Hello everyone.


I played through IA a year ago I think, and this summer I'm going to give it another shot with the newly added challenges and items. I still have a week or two before my character is done in BG1 and then I'll port it to BG2. I'm playing a Ranger Stalker and I would like to have the more logical effects of the ranger class enabled reputation-wise. It would therefore be nice if I could enhance IA with the Virtue Mod. Neither Virtue nor IA mention an incompatibility towards one another (neither mention the other anywhere that I could find), but I'm of course wary on mixing mods of different sources. Weird things may happen...


My question is hence: Has anyone played with both mods and has anyone come across some incompatibilities or oddities?

The problem is also the order of installation, Virtue states that it should be installed last, but so does IA. I think the proper order would be Virtue - IA, but since Virtue is Weidu it might as well be better if I went with IA-Virtue instead.


Lastly, I'm interested in adding some other minor mods and I'll just list them to ask whether these too have some disparities with IA:
- the new Rogue Rebalancing
- Exnem's Vault
- Tower of Deception

Cheers

Tower of Deception is compatible, Rogue Rebalancing is not (see "Mods" thread). Not sure about the other two.

As Sikret is bringing out IA 4.3 in the near future, presumably with a revised (in)compatibility list, you might want to check that list then.

cheers

IA is also WeiDu. I played both mods without seeing any problems. But lots of what Sikret adds makes Virtue more or less ignorable. I think Virtue is great when not playing with IA. I would recommend installing IA otherwise yuo can't be sure what happens - and nobody get's flamed /me runs for cover

I thought that the list in the readme file was the entire compatibility list. I guess I will look through the mods thread to see what works. Thank you both for the suggestions.

Shaitan, If you say that Sikret has added enoguh content to 'decrease' the impact of Virtue, then I will take your word for it. Maybe I'll try a short rundown with both to see the difference.

Cheers!

I think Sikret literally became aware of the incompatibilities between his mod and Rogue Rebalancing like today or yesterday. I think one or two others have been added to the incompatible list (BG2 Tweakpack, for example), which will most likely be notated as such in the upcoming 4.3 release.

Does anyone know which component of BG2 Tweakpack is incompatible? I searched for old posts on the subject but couldn't find any details. With the number of components I'm not surprised that something doesn't work right, but I'd expect that other parts would still work ok.

Edit: I just read Sikret's comments in the Mods thread and saw that he doesn't know either what works in the BG2Tweakpack and what doesn't. You may want to try experimenting a little and if you can find anything that definately works, and others that definately don't I'm sure lots of others would want to know your results. A great place to start would be the Ease of Use components that Sikret recommends for use with IA, since Ease of Use was depreciated into the BG2TweakPack a while back with Wes's permission and the BG2Tweakpack is the currently supported edition.

As for Virtue, last I checked it should still work ok even if installed after IA or other content mods, though it may not be applied uniformly to all mod content as certain situations won't be taken into account. I seem to remember Littiz needing to do some special work to make the Sword Angel kit to use Virtue if installed, but it was more of a "use Virtue if installed, else use rep system" type of a deal.

Well, of course there are the items that Sikret points out from Weimer's ease of use, which equally apply to the BG2 Tweakpack (which it is included in). There is the avatar morphing script, which doesn't seem to work at all with IA installed (at least, that has been the experience in my game).

A bug that I stumbled on is with the P&P style protection items (the feature that allows you to toggle the AC on and off so you can stack save bonuses). Once an item is toggled Cromwell will never recognize it again as a valid component for recipes (I assume this applies to Cespenar as well, but I didn't bother to test). So I could have 3 rings of protection +1, but if I toggle one or more of them, I'll never be able to those toggled rings to forge a ring of protection +2. My workaround to that was to simply stop toggling protection items if I thought I might want to use them in a recipe later. No biggy. Oh, and when I looked in Shadow Keeper I noticed that there are 3 rings of protection +1 listed, so I assume one is the original (which works with Cromwell), and the other 2 are "modified" versions used for toggling (1 that removes the AC bonus, and another that replaces the AC bonus).

The other thing that I noticed is that later in the game many of my IA modified protection items are able to stack (though technically they shouldn't because I installed PnP style protection items). So, for example, I could have a character wearing a cloak of protection +3, a ring of protection +3 and a ring of protection +4, all at the same time with the AC and save bonuses for each stacking. This isn't surprising, however, since with IA installed last, any of Sikret's modified items are going to comply with the rules that he coded them with.

Lastly, I have installed the "remove helmet animation" component, but Sikret's modified dragon helm shows an animation (again, not surprising based on the logic I present above). There are probably other modified helms that this applies to, but the improved dragon helm is the only one I personally used. This actually worked out as a cool side benefit for me, because while I sort of hate seeing 4 - 5 party members in those BG helms, having just 1 with it was sort of cool, for variety's sake.

So, in my experience, there aren't any game breaking bugs between IA and BG2 Tweakpack (except for the items Sikret has specifically called out, which I didn't install), but there are numerous quirks. In general, if you're determined to use both of these mods, just try to stay away from components in tweakpack that modify items.

I know for many of the components, in order for them to be modified they need to be present for BG2Tweakpack to detect them. So if for example you wanted the IA helmets to have no graphics, then you could install that component after IA was installed. It gets kind of convoluted but I'm sure one of the BGT+everymodinexistance experts would find it a walk in the park.

It's also good to hear that the components of Ease of Use that Sikret recommends works just as well from IA. That makes for one less mod to worry about downloading and installing.

For me, BG2tweakpack does not have many components over Ease of Use, so I don't mind that IA suggests using the latter. Many BG2tweakpack changes are cosmetic or small tweaks anyhow and a bunch are especially added for tutu content. The prominent ones that many people use are still in Ease of Use.

I think it might be worth to wait for Anvil v4.3, so I'll do that and in the meantime I'll figure out what other mods work and whatnot.

Thanks all for the info.