Corona quarantine BG2 Options

[psychlopes]

hello,
can you add a tweak to remove the improved spellhold if I go with higher experience than recommended.
thanks

[critto]

Sure, I'll add a component to IA Tweaks soon.

[psychlopes]

thank you very much.
also, I did not see if the four mod is now included or should I still install it separately.
also, if it was added, are there still class restrictions??

[critto]

also, I did not see if the four mod is now included or should I still install it separately.

It was merged into the core mod. There are no class restrictions, you will see all encounters. The custom items were removed, however, in favour of other rewards, more consistent with the original IA.

[critto]

The component to disable the hardened version of Spellhold is now available in IA Tweaks. Enjoy.

[psychlopes]

[Azoth]

critto,
somehow i cannot memorize a second lvl 3 mage spell with Aerie. I see a free slot but i cannot assign a spell. It plays the selection sound but nothing is happening.
She is M7/C7 and should have 4/3/2/1 mage spells.

Not sure if this is IA related...

[critto]

We've just found this bug in our internal testing. I am looking into it, will publish a patch once I figure out what's going on. Make sure you have a save prior to entering the circus for the first time, it might require you re-entering and re-hiring Aerie once the bug is located.

[critto]

Well, I have found the reason. It was a mistake during patching the original Aerie's creature file. The slow spell was removed from her spell book, but not from a list of memorized spells. This causes the bug: the spell is sitting in the slot, but can't be seen because the game has nothing to reference it against. I've pushed the patch to the master on github. You can grab it from there and replay the sequence starting from the point prior to entering the room where you meet Aerie in the ogre form for the first time.

Or you can edit the save directly in Near Infinity. Game -> Open File -> Open External File, find the baldur.gam in the appropriate save's folder. Once it's opened, in the right upper corner (the "player characters" list) double click on "*ERIE6", go to the Edit tab, scroll down until you see "CRE resource" and double click it. In the newly opened window, scroll down the long list until you see "Memorization info 9". When you click it, you should see "Spell level: 2" and two third level wizard spells listed, one of them is Slow (SPWI312). If it is, double click the "Memorization info 9" line, select the Slow spell in the newly opened list and press the Remove button below. Now, you can close all windows (three in total) until you see the first one, with the "Player characters" in the upper right corner. Here, go to the Edit tab, press Save and confirm the overwrite. You should see the message the the file was saved and then a correct path to the baldur.gam

The issue should be resolved.

[Azoth]

Thanks for the detailed instructions. Did the trick and i can select a 2nd lvl3 mage spell with Aerie.

[HTRT]

Great to see you guys are still putting in the interest

I would say don't forget the extra +4 to saves enemy mages get when they use improved invisibility. The spell used by the player is fine, but the spell used by opponents does several things, including invulnerability to ruby ray and stuff. It used to be fine but for some reason with ee the problem arose. Locally, it was simply a matter of removing the +4 to each save in the special enemy-exclusive spell version's effects as the improved invisibility effect itself provides it.

Good luck with all that !

[critto]

Hey HTRT!

I've thought I'd fixed all those a long time ago. I'll re-check once again just to make sure.

[psychlopes]

hello,
when I try to install IA tweaks it gives me an error message:

ERROR ** [SETUPIATWEAKS.TP2] not found.
Make sure that you have unpacked the archive correctly and
that you are not trying to run this file from inside an archive.
Press ENTER to exit.

I installed only IA before it .

[critto]

Rename SetupIATweaks.exe to Setup-IATweaks.exe

This is fixed in the latest commit on the github, but the release zip is still a bit outdated. I'll renew it later so there's no confusion.

[psychlopes]

thank you, that fixed it.
I couldn't find the option for removing the hardened version of spellhold though.

[psychlopes]

nevermind. I just downloaded the master version and it has it.
thank you

[critto]

2 HTRT:

I've looked through the spells and only found Mass Invisibility still applying extra bonuses to saving throws. This will be fixed in the upcoming release of v7. Do you have any other spells in mind that I should check?

[HTRT]

Hmm true...Nice find with mass invisibility. I'm probably using an old version i.e. the same version where several item restrictions didn't work well like the truth/judgement day for good aligned fighters, boots of ranger lord for rangers, hood of the honorless for (all) thieves, etc.
I believe these item restrictions have been fixed later, cause I remember reading something about that.

SPWII41 was the culprit, but apparently it is working for example in Improved Anvil-Master instead of my old version, so nevermind !

I'm reading my last notes for that archer run before I stopped and only information I didn't share about possible inconsistencies would be the following :

-A vampire called Vampire had the string Panic after Dorn's aura of despair despite (obviously) not getting actually scared.

-Flaming fists from Rasaad is dispellable but the icon doesn't wear off if dispelled, although the actual effects are dispelled. It doesn't seem to be something that should be dispelled if we compare it to other "innate-physical-fighter-type" abilities in the mod.
Mazzy's strength, invoke courage and righteous magic abilities are dispellable as well (and maybe shouldn't).

-Guardian of the ring tried remove magic on Rasaad's undispellable innate IH. It is quite likely that many IA dispellers including mages and purge magic users would likewise recognize a monk's IH and waste their efforts on that. Riskbreakers have a real innate improved haste (which is dispellable; understandably for balance purposes) and the monks have some flavour ability flurry of blows that is in terms of gameplay an improved haste. Don't know how you want to deal with that, but minimally monsters probably shouldn't recognize the monk's ability as a real IH if it's undispellable.

I don't think I will be continuing that run unfortunately. I would still like to say : Based on that incomplete archer run and countless tests/experiments in other runs, to me it certainly wouldn't seem exaggerated to go with a relatively universal fix for missile weapons in IA.

Something to take into account beforehand : missile weapons ARE usable and (quite) useful in many fights early on and mid game. Alas, many opponents are absolutely impervious to them and their usability late game is abysmal.

The idea I had would be to implement some kind of : new missile resistance = 1-((1-n)/2) where n is the slashing/piercing/crushing resistance if they are equal to each other. For example, a monster with 60 resistance to slashing, piercing and crushing would acquire a 80% missile resistance instead of 100%; monsters that are seemingly designed with weapons in mind, for example gem golems, ultra golems, would still remain immune to missile.

The reasoning behind this change would be to make some players happy and feel less obligated by IA to play a certain way and according to my experiences, taking into account the monster strengths, regeneration, sustainability, pressure to damage them quickly, impossibility to leave most fights, specific vs missile AC bonuses to many opponents, it wouldn't unbalance the game. The main idea of making most monsters totally invulnerable to missiles was to avoid cheesy uses of missiles, but with such a ruleset and the formidable challenge posed by many IA monsters, I highly doubt this kind of vulnerability would allow for drastically easy encounter solving. Remember that even with equal resistance to all types of physical damage, melee weapons will almost always do (a lot) more damage, so this difference increases further if the missile resistance is better than the 3 others.

It would not be possible to take down the rakshasha prince with enough +4 missile attacks and enough tacho and attacks per round. In a realistic scenario, you could see for example an archer reliably damaging the prince non-stop, but this amount of damage would only partially work out the regeneration of the prince, being far from enough to completely cancel it.

Anyway, just an idea !

Another thing I wanted to talk about is I recently finished a bg1-sod-bg2-tob walkthrough. The protagonist was a necromancer and I was able to play the entire saga without any kind of inconsistency whatsoever. Sensible stuff such as being a necromancer was properly checked. I did get one inconsistency, but it isn't IA related I think : I found 2 helms of balduran in its usual container. Other than that, everything behaved flawlessly. The 500K experience on party definitly wasn't game breaking at all. It did make the early game easier, but overall the run felt quite legit and satisfying. I decided to test improved spellhold since I had that xp boost. Party was able to defeat everything theoritically doable before spellhold, including mage stronghold up to the old one battle, twisted rune, firkraag, alhoon, umar, kangaxx, slaver hq, WK3, post firkraag adventures, etc. The only exclusion was orcus. This type of run was harder and more satisfying than the usual 2 350 000 spellhold ones, imo. Jon Irenicus in harder spellhold is really hard because he summons a TON of golems and party only had 4 800 000 xp, which meant very few HLAS to get rid of the golems.

I tested two characters intensively in this run :

A berseker 9 dual class thief and Jaheira.

Berseker-9 ->thief : Use any item is currently "broken", but I think you are aware of that. Even though it is "broken" and that character can use very interesting combinations of items, I didn't feel like this character was breaking my game. As a matter of fact, he was among the weakest of my arguably powerful party. This guy was able to use the holy avenger (IA upgrade with the 5% chance to dispel) for most of the game and it was a very very nice weapon. The 5% dispel includes dispelling stuff such as hardiness and spell protections, so when it does land, for example on Rozvankee, it wreaks havoc. Interestingly enough, this holy avenger IA upgrade allows this character to backstab despite being a two handed sword. To keep the pleasure of having a thief, I refrained myself from using items that would permantently disable thief buttons, such as necro helmet, cernd's cloak, etc. Even with such restrictions, this character was a master of magic resistance and was able to reach very high amounts of physical resistance although it wasn't necessary to use that. The sunlight cursed helmet from the four helped with his low tach0 and later in the game he was able to use tenser's transformation with a noble staff. All of that seems really original and exciting, but ultimately this character proved strong, fun, but not overpowered at all, because : no warrior HLAS. Lack of warrior HLAS and low number of attacks per round (even if he could borrow jaheiras' gloves) restricted his power. MANY opponents are susceptible to backstab, you just have to test a little. Whenever an opponent was a target for backstab, this opponent got ripped apart, though once again it didn't unbalance my game and I still think he was my weakest fighter overall. Since I was going with improved spellhold I could have dualled at level 13 and make him a kensai/thief instead. I do not think the character would have been a lot more powerful. Of course, a far fetched non-legit exaggeration such as a 28 kensai->29 thief would be an atrociously powerful character.

Jaheira : Was a very powerful early game character. Her clan hunter was insanely helpful and remained pretty strong for the entire game. In mid game and certainly late game, I observed that her lack of spell casting alacrity combined with her reliance on over-preparation to become a fighting juggernaut made her a second class character, although still very strong overall. What I mean is that ultimately in the game you want somoene either ready to do great in physical combat with minimal prepration, or somoene capable of doing a lot in a little time in terms of spellcasting. There were many times where she faded away with a dispel/purge/script dispel and had trouble having great impact on the battle. Many of her critical buffs last one turn, so you don't get the juggernaut jaheira for long. I loved her usage of giant strength (rarely have anyone to cast that early on). I know that many people consider her to be very powerful and so do I, but I don't see her as a must have for a very difficult run. I feel shy to share this because people regard her as too strong, but I would have really liked to see some nice useful spells on the clan hunter who is a high level druid; the clan hunter spell selection seemed a little dull to me.

Now for the present, I made a very small private personnal private mod to include the vagrant kit in bg1, mostly following IA code. I haven't done an entire playthrough to testify properly for it, but I have made many tests and for now it seems :

1) The vagrant is totally legitimate as far as IA bg2 goes, even for stuff as sensible as the IAMVAGRANT variable, vagrant-specific items, specific quests, etc. This is great as maybe one day we could have the possibility of playing the IA party for the entire saga, see how they fared on the swoard coast before becoming strong heroes
2) The icewind dale spells from SCS in bg1 ee and sod can be exported without risk in a bg2 improved anvil game. The game will simply consider these spells do not exist as the program is missing the ressources and it will gracefully avoid their existence. They were all removed from spellbooks in a seemingly totally bugless way and the characters seem flawless.

So that's it, nice to see you guys are still working on IA ! Good luck and have a nice summer !

This post has been edited by HTRT: Jun 25 2020, 02:06 AM

[critto]

I believe these item restrictions have been fixed later, cause I remember reading something about that.

Yes, those were fixed.

SPWII41 was the culprit, but apparently it is working for example in Improved Anvil-Master instead of my old version, so nevermind !

Yes, that was a long time ago. I believe the II issue was one of the first fixed after release of EE.

-A vampire called Vampire had the string Panic after Dorn's aura of despair despite (obviously) not getting actually scared.

He's probably missing a specific protection from that particular string. Application of these effects is not centralised so things get forgotten, the more there are of them. I'll try to find and fix it for consistency's sake.

-Flaming fists from Rasaad is dispellable but the icon doesn't wear off if dispelled, although the actual effects are dispelled. It doesn't seem to be something that should be dispelled if we compare it to other "innate-physical-fighter-type" abilities in the mod.

I do not really remember what are the flaming fists you're talking about but I'll check this ability.

Mazzy's strength, invoke courage and righteous magic abilities are dispellable as well (and maybe shouldn't).

IIRC, these were indended to be dispellable but maybe they shoulnd't be. There's too much undispellable stuff in IA and this is something I don't really like.

-Guardian of the ring tried remove magic on Rasaad's undispellable innate IH. It is quite likely that many IA dispellers including mages and purge magic users would likewise recognize a monk's IH and waste their efforts on that. Riskbreakers have a real innate improved haste (which is dispellable; understandably for balance purposes) and the monks have some flavour ability flurry of blows that is in terms of gameplay an improved haste. Don't know how you want to deal with that, but minimally monsters probably shouldn't recognize the monk's ability as a real IH if it's undispellable.

I'll check it out, thanks. This should be fixed either in the ability itself or in the AI.

I don't think I will be continuing that run unfortunately. I would still like to say : Based on that incomplete archer run and countless tests/experiments in other runs, to me it certainly wouldn't seem exaggerated to go with a relatively universal fix for missile weapons in IA.

Something to take into account beforehand : missile weapons ARE usable and (quite) useful in many fights early on and mid game. Alas, many opponents are absolutely impervious to them and their usability late game is abysmal.

I've had drafts of possible changes to the mechanics of missile weapons for some time now, we even discussed this internally in our workroom. It's hard to find a solution that works while trying to minimize potential for abuse that was fought against in IA for a long time. But I'm not a fan of using complicated mechanics to police the player's behavior that's why I haven't done anything about this for a long time.

Of course, there's a radical approach to just stop caring about it, bring back the missile weapons in their original form, applying resistance to missiles only based on the enemy's resistance to piercing weapons, and then try to bring something new as a way to enrich the playing experience.

The idea I had would be to implement some kind of : new missile resistance = 1-((1-n)/2) where n is the slashing/piercing/crushing resistance if they are equal to each other. For example, a monster with 60 resistance to slashing, piercing and crushing would acquire a 80% missile resistance instead of 100%; monsters that are seemingly designed with weapons in mind, for example gem golems, ultra golems, would still remain immune to missile.

Yes, this is something that would re-configure the missile resistance in a very basic and very doable manner.

The reasoning behind this change would be to make some players happy and feel less obligated by IA to play a certain way and according to my experiences, taking into account the monster strengths, regeneration, sustainability, pressure to damage them quickly, impossibility to leave most fights, specific vs missile AC bonuses to many opponents, it wouldn't unbalance the game. The main idea of making most monsters totally invulnerable to missiles was to avoid cheesy uses of missiles, but with such a ruleset and the formidable challenge posed by many IA monsters, I highly doubt this kind of vulnerability would allow for drastically easy encounter solving. Remember that even with equal resistance to all types of physical damage, melee weapons will almost always do (a lot) more damage, so this difference increases further if the missile resistance is better than the 3 others.

It would not be possible to take down the rakshasha prince with enough +4 missile attacks and enough tacho and attacks per round. In a realistic scenario, you could see for example an archer reliably damaging the prince non-stop, but this amount of damage would only partially work out the regeneration of the prince, being far from enough to completely cancel it.

Anyway, just an idea !

Thanks for sharing. This might be something that I'll try to do in the future once I'm done with the current changes.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is I recently finished a bg1-sod-bg2-tob walkthrough. The protagonist was a necromancer and I was able to play the entire saga without any kind of inconsistency whatsoever. Sensible stuff such as being a necromancer was properly checked. I did get one inconsistency, but it isn't IA related I think : I found 2 helms of balduran in its usual container. Other than that, everything behaved flawlessly. The 500K experience on party definitly wasn't game breaking at all. It did make the early game easier, but overall the run felt quite legit and satisfying. I decided to test improved spellhold since I had that xp boost. Party was able to defeat everything theoritically doable before spellhold, including mage stronghold up to the old one battle, twisted rune, firkraag, alhoon, umar, kangaxx, slaver hq, WK3, post firkraag adventures, etc. The only exclusion was orcus. This type of run was harder and more satisfying than the usual 2 350 000 spellhold ones, imo. Jon Irenicus in harder spellhold is really hard because he summons a TON of golems and party only had 4 800 000 xp, which meant very few HLAS to get rid of the golems.

It is strange that you didn't find any inconsistencies at all, maybe you just haven't noticed them. In any case, I've addressed the issue of character import in the recently published 6.5. There shouldn't be anything missing out if you import a character from the previous part of the saga (this only matters for Necromancer right now, I guess).

Berseker-9 ->thief : Use any item is currently "broken", but I think you are aware of that. Even though it is "broken" and that character can use very interesting combinations of items, I didn't feel like this character was breaking my game. As a matter of fact, he was among the weakest of my arguably powerful party.

Yes, this was made possible because I've removed many constraining checks from the global scripts. I'm not sure how UAI works against restricting item to specific character via a new EE engine opcode 319, whether it overrides it or not. And, of course, I've never addressed the issue of disabling the buttons. I'm glad to hear that it was fun for you to play it. I don't really care much about sustaining any effort to make UAI useless, but if I were to work on the thief kits more consistently and if something like this were to happen in the future, I'd probably remove UAI at all. It's just too much of a wild card to balance against.

Jaheira : Was a very powerful early game character. Her clan hunter was insanely helpful and remained pretty strong for the entire game. In mid game and certainly late game, I observed that her lack of spell casting alacrity combined with her reliance on over-preparation to become a fighting juggernaut made her a second class character, although still very strong overall. What I mean is that ultimately in the game you want somoene either ready to do great in physical combat with minimal prepration, or somoene capable of doing a lot in a little time in terms of spellcasting. There were many times where she faded away with a dispel/purge/script dispel and had trouble having great impact on the battle.

Yes, I realize this might be the case. Unfortunately, as it stands now, the mechanics of late-game IA rely very heavily upon enemies having a lot of lasting power via powerful resistances and scripted abilities which the party might overcome only with the use of more powerful class options that have access to similarly powerful melee/casting abilities. I have consiously avoided adding similarly overpowered abilities to the avenger kit or to Mazzy's kit. But I realize that it might be an unbalanced approach if the other side of the problem isn't addressed properly as well. With all that being said, maybe it makes sense to give the avenger kit possibility to use spell sequencers/triggers as a way to counteract certain scripted behaviors.

1) The vagrant is totally legitimate as far as IA bg2 goes, even for stuff as sensible as the IAMVAGRANT variable, vagrant-specific items, specific quests, etc. This is great as maybe one day we could have the possibility of playing the IA party for the entire saga, see how they fared on the swoard coast before becoming strong heroes

Yes, it is fairly easy to overcome the issue of importing a character if you're aware about these hidden application of scripting states. I've removed these crutches in 6.5, however, they are completely pointless. The whole saga would be cool to play, indeed, I've toyed with this idea for many years. But this would be a very long term project as long as I enjoy spending some of my free time to work on IA.

2) The icewind dale spells from SCS in bg1 ee and sod can be exported without risk in a bg2 improved anvil game. The game will simply consider these spells do not exist as the program is missing the ressources and it will gracefully avoid their existence. They were all removed from spellbooks in a seemingly totally bugless way and the characters seem flawless.

Yes, the EE engine has made many of these things much more sensible. There might still be some internal issues but this is very unlikely.

So that's it, nice to see you guys are still working on IA ! Good luck and have a nice summer !

Likewise. Hopefully, then next time you're around you'll be able to play the real v7 version.

EDIT: just as a follow up, I've fixed Flaming Fists and the vampire called Vampire locally. The guardian of the ring did not react to IH specifically, but I'm still thinking on whether the ability should be undispellable. I've also found some minor discrepancies in how Flurry of Blows and Diamond Body are set up, will fix those for the next version as well.

This post has been edited by critto: Jun 25 2020, 08:41 AM

[HTRT]

I found some old Vagrant run (as early as when demogorgon battle was implemented) and would like to write a small report of information about 2 unusual classes, as the party was vagrant fighter-mage-cleric kensai kensai kensai wild mage.

Fighter-mage-cleric : a very well rounded character overall. I was skeptical at first because of the HLA nerfs for multi-class characters, especially triple class. He will be slightly meh at everything he can claim to do, unless you take time to buff and prepare. If you do prepare, you can have a very powerful and flexible character. With the help of the potion of elven expertise, his levels will remain somewhat relevant as you go through the game. Furthermore, the reward this character gets after demogorgon will help him reach xp cap or very close even in a 6 player party. He gets a quite reasonable 16 HLAS total, one level 9 mage slot, 3 level 7 cleric slots. Again, preparation is needed to make the most of him but his power can reach quite elevated summits. We're speaking of dual wielding black blade of disaster with flail of ages + 5 with righteous magic, using spell immunity and such, getting foreknowledge via the wizard slots, using champion's strength in a fight where you will be silenced to get a +6 tach0 advantage over any fighter who isn't a kensai, reaching the best overall armor class levels excepting swashbucklers, etc. I had a lot of fun playing this guy and I found him well suited with a vagrant party.

Wild mage : Probably the most interesting character I ever played in this mod. If you don't mind messing around and reloading, you can generate some pretty interesting effects such as pre-buffing with wish as early as level 14 or even before (provided you kill alhoon in the sewers), summoning skeleton warriors at the maximum power as early as level 10 with a lucky +5 to caster level, casting a pre-buff spell that ends up area of effect (once a stoneskin was cast on every party member !), stacking the Combat ready! spell on the party which provides +2 to hit and +2 damage to everyone for one turn and a lot more. The wild mage -5 to +5 alteration to caster level upon casting a spell can mean a very strong remove magic as well. My wild mage was wielding the staff of the magi and was a very interesting alternative as the "party mage". With demogorgon's reward, amulet of power, foreknowledge and robe of vecna he reached that prized +5 casting speed. With a different party, he could have used the gloves from the Four which grant another +1 to casting speed. Furthermore, this character could make for an interesting protagonist for an evil party because he could be using the robe of eloquence with the amulet of power, the gloves of spell weaving and eventually foreknowledge for a + 3 casting speed but permanent alacrity. Be warned though, as this character might struggle making memory of the apprenti. I would seriously consider playing with this evil aligned guy in the party as a druid protagonist.

This post has been edited by HTRT: Jul 6 2020, 04:57 AM