Basic questions

Fysh

1. If you clear an area do the creatures respawn?

2. How can you tell how tough an opponent is, or what their current health is?

Tresset

1. Yes, random encounters will occasionally respawn, but many creatures do not respawn.

2. There is no real way to tell how tough they are aside from their xp reward or their treasure (which you only get after killing them). As for health if you hover your cursor over the creature without moving it or press the tab key with the cursor over the creature you will get a rough estimate as to how much health they have left. The only way to tell exactly how much health they have left is by enabling the cheats and using control-M on them.

Southpaw

1) only basic/easy enemies respawn (so no hard encounters - usually just some wolves, bandits, skeletons or a ghast or two)
2) You can not. Only assessment is, when you point at the enemy, it will tell you how much damaged he/she is. This goes :
Uninjured, Barely Injured, Injured, Badly Injured, Near Death.
If you really want to guess how much HP the enemy has, watch it and count how much dmg you had to do to drop him to Injured status (around 50%). The double and a bit is his/her maximum.

Fysh

Thanks I don't really care about hp, and only wanted to know how near death an enemy was.

franco

I think @Southpaw has indicated how you can determine their current health as well as their total HP's. Often, that scales with their toughness. But then the rest of your question about how tough they are? You do tend to also learn with experience. First what form of damage does he deal. I especially note how long he takes to score a hit and how much damage he delivers with that hit. Also, how easy is he to hit. If that combination seems formidable I estimate whether the magic users need to step up to make a difference. If they still look too tough, I would back off and come back later with better equipment, more experience and more HP's.

Fysh

Yeah that's the plan to try and avoid fights I have no chance of winning!

ZanathKariashi

Random encounters respawn, and level scale, slightly...but can still potentially obliterate you instantly, depending on how the battle goes (getting a 10 kobold/bandit/hobgoblin ambush SUCKS, cause they will rain ranged death upon you before you can get to the edge of the screen or close ranks....best bet is to try and kill them with ranged attacks first), static encounters don't (If it has a specific Name (rather then just Generic enemy type) or talks to you, it's probably static). Also some areas like the Gnoll fortress and Gullykin respawn VERY fast (just a couple minutes), if the spawn areas aren't within LOS....most of the others take a few days to respawn.

CaptRory

If I get ambushed by bandits I drop a couple of sleep spells. Knocks out 75% of them.

BelgarathMTH

You need to know what kinds of creatures cause hold, fear, poison, and charm effects, which usually mean instant death. Most factors are much less relevant than these. Any spellcaster can use hold, fear, and charm to wipe your party singlehandedly. Several creatures can also cause these death effects.

I'd give you a list, but this is a no-spoiler forum.

Also beware giant creatures of any kind. They can usually one-shot your party members in melee.

Watch the armor class of your melee people. The lower the better. A single armor class factor can mean the difference between getting hit one in five times or one in ten times. Armor class is huge in BG1. Keep everybody with an armor class higher than 0-2 out of melee of any kind. Armor class is more important than hit points for most of BG1.

Gish

If you have a fair knowledge of fantasy novels Andor have read much on mythology it will help you figure out who poisons petrified and so on. There is no sure way to be ready for each encounter. BerZerkers can ignore a number of nasty effects tho. Having two healers is my universal strategy. An beating the bad guy to the punch on using horror and sleep for a long way. Archers are great for interrupting Mage spell casting