This is not true. The battles in the original game are too easy and totally laughable for any serious player (no need to be a tactical guru to realize this) and that's why most players look for mods which enhance the game's difficulty level not only by improving creatures AI to make them behave more intelligently, but also by adding diverse categories of new types of creatures and abilities to the game to make the player think during battles to solve tactical puzzles.

I remember that you were eagerly waiting for the release of the TS_IA compatibility patch. With the viewpoint you have expressed in this thread (= thinking of the original game's battles as being perfect), I don't think that IA is for you to play. The reason is not that you are not skilled enough. Less skilled players can also play IA if they prepare themselves for drawing a learning curve and improve their skills. The reason for which you can't play IA is that you *think* that you are already skilled enough:



With such an attitude, you won't even start to improve your skills.

The bottom line is that computer-game opponents based on what would be a balanced fight in AD&D are always going to be a push-over, because the computer-game opponents are laughably stupid. This isn't even a comment on the original game's AI. It's possible to improve lots on it, but the best AI out there (whatever it is) is still laughably stupid, compared to a human opponent. We currently have no idea how to simulate the intelligence of a human - or indeed a worm - on the best purpose-built parallel-processing hardware, let alone in the Infinity Engine scripting language.

If the original BG2 was AD&D, the party would be wiped out. They systematically go up against opponents much higher level than them.

This post has been edited by DavidW: Apr 16 2008, 08:57 AM

I found these guys easy, just use Web and Entangle and then kill them with arrows and fire balls.


A bit tougher but winable.


Also easy, see lizardman tactics.

Do you have Dar in your party? He is useful!

Good luck!

It wouldn't be needed to simulate human intelligence to make powerful enemies in games, including the Infinity Engine games. Artificial intelligence has serious achievements, and these are applied in computer games as well. In case of the IE games, we're just talking aboutt the decisions of managers, developers and/or others.

Including financial decisions (budget, schedule etc.) For example, writing much better AI takes more time and project resources. On top of these, if a game is too hard, weaker players or those who play it for other reasons won't be satisfied. This is profit loss. So creating a difficult game even probably wasn't a goal in advance, or at least, not for the final version (requirements may change during the project).

I'll reply tonight..

Sure, opponents could be way brighter, and thus way tougher, than the vanilla-game creatures; I'm not denying that (I write AI mods, after all!)

What I am saying is that for an opponent who's the same strength as the party on paper to be a match for them (which they would be in a pen-and-paper RPG) it would require human-level AI (or at least real goal-directed intelligence), and we're nowhere near that. I don't want to knock AI as an academic discipline: it's made great progress, clarified its conceptual territory, and contributed en route to problems ranging from philosophy of mind to missile guidance, but the underlying problem is amazingly hard and we're still scratching at the surface.

This post has been edited by DavidW: Apr 16 2008, 11:01 PM

Absolutely. On the other hand, many AI experts believe it doesn't always have to be the primary goal to reproduce (or even to follow) how human mind and intelligence works. In very many cases, it isn't known whether trying to mimic human abilities (or the real world) is the way to go, or not. There are examples in the history of AI when the key of the success wasn't based on such things (and, of course, there are examples for the opposite as well). Of course, as you've said, it's undoubtful that the possibilities offered by (the relevant fields of) AI are far from human intelligence yet (I said "relevant fields", because AI itself comprises much much more than most people would believe). Discussing all this exceeds the scope of this topic, so I didn't want to mention concrete examples and more details.

P.S. just for fun: it is believed that a (biological) neural network solves nonlinear differential equations in analogue form, in real time. Think of your brain, dear reader, it's solving equations at the moment when you're reading these lines!

Bereth, you won't believe but Imoen is capable of dealing with ALL that beatles alone, even without using her spells. Indeed, you need only one Imoen, one short bow and good arrows.

[EDIT] In fact, NeJ2 is much more tactical than you think. There are many different tactics used in the mod, for example those mentioned by Chev. Of course, brute forcing hordes of undead, trolls and lizards is not a good idea. Moreover, when I played the plain BG2/ToB for the very first times, I have never thought about tactics because it was really plain and simple, your enemies just become harder with your levels, so one single paladin or good dual-class character like kensai/mage or cleric/ranger could make his way through the game solo. I don't think this is called "ballance". In fact, that was the reason why I started modding the game. It was too simple and boring to me. Anyway, thank you for your feedback. I value it a lot.

This post has been edited by Vlad: Apr 17 2008, 09:13 AM

WOE, there Sikret. there is no need to lecture me regarding my experience with D&D. If you knew the people I knew, they would be laughing at your comment. Just because I don't Mod, means absolutely nothing. I know this game like the back of my hand.
All I'm saying is that I don't like having to take forever. I don't mind tough battles, heck I'm one of the very very few who killed the shadow dradon at lvl 9 in the orriginal game. (and some had said it earlier to make a point); "Do one cave then go back to Kuldahar and sleep before the next cave".

It's this aspect that I do not like, and is reminis of the games unbalanced creatures. Regarding any "Serious Players" as your comments suggest, answer me one question; The first time you played it completely through, from start to finish, did your main character ever die?

My point is realy to the point of elongating a game by means of creating unbalanced creatures (vs your lvl to enable you to fight continuosly or at least more than a couple of times before having to sleep). Perhalps you don't believe I'm not just some Shmoe off the street, with little to no experience with the game. Not entirely sure, but regardless, my argument isn't agains't making it more challenging, as you could put different types of elementals together for example (go ahead and try some area of effect spells with this combo), or Wyverns with Ancient Ankegs. Certain core creatures when put together are insanely lethal. There are a multitude of ways to make it more chalenging without making creatures up and giving them new powers that may seem unbalanced.

Not unlike my "Ollerand's Exploding Centipede" spell I had years ago (9th lvl spell combo with Creaping Doom)...
Talk about overkill!

Like I said, my experience is vast!

This post has been edited by Bereth Darkides: Apr 17 2008, 01:56 PM

Therein lies one of my problems..... I ran out of arrows,,,,

Well, well... The mighty Bereth Darkides forgot to stock his arrows, or may be dropped his bow after drinking three cups of ale in a tavern... It's not a sunday walk in Firkraag's dungeon, but the Dragon's Eye!

Not having arrows would make the game seem unbalanced.

I played the older version of Nej with IA 4.2 installed. Finished the Ice wind dale areas and got to Halrua. The only real problem I ever faced was running out of spells and then having to fight monster spawns while trying to rest. If it wasn't for that, it would have been very easy to use hit and run tactics to thin the enemies.

There's a lot of time saving shortcuts in the BG2 engine that can take 5 hours and reduce it down by a lot.

I haven't played the newest NEJ yet, so I can't say what changes Vlad made to it, but unless it is somewhere along changing the resistances, or increasing the number of monsters that spawn when you try to rest, it shouldn't be a problem.

<B>The battles in the original game are too easy and totally laughable for any serious player (no need to be a tactical guru to realize this)</b>

What made the battles in the original game tough for me was because I assumed spell trap would absorb breach, so I would always try to ruby ray the spell trap first and then use breach.

Also, with the help of good scripts, a party of 6 essentially fights by itself against all vanilla BG2 enemies and you don't have to do jack.

What made BG2 vanilla "hard" in some respects, was that I had to micromanage and use up the round times of all six of my characters. That got tiresome and oftentimes I would forget that I could now cast a spell and what not. And clicking on six characters that all more or less look alike when the spells are flying, wasn't a help either. I really wanted Planescape Torment graphics where each individual model was detailed and easily distinguished on screen. Didn't even need to be scruntched up like in PST either, but it would have really been nice if they could make static models for the player characters.

That's probably what would make a one hour game into a 5 hour slog, similar to what Dark was saying. My solution was to write my own scripts after I stole most of it from uScript and eSeries. Fun and realll useful.

<B>I know this game like the back of my hand. </b>

CRPG AD and D and paper ADD is not the same game. They may be trying to use the same rule sets, but a CRPG provides many many ways to exploit AI retardedness.

Paper CRPG gives you a human dungeon master to fight against and pure mathematical dice rolling as "combat" or simply tasks and challenges setup by the human dungeon master. Rarely does luck with a dice roll make a large difference in tactical mods for BG2. Unless you really want to see how many times you can roll successfully against insta death on a 50/50 percentage basis. Then you'll be reloading.

<B>All I'm saying is that I don't like having to take forever.</b>

A good tactician, as opposed to a good ADD paper player, will always stack the odds against the enemy so that he doesn't have to die or reload or what not. If you use Ctrl+J, that saves up most of your traveling time too. Combine the two with flawless execution of victories, and it won't take up much time at all.

<B>"Do one cave then go back to Kuldahar and sleep before the next cave".</b>

Sleep in or around the dungeon maps. Why are you going back to Kuldahar to sleep?

<B>The first time you played it completely through, from start to finish, did your main character ever die?</b>

Given that my main was Berserker/mage, no. Maybe once to an insta death spell or trap, but not to enemy mages or melee mobs.

<B>It's not a sunday walk in Firkraag's dungeon, but the Dragon's Eye!</b>

I found the dragon's eye easier than the Kresellar's tomb. I started with a brand new BG2 party, no BGT, and it took awhile to get everybody set up and working together the way I wanted to.

BG2 tactics can be split up into some easily recognized groups. Physical range damage is one of them. Magical ranged attack is another. Healing capacities. Physical damage rate.

Not having any archers mean you have to get your melee guys to go in and melee. This can be very damaging and dangerous if you have poisonous bugs.



This post has been edited by Ymarsakar: Apr 18 2008, 10:48 PM

Using additional scripts for individuals and parties can get improved results. Uscripts and gbscripts work well and are easy to install/uninstall although support with them does not exist. They usually support all items/spell/innates including those from ToB. I think they work well and have used them in combinations of mods.

Ya OK.. OK... lets all have a BIG laugh at my expense


Big Dummy award goes too......The idiot with the green shirt (don't ask,, getting enough flack at work for the color choice)

Having stacks of 200 arrows instead of 20 would also eliminate the ammo limit from having multiple stacks of 20 arrows in inventory. The money certainly isn't an issue.

This post has been edited by Ymarsakar: Apr 22 2008, 01:53 AM

Regular uScript and eSeries does a couple of things with melee and ranged combat choices that are either tedious or not wise if you want to maintain a certain level of tactical control over your party.

You might want your mages to sit still and only use darts and slings, instead of the script moving them to combat range. Or you might want your characters to auto switch to melee when attacked with a ranged weapon equiped, but return to ranged if you order the party member out of range.

Since scripts are supposed to save me time, even having to hit a key to stop auto move or weapon preferences gets to be too much once you do it over and over again. This is why I've modified uScript to avoid these little problems. You would probably have to do something similar if you plan on using scripts to coordinate all your party tactical actions.

Yeah, the uscripts were a bit tedious. I give a lot of praise to it and indeed it could be modified. One of my projects is to take uscripts and make them also spell supportable for NeJ2 and TS and for characters as well. Maybe IA too but contacting anyone about them will be top priority.

When I was deciding which script I was going to read through to figure out how to modify, I had the eSeries or the uscript as my choices. Since eSeries has multiple scripts for different classes while uScript only has one main script for the player, I settled on uScript. The lack of large amounts of comments in the uScript baf was also a help, so was the tabbed text alignment when I read it and edited it with Bg2 script. Much more aesthetically appealing.

I'm currenting editing uScript as I play IA 6. I have it set so that if you turn off spellcasting with S key, the mages would spam magic missiles and flame arrow until the spell was depleted. Good for sorcerers and for when you need to have your mages chain cast damage spells but don't want to constantly pause and tell the mage to cast again.

Once S is on the off mode, defensive spells and other spells are automatically disabled for the mage, which means they'll usually just cast damage spells and without checking the enemy's stats that might have precluded a cast.

In vanilla or even tactics, many of the enemies don't have resistance, physical or elemental, so it was better to put more stringent requirements on the script for casting damage spells. in IA, it is far better for casters to focus fire their damage spells to get IA mobs out of the way, since they take a lot of killing.

When I was palying Tactics, I modified uScript so that it wouldn't waste magic missiles and flame arrows, except on golems and what not. Many mobs could be killed by my archers or melee guys, so there was no point to wasting a spell on them.

This post has been edited by Ymarsakar: Apr 28 2008, 06:25 PM