pots and even if you just sell them off then the extra resources WILL break your game.

Is this statement mostly for the BG2 part of the game? Because in BG1, I've rarely recovered more than 2 potions from a slain enemy. They certainly didn't break the game and gave me a chance to get some more extra healing potions (the total number of such potions for sale is less than a dozen in the whole game, so they were a nice addition).

Also, prebuffing priests and mages worked fine for me in BG1. It caused slowdown on my older computer (rather, the 'smarter' scripts did) but runs smootly on my new one.

[ussnorway]

IME Doing an alpha-strike like traps/ backstabbing can cause this to bug (take the damage, possibly die then get back up undamaged) which means that the other people who play with it turned on tend towards waiting for all the buffs to go up before starting their attacks witch of course makes mages far more dangerous/ harder to kill... if you pick allow full buffs for mages/ priests then more power to you but I don’t recommend it for a 1st play because you can’t use standard anti-mage schemes.

Jianson, My easytutu and bg2 experience is markedly different... are you killing the enemy target instantly? I’m currently playing that -> Three quarters are broken... after killing five targets tonight, I received 4 invis potions and 2 heals... it adds up fast and as you correctly point out, healing should be a rare resource that has to be managed.

[Satyricon331]

I think the potion thing really depends on playstyle. I tend to play with small parties of 2-4 spellcasters, and battles take long enough that enemies use most of their potions, at least until mid game. Plus, there's the conceptual issue for me that if enemy potions break when they die, your potions should break at least when a party member dies, if not also on critical strikes or high damage, but there's no mod option to have that occur.

Also, I've never had a problem with SCS pre-buffs, but I've avoided playing thieves b/c their abilities largely have no verisimilitude for me. It seems like there have been many no-reloaders who've tried traps and backstabbing without problems though?

[ussnorway]

You can use a trap to kill a buffed mage if you set them behind you then retreat over them... it’s a tactic I use myself & yes play style has a huge impact on mods but what I’m talking about is walking up to a neutral circle mage/ priest and killing them outright with an alpha eg. Spike traps will trigger as soon as they turn red and this (legitimate) tactic can cause issues... perhaps we are getting off topic so I'll shut up now and let others have their say, guys.

[Matuse]

I'd be very interested to hear what reasons there are to go without the fixpack. To my knowledge, it fixes a ton of bugs while staying in the background and hardly influencing gameplay at all. ussnorway, did you run into any issues?

Most of the actual bug fixes the fixpack makes are things I don't care about (yes, it's odd that nymphs use a male spellcasting voice, but this has no real impact on the game). Adjusting 5 or 6 game files because Crom Faeyr doesn't kill ettins like it says? There are maybe 2 ettins in the entire game, one of which you fight before you could possibly have Crom Faeyr, and they are incredibly weak. Why bother with such a change?

Most of the things they "fix" that aren't bugs are things that I want to remain. Like the giant head in Spellhold that you can talk to multiple times. If I want to talk to it multiple times, then that should be my choice. If I don't feel like abusing it, then I'm perfectly free to not talk to it a second time when it opens. At least I have the choice.

One thing I have found with these outside changes is that they have a big tendency to just go wrong in ways that I do notice. On my latest install, it took me 4 different load configurations to find one where the night war encounters with the vampires actually showed up. Some combination of Tactics and UB was making the vamps never appear. I was having to go into shadowkeeper and set the global variables by hand. The less I mess with the game files, the less buggy the overall game is. The fixpack has barely any files at all that it doesn't touch, and to me that is just an invitation for big problems.

Modifié par Matuse, 18 octobre 2012 - 11:44 .

[Jianson]

(This is all for BG1 Tutu)

An initial backstabbing rarely works for me against mages because they tend to have Stoneskin on even before their short-term buffs activate. This also seems to protect them from traps (they deliver physical 'arrows', don't they?).

My main method of fighting them have been spells >3rd level (because they nearly always run Minor Globe): Confusion, Chaos, Emotion. If I manage to get them visible, add Feeblemind, Hold Monster. Preferrably open the fight with a Greater Malison.

Otherwise: hit with Arrows of Ice or if it's an emergency: Dispelling (but those are very rare and expensive).

Or throw in summons to soak up Sunfires, Fireballs, Lightning Bolts and then just go in and fight them by cheiwng down Stoneskins and Mirror Images (and keep drinking healing potions!) when they´re down to Melf's, Orbs and Magic Missiles.

Modifié par Jianson, 18 octobre 2012 - 12:07 .

[DMWW]

The main moral I draw from this is "read the documentation". SCS is very large and complicated, and it's not wise to install it blind.

ussnorway wrote...

SCS;
This is very customizable but the basics are smarter general ai & allow mages/ priests to use all the normal abilities.
Improved = cheese, eg. Imp; spiders can teleport & the vamps have a bat fetish so if you add this stuff then don’t get upset when the game wins against you by cheating.

My experience is that "cheese" has no very defined meaning other than "I don't like this". I don't think anything in SCS cheats (or not intentionally) but of course if you install components whose purpose is to give extra abilities to creatures, they're going to use those abilities.

All tactical challenges are wild cards with everything from a constant level drain aura to the ever popular two black dragons drop onto your head as you step through the door and yell “SURPRISE”!

Most (including those dragons) are documented. 

1st time balance issues = 3 things;
1. Don’t allow pre-buffing, apart from being very buggy

Not that I've heard, but reports are welcomed. (My impression is that most people play with prebuffing, and I haven't had reports of problems with it on recent versions, so it may be something specific about your install.)

2. Potions should break when dropped because everyone and her dog now carries two dozen heal/ invisible pots and even if you just sell them off then the extra resources WILL break your game.

This is a fairly significant overstatement, but probably has a grain of truth in BG2. (I played through with no potion drop, and I wouldn't say the game was broken, but it's true that I had lots of potions.) 

3. Only allow select Mages/ Priests to have HLA or you can expect that nameless slaver to drop a Deva and firestorms on your head two hours after escaping the starting dungeon.

To quote the documentation, "I include [this component] mostly for completeness (personally, I prefer HLAs to be restricted to ToB) but they're there if you want them. If you start getting planetars and Dragon Breaths dumped on you when you're fourteenth level, don't blame me. "

3. My final issue is the lack of documentation... it’s perhaps understandable because it is more of a collection of individual band aids than a patch per say.

I'm puzzled by this - the documentation in Fixpack is incredibly thorough, and quite a lot longer than the documentation of the actual game.

Modifié par DMWW, 18 octobre 2012 - 12:42 .