Best Mods for increasing difficulty?
nptitim
Member Posts: 111
What are the best mods to install for increasing difficulty of the fights so enemies have better AI or more of them or harder, etc? I don't like way the "insane" difficulty works. I heard Ascension was good but I wasn't sure if that was working with BGEE at this point. This question is in relation to BGEE and not anything else. Thanks
1
Comments
SCS makes the game more tactical and has 1. the advantages of primarily improving on the AI and avoiding to have the enemies cheat (for the most part they don't do things that are off-limits to the player nor against the ruleset), 2. the advantage of being very customizable, so you can make is just as difficult as you want it to be (I pick most AI improvements, without the pre-buffs and only some of the tactical improvements myself).
Hard Times makes prices more expensive and powerful items more rare, reflecting an economy in crisis (the Iron Crisis, not earth's 2009's still ongoing crisis). Combined with SCS, this makes the game much more challenging.
I myself bought BGEE in pre-order, but will stick to Tutu until I can apply those mods (among others like NPC1-project).
What's funny is that in BG:EE I'm still in the SCS mindset. Take the very first real fight you have in SCS, after the Elminster encounter. Anywhere from 12-14 nasties just swoop down on you. In BG:EE, I steeled myself, pushed forward...and was jumped by one Gibberling.
/shakehead
Of course, kiting the group with one character while the other one shoots is a classic but against 14 enemies!?!? As you wrote, the attacking group would for sure break up and go after each char. Ok, now you say they come in 2 waves, so that helps but can we kill the first wave before the second one comes? It looks like to me that it would boil down to:
1. run around till the pack of enemies aggro on one char
2. the other char shoots
3. loose agro
4. rince and repeat, endlessly
I mean a charname elf fighter would have good enough a thac0 to quicken the process but then one may very well get aggro on charname and Imoen will miss a lot more. With Imoen and a mage, this is gonna be an awful lot of missing all the way through and tons of running once the sleep spells have been exhausted.
So all in all, it seems to me that one would need quite a bit of luck and/or a lot of patience to win that fight with only two characters. Yes, patience, not cleverness because at level 1, we have too little tools to be tactically clever. Not that there is anything wrong with that. For example, I have soloed Dragon Age Origin with every possible class and that involved running for hours (of real time!) while special attacks cool down withered away. I don't know why but I am less inclined to apply such grinding tactics in BG.
Anyway, if I understood correctly SCS has fine-grained tweaks. I am mostly interested in making enemy mages more clever and I hope there is a way to play down some other aspects I find more questionable.
1) BP was written for BG2, even though there's some BG1 overlap. To make it work for BG1 (and BGEE) would involve a complete redo from the ground up
2) Everyone seems to already like SCS, and despite its age few have even heard of BP as an AI mod (c.f., a poll in these forums). I have little incentive to spend 100's of hours on a mod that practically nobody will even try or use.
That's why I stuck to just party AI, this time around. There was a much higher demand and greater need for a quality set of these, and less viable options to fill that void.
On the side, I am working on a much more modern, much more utilitarian (end-user friendly) install of the original BP mod for BG2/ToB. If that becomes well-received and downloaded/used, I'll reconsider this stance.