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What are the experience levels to spawn stronger mobs?

SymphonyofSwordsSymphonyofSwords Member Posts: 40
in Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Some of the enemy mobs adjust to your party levels. For example, in the Shadow Dungeon, depending on your level, skeleton warriors, greater boneguards or even liches might spawn.

Does anyone know what the exact level requirements are in order to spawn these stronger mobs?

Comments

  • Lord_TansheronLord_Tansheron Member Posts: 4,212
    That's a great question! Would be interesting to see what regulates that, whether its levels, total party XP, average characters XP or what, and in what sort of brackets its moving.
  • karnor00karnor00 Member Posts: 680
    I don't know exactly how it works, but I know there is an option in SCS to increase the difficulty of the encounters by one, two or three notches. Or even all the way to max which can spawn liches on your level 8 party!
  • Tomato9999Tomato9999 Member Posts: 30
    i think knowing this would be a major spoiler. Metagaming is already too powerful and makes the game much easier when it is hard
  • SymphonyofSwordsSymphonyofSwords Member Posts: 40
    No no no, I WANT the bigger mobs to spawn in my game. :-(
  • MusignyMusigny Member Posts: 1,027
    edited January 2015
    karnor00 said:

    I don't know exactly how it works, but I know there is an option in SCS to increase the difficulty of the encounters by one, two or three notches. Or even all the way to max which can spawn liches on your level 8 party!

    Stratagems uses a sliding window 0<-400K<-1M<-2M. (In fact those values are slighlty shifted 400001 and 400002, etc...)
    first degree : the original 1M and 2M xp keypoints become 400K and 1M (and 400K becomes "0")
    second degree : the original 1M and 2M xp keypoints become "0" and 400K
    third degree : you always get the max spawns (originally above 2M) except with undeads (it obeys the first degree rule)
    fourth degree : you always get the max spawns (originally above 2M)
    It also handles another variable used in chapter 6+.
  • molloymolloy Member Posts: 105
    edited January 2015
    argent77 said:

    Level-dependent mobs are usually spawned by scripts (either by the area script or by local triggers). For example, the creatures spawned in front of the letter room in the Shadow Temple are created by the script SPWNDEAD.BCS which looks like this:
    [spoiler]IF XPLT(Player1,400000) Entered([ANYONE]) THEN RESPONSE #100 CreateCreature("skelwa01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("shadow01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("shadow01",[-1.-1],S) END IF XPGT(Player1,399999) XPLT(Player1,1000000) Entered([ANYONE]) THEN RESPONSE #100 CreateCreature("skelwa01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("skelwa01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("shadfi01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("shadfi01",[-1.-1],S) END IF XPGT(Player1,999999) XPLT(Player1,2000000) Entered([ANYONE]) THEN RESPONSE #100 CreateCreature("mumgre01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("icbone01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("skelwa01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("skelwa03",[-1.-1],S) END IF XPGT(Player1,1999999) Entered([ANYONE]) THEN RESPONSE #100 CreateCreature("lich01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("mumgre01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("mumgre01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("skelwa01",[-1.-1],S) CreateCreature("skelwa03",[-1.-1],S) END
    [/spoiler]
    Even without knowing much about scripts you can guess what creatures are spawned for each XP range. For example, "skelwa" is a Skeleton Warrior, "mumgre" is a Greater Mummy and "shadfi" is a Shadow Fiend.

    Also it very much looks like it's dependent on charname-XP (not his level and not the partymembers levels or XP).
    Tomato9999 said:

    i think knowing this would be a major spoiler. Metagaming is already too powerful and makes the game much easier when it is hard

    At the point where you start asking these questions you are pretty much lost for an unmetagamey playstyle, so answering this shouldn't do much harm anymore.
  • GreenWarlockGreenWarlock Member Posts: 1,354
    OK, so it looks like the break points are 400k xp, 1M xp and 2M xp around the SoA parts - assuming these figures generally hold. What would the figures be in Watcher's Keep, at least the early levels?

    My concern is maximizing the XP gains from a party of 6, so clearly I want as many of the higher level encounters as possible to maximize total XP through the game - which also means deferring the places that will have the highest boost effect until as late as possible. Does an early run at Watcher's keep cost me more in terms of ultimate XP there, vs. raising my xp closer to the 2M xp mark to maximize what I will score back in SoA?

    I presume the best thing I can do is shoot for big quest XP points early, as those are fixed bonus amounts, boosting me closer to the levels were variable xp matters.
  • MiridorMiridor Member Posts: 90
    edited January 2017

    Also it very much looks like it's dependent on charname-XP (not his level and not the partymembers levels or XP).

    Are you sure? Something really strange just happened to me in the Windspear dungeon. On level 2 the room on the right end of a hall typically containing a few mummies and other undead, was now populated by around five mummies, a couple of vampires, three or four ancient vampires and several vampire elders. I wasn't really prepared for this, took a beating and reloaded. When I went in again, I was welcomed by a few measly mummies and ghasts.

    I'm not really sure what I did differently but it might be that charname opened the door the second time around (he is an M/T) and triggered the encounter.

    It could perhaps just be a bug caused by a mod.
    I remember having problems once with a bunch of vampires appearing in Undercity in BG1 for no known reason - suddenly that dusty old scroll of protection from undead came in handy :-)
  • SirBatinceSirBatince Member Posts: 882
    The firkraag vampires are actually handled by an invisible special floor trap that creates them. Oddly enough the exact shape of said trap doesn't entirely cover the hallway it's positioned in and as a result it's fairly simple to accidentally miss it.
  • sarevok57sarevok57 Member Posts: 6,006
    SirBatince said:

    The firkraag vampires are actually handled by an invisible special floor trap that creates them. Oddly enough the exact shape of said trap doesn't entirely cover the hallway it's positioned in and as a result it's fairly simple to accidentally miss it.

    ah, this makes sense, because in the past I have had where those vampires didn't spawn in before and I had 2 000 000 XP +
  • MiridorMiridor Member Posts: 90
    SirBatince said:

    The firkraag vampires are actually handled by an invisible special floor trap that creates them. Oddly enough the exact shape of said trap doesn't entirely cover the hallway it's positioned in and as a result it's fairly simple to accidentally miss it.

    Wow, that's interesting. It's not too late to learn new things about the game even after all these years. Do you know if there are other places with the same kind of trap?
  • Lord_TansheronLord_Tansheron Member Posts: 4,212
    If you have debug mode enabled, Ctrl+4 I believe will highlight hidden trigger areas. Not a foolproof way in identifying what is triggered and what not, but a start. Note that this will reveal all parts of the (explored) map that contain areas of special effects - this includes floor traps, doors, clickable information, and even some graphical animations.
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