Hi,

One of the thing I like most in IA is the difficult battles at low levels (chap 2-3), to name some: sewer party, mencar's party, conster, firkraag, shade lord, thax, trademeet crypt, slaver compound, planar sphere....
Of course I also enjoy late game challenges (TR, Orcus, ...), but then you don't have the same feeling of preciousness regarding the use of your single improved haste, pfmw or pfme scroll, you don't have to plan your adventure so you may have the mandatory RRoR scrolls, no greater restoration, a time where 1000 gp make a huge difference since with those you can get life saving potions, and so on...

Problem if you want to have them all in chap 3 (which I did for the first time in my current run-through) is improved spellhold .
Like some others did, I have to say it's not my cup of tea (fighting very tough ennemies, spawning infinitely for no XP). But I completly agree with the principle that you should enter spellhold with level 13-14 party to enjoy the mod (btw, even if I didn't agree, this is how it's meant to be).

Why not just reduce XP of party (and levels) before going into spellhold in case it's too high with current limit?
This way those (like me) who like to complete everything before could do it at the cost of loss of experience, and still keep IA level balance regarding party level in spellhold, those who prefer to keep some fights for later on (and preserve experience) would feel no change.

I don't know if it's doable by any means in the mod but I would like to know other opinions about this.


PS: please excuse me if this topic has to be moved somewhere else

I understand this. It's exactly the reason some players prefer BG to BG2. I like both types of battles and enjoy battles at high levels as well as battles at low levels.



Unfortunately this is not a good idea, because a party who have left all those quests to be done in chapter 6 will gain their xp and will have much higher levels at the end of SOA than a party who have done the quests in chapter 3 and have lost the xp at the beginning of spellhold.

My opinion of improved spellhold: I hate it as much you do.

I also hate it when I get tower rushed by adjacent enemies, or when an attractive woman I'm trying to pick up happens to be engaged, or when some institutional fund trader pennies my bids with huge walls of size. But if these things never happened, the respective endeavor would lose versatility and challenge. You must never remove the threat of "something you hate" from occurring if you seek challenge. You just lose even a differential amount of challenge, and everything becomes less interesting

I'm also not convinced it's technically possible, though I'd be interested if I'm wrong.

From a technical point of view nearly everything is possible, question is, whether or not the result is worth the hassle.

One of possibilities - generate a list of level drain immunity items, make a party to drop them all upno the start of SH, apply required level drain and immunity to restoration, refresh that immunity until party finally escapes. Roughly that's it.

PS and of course one can always go with making a cutscene, during which every party member will be 'studied', while in reality - stripped of extra levels one by one, till reaches the required point, storing the info along the way. Then, at the end of SH - another cutscene, this time restoring those levels, using variables stored before.

PPS the second method actually seems pretty reliable, as I did the similar thing and was satisfied with the result quite enough.

Opcode #104 could be used for this purpose after checking every party member's xp in separate scripting blocks, though I agree that it wouldn't lead to a perfect solution as it doesn't adjust the levels of experience to match them with the new xp.



Apart from being inelegant, this solution will not work because there are vampires in spellhold and the immunity to restoration applied to party members will prove problematic as they won't be able to restore the lost levels caused by those vampires.