Challenging versus Cheap?
Pantalion
Member Posts: 2,137
Right now, going through ToB for the first time in a decade, I'm playing Ascension with SCS improved bosses. I've just encountered Draconis, who has apparently sixty Improved Invisibility spells and has summoned about twenty invisible stalkers.
Next, I encounter Abazigal. Or rather, Abazigal encounters me, along with five wyverns with all manner of bizarre traits like permanent level draining attacks, stoneskin and invisibility, and a dragon who is, against all logic, not only immune to imprisonment but if targeted by it becomes immortal (to my forced reloading disappointment). Abazigal himself of course heals and polymorphs into a dragon when you defeat his human form, is immune to time stop, casts every spell instantly, and automatically casts Remove Magic and Silence via script time and time again, and the lot of them automatically charge you the moment you enter, so you'd better hope you knew that ahead of time and pre-buffed.
In a way, that's fair enough, the fights are still very much winnable and are certainly challenging, but at the same time, the way it's accomplished is... Unsatisfying to me.
In fact, so much of SCS's "upgrades" feel that way to me. The game is build around universal rules, and when those rules only apply to the player, it very quickly takes my immersion away.
Every single thief carries around half a dozen potions of invisibility? You know how much that would cost? How are they supposed to make a profit if that's how they handle every fight? It's bad enough that invisibility instantly detargets even though it's not like they moved yet, but doing nothing but spam the ability? That's either unbearably deadly or unbearably tedious, depending on whether you have true sight and stoneskins.
Mages reset into full buffs whenever you see them (including if they happen to go out of sight for half a second while you duck behind a corner to heal or hide)? Where are they getting all these spell slots? Why don't I instantly pop out long lists of instant pre-buffs right before every combat even though I was previously in the middle of dinner?
Why can't I have a bunch of Protection from Magical Weapons spells that automatically activate whenever's (in)convenient, and why, oh why, can't I be immune to Imprisonment with no preparations and no excuses?
But so many "enhanced" combats appear to be predicated around this idea of the player running on different rules to everyone else. Illasera vanishes and turns ethereal at will, Yaga Shura is pretty much immune to non-poison damage. Wyverns with energy draining attacks like vampires, dragons which spam remove magic so often they might as well be Beholders...
Is this necessary?
I think of Firkraag's dungeon, where you enter a room and orcish archers are shooting you from all sides, forcing you to search out the secret doors to their hideout while trying to return fire with your own missiles.
I think of Firkraag himself, a hugely powerful attacker with defences that make most players scratch their heads when they first encounter him. And the vampire lair, where you're forced to marshal your resources around anyone you can protect from level drain as you struggle through some nasty fights towards Bodhi.
I even think of some of the good parts that EE has introduced, some fights I found plenty challenging without any obvious rule-breaking (Neera's ToB questline in particular provided one of the most entertaining fights I've had in the whole expansion), and a fight that did break the rules with a completely unkillable NPC attacking you, but in a way that felt dramatic and fulfilling as you were forced to escape, and that part didn't feel cheap, because it was well justified by the plot, wasn't obviously arbitrary about it, and helped move the quest along to a dramatic conclusion.
What are your feelings about introducing difficulty by breaking the rules? Can an encounter follow the rules of D&D, maintain the integrity of the world it simulates, and still be a challenging, enjoyable fight for experienced players, even at the peak of their power? Could simple tactics and scenario features provide difficulty even to a player who has faced that scenario before? What techniques would you be interested in seeing to make a fun, memorable and challenging encounter?
Next, I encounter Abazigal. Or rather, Abazigal encounters me, along with five wyverns with all manner of bizarre traits like permanent level draining attacks, stoneskin and invisibility, and a dragon who is, against all logic, not only immune to imprisonment but if targeted by it becomes immortal (to my forced reloading disappointment). Abazigal himself of course heals and polymorphs into a dragon when you defeat his human form, is immune to time stop, casts every spell instantly, and automatically casts Remove Magic and Silence via script time and time again, and the lot of them automatically charge you the moment you enter, so you'd better hope you knew that ahead of time and pre-buffed.
In a way, that's fair enough, the fights are still very much winnable and are certainly challenging, but at the same time, the way it's accomplished is... Unsatisfying to me.
In fact, so much of SCS's "upgrades" feel that way to me. The game is build around universal rules, and when those rules only apply to the player, it very quickly takes my immersion away.
Every single thief carries around half a dozen potions of invisibility? You know how much that would cost? How are they supposed to make a profit if that's how they handle every fight? It's bad enough that invisibility instantly detargets even though it's not like they moved yet, but doing nothing but spam the ability? That's either unbearably deadly or unbearably tedious, depending on whether you have true sight and stoneskins.
Mages reset into full buffs whenever you see them (including if they happen to go out of sight for half a second while you duck behind a corner to heal or hide)? Where are they getting all these spell slots? Why don't I instantly pop out long lists of instant pre-buffs right before every combat even though I was previously in the middle of dinner?
Why can't I have a bunch of Protection from Magical Weapons spells that automatically activate whenever's (in)convenient, and why, oh why, can't I be immune to Imprisonment with no preparations and no excuses?
But so many "enhanced" combats appear to be predicated around this idea of the player running on different rules to everyone else. Illasera vanishes and turns ethereal at will, Yaga Shura is pretty much immune to non-poison damage. Wyverns with energy draining attacks like vampires, dragons which spam remove magic so often they might as well be Beholders...
Is this necessary?
I think of Firkraag's dungeon, where you enter a room and orcish archers are shooting you from all sides, forcing you to search out the secret doors to their hideout while trying to return fire with your own missiles.
I think of Firkraag himself, a hugely powerful attacker with defences that make most players scratch their heads when they first encounter him. And the vampire lair, where you're forced to marshal your resources around anyone you can protect from level drain as you struggle through some nasty fights towards Bodhi.
I even think of some of the good parts that EE has introduced, some fights I found plenty challenging without any obvious rule-breaking (Neera's ToB questline in particular provided one of the most entertaining fights I've had in the whole expansion), and a fight that did break the rules with a completely unkillable NPC attacking you, but in a way that felt dramatic and fulfilling as you were forced to escape, and that part didn't feel cheap, because it was well justified by the plot, wasn't obviously arbitrary about it, and helped move the quest along to a dramatic conclusion.
What are your feelings about introducing difficulty by breaking the rules? Can an encounter follow the rules of D&D, maintain the integrity of the world it simulates, and still be a challenging, enjoyable fight for experienced players, even at the peak of their power? Could simple tactics and scenario features provide difficulty even to a player who has faced that scenario before? What techniques would you be interested in seeing to make a fun, memorable and challenging encounter?
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Comments
The game doesn't have the AI to make thieves run and hide, so they use potions instead. It's meant to let them backstab more than once, like a player would if they were using a thief. But vanishing in the middle of combat would be illegal, so they just give the thieves potions instead. It gives you a nice reward for beating them early.
Mages can re-cast their buffs after you disappear because (I assume; I haven't noticed this myself) it replicates what you would presumably do during that time: re-cast your buffs during a break in the middle of the fight. Many people prefer not to install the pre-buffing part of SCS, and instead fight mostly unbuffed enemies. It's a matter of taste. SCS mages shouldn't have unlimited PFMW spells (they get a finite amount, plus a Contingency or Spell Trigger with PFMW in it), but certain demons, like Demogorgon, can cast it every few rounds, without end.
I understand that Yaga-shura's resistances are supposed to decrease over time in Ascension. He should be killable without poison; it just requires more time. You can also kill him with DEX drain via Haer'dalis' Chaos Blade, ideally during a Time Trap.
Ascension is a bit like Tactics: it adds to the difficulty by giving the enemies lots of crazy abilities and immunities. SCS doesn't do that; it's just compatible with Ascension, so players looking for an unrealistic and crazy challenge can fight against enemies with Ascension-style superpowers and SCS-style AI. You can uninstall Ascension and SCS will just make ToB enemies smarter, without giving them new abilities. What you're describing is due to Ascension, not SCS.
There are things that SCS does that aren't exactly legal, but they often replicate legal stuff. Their PFMW Contingencies fire when their previous PFMW runs out, which isn't a condition you can use yourself. They can choose either a double Charm Person or double Magic Missile Minor Sequencer depending on what you're vulnerable to, which isn't legal but is similar to what a player could do using a reload or foreknowledge of the fight. But mostly SCS sticks to vanilla abilities and rules. They don't cast Time Stop instantly.
No reason for immunity to Imprisonment for most dragons. That's just to prevent the fights from ending in a single round. But Abazigal needs to deliver a short dialogue before he dies, and instant death effects prevent this. SCS shouldn't give this immunity to all dragons, however, if you tweak your install.
Personally, I find SCS' approach, which breaks few rules and focuses on better AI, to be much more fun than other approaches. Tactics, Ascension, and Improved Anvil especially give the enemies unreasonable abilities and immunities, and will cheat relentlessly. That's what they're meant to do: up the difficulty through sheer force. This comes at the cost of realism and fairness. It's a necessary tradeoff.
These mods do give you special items as compensation, to make the later encounters more doable, like Sanchuudoku from Kuroisan. Improved Anvil is probably nearly impossible without relying entirely on its items. But they suffer from the same basic weakness: the increase in difficulty tends to just demand bigger numbers, more buffs, and more optimized builds, rather than smarter tactics.
Take out Ascension and you shouldn't see so much of the crazy stuff you describe here.
That was very helpful and informative, thank you.
In my experience (and DMs can be very different in their approaches) D&D is as much about thinking and problem solving as it is about combat. So the way to increase the difficulty of any given quest is not necessarily to make the opponent bigger and badder but rather, harder to get to. For example, this can be done by giving the players choices to make that will determine the route they take and the obstacles they face - with the 'easiest' route being the one that's harder to 'find' (in the intellectual sense).
Maybe the writers should start thinking like old-fashioned DMs.
There is a lot you can do with smart scripting, but it can only take things so far. If you want more challenge, you have to add handicaps. That may chafe with RP and feelings of fairness, but it's for YOUR benefit - after all, you WANT the challenge, right?
I appreciate your taking the time to explain some of the reasoning behind the SCS changes, and I know I'm bringing this on myself, I was just trying to explain how I felt about the various "difficulty" mods out there.
I have to appreciate "cheating to follow the rules", though at the same time some of the ways SCS attempts this make the fights feel a little one dimensional at times. Every single fighter seems to chug them some giant strength, every single thief vanishes instantly as soon physically possible by chugging an invisibility potion, it's either fiendishly dangerous or pointless. It's like Kangaxx, if you know the strategy, it's just ticking boxes - Truesight up, Mages Stoneskinned, thief fight won. It's better than the rudimentary basic AI, but it makes it feel that much more like a videogame. There's never a thief who stands and fights, there's never a thief who tries and fails to hide, and there's never a thief who, just after you first see them, deals 2D8+5 missile damage to everyone in range from the "snare they laid" (unless that character rolls a success on their find traps score?).
Mages instantly having buffs up is the same way. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense, a mage in an ambush should have had time to cast a short term buff and a few long term ones. Other times, it's a bit silly. If you backstab the mage while they're still neutral, they die instantly, the instant they're in combat, they "already had cast" stoneskins, and rare is the mage who hasn't cast up that same combination and doesn't need exactly the same RRR->Breach->Beat strategy.
And yeah, no idea why the random dragon with Abazigal was immune to imprisonment. Far, far too many things are immune to a spell which puts the mage in direct melee with a 9 second cast time. I suppose it's not possible within the engine to have magic users cast "Freedom" from a scroll if it's cast?
But yeah, in keeping with my own topic, a few of the ways I'd like to see difficulty increased are through giving the player tactical scenarios they need to deal with.
A maze containing kobold commandos with Arrows of Detonation shooting through side windows. The secret entrance to reach them is at the far end of the maze, which is full of grease, web, stinking cloud and Greater Malaison traps as well as fire immune critters to slow you down.
Ambushes and where the thieves have set snares, dealing 2d8+5 damage to everyone in range of the thief that fails a detect traps roll.
An underground temple infused by evil, where horrific nightmares and constant ambushes prevent the party from resting, and negative energy causes them all to lose 1 HP per turn, while the entrance has collapsed behind you, forcing you to travel onwards.
Invisible, non-detection cloak wearing thieves in the middle of a dark wood, set to periodically shoot arrows at the nearest party member before turning invisible again and moving away to a new spot.
A completely dark area where all enemies had the same name "Unseen Assailant". Like the map itself, they are completely black in colour, but with Infravision you can see them highlighted in red and determine what they are to deal with them appropriately.
A literal army for the party to deal with, only at the typical level expected of the world in general - dozens of level 5-10 archers with a few lieutenants with magically enhanced +2 missiles, all spawning in together with dozens of level 5-10 fighters with a mix of maces, sword and boards, and halberds charging in. Level 5-10 mages and clerics cast haste and Strength of One spells on the groups while others hit your party with all the nasty, party friendly, wands. Spell striking, paralysis, sleep, glitterdust, fear, cursing, flamestrike and frost as they try to overwhelm the party with sheer numbers.
A maze of mirrors that produces a hostile simulacrum of whoever moves into dead end branches, with all their stats and equipment (and turn to snow when destroyed). Rather than facing off there and then, every simulacrum is transported to the final encounter room ready for a massive battle royale with as many party members as messed up the route. At the same time, hostile squads of Beholders, Illithids and undead appear throughout the maze, making exploration with a single character risky.
A null magic forest full of wyverns, trolls, spiders and other nasties, where every spell has a 100% chance of failure and they need to get through to the other side before the chasing demonic wild hunt has a chance to catch up.
This is the type of challenge I'm hoping to see more of in SoD, where the situation itself is part of the challenge, and any additional benefits that enemies have is explained and justified through the plot.
Do you really let your mages go through locations without Stoneskin that lasts for 10 hours? Won't you use an invis potion if it lets you to backstab again?
The behavior of enemy casters is designed to counteract you as a player, who can throw 10 skull traps from the position where enemies don't see you, to counteract you as a player, who enters the fight with Blur, Mirror Image, Spirit Armour, Haste, several Spell Immunities, Tenser Transformation and what not.
The full-prebuff is just an option in the SCS mod, you can choose not to install it at all.
If you find a mod, or any component, or even most of components, to be too much, you can just uninstall it. This is why, for example, it's recommended to try the SCS with only "general better AI" and "better calls for help" components for the first time.
Other mods, such as Tactics and Ascension are designed for players who look exactly for those OP enemies because they know the game very well and "been there, done that for 100 times". These players often like to use OP character combinations, cheese tactics and such. These things are counteracted by cheese from enemies.
I do had a long discussion with DavidW ages ago regarding "variety over optimization" and it actually led to a few improvements within SCS (since then a lot of SCS mages get a random "kit" and you see some specialized necromancers, conjurers, invokers and enchanters; you can't rest in certain areas; etc.) but overall we simply had two different mods in mind.
SCS isn't trying to re-build quests or encounters to increase the challenge, and it rarely tweaks creatures as well (except few instances specifically mentioned during the install or within the readme). The goal of SCS was to simply IMPROVE AI SCRIPTS as much as possible, FOCUSING ON OPTIMIZATION. It reached that goal wonderfully imo.
Sadly too many encounters feel the same because of the optimization, and others can still be trivialized with the right tactic. (e.g. mind flayers and beholders can do almost nothing against a horde of Skeleton Warriors or Mordy Swords) but that's because, as @Lord_Tansheron says, improving creature scripts "can only take things so far". Prevent the party from resting within mind flayer's city (I think SCS gives this option after I asked for it for years, doesn't it?), add a few powerful thralls and suddenly you have an extremely tough area you cannot simply walk over exploiting glaring weaknesses or using cheap tactics. @semiticgod those mods were ok 15 years ago but are simply terribly designed imo, and to a lesser extent even the fan favourite Item Upgrade suffers from a similar approach. They give players ridiculously powerful items and then they are forced to make enemies cheat to barely pose a threat - or vice versa. Improve Anvil is the worst of all and pretty much requires stupid metagaming (e.g. creatures have tons of "random" resistances and immunities that don't even fit them) and few specific builds (aka the only ones the modder liked).
SCS has its flaws, but it's simply the best AI mod you can have for this game, and as a modder I can say it's also an astonishing work in terms of coding and implementation.
End of my rant.
Those old tactical mods did not benefit from advanced features which were made available after their release. Some were also very keen to limit the interference between mods. In most cases, I think the scripts, themselves, were not coded to cheat on purpose. Furthermore adding some immunities through spells and items was just there as a way to keep things simple.
In fact, the proposed challenges intentionally included more or less blatant breaches in the opponents defenses. Without investigating the files with an editor, finding such weaknesses still takes a lot of time. I think it's a good way to entertain people, at least those who accept to lose ten times before becoming victorious. If you want to make an opponent invulnerable, it just takes a few modications...
Btw people largely underestimate the true origin of immunities. They are granted by vanilla game items, nicely reused by modders. From that perspective, as far as I know, no tactical mod proceeds differently.
A bhaalspawn immune to backstab, time stop, imprisonment etc... personally I applaud.
SCS brought things to a different scale but also introduced side effects.
I think modern modders should reuse its approach and keep all the generic components. I think it would be really great to see it reused as a framework by other mods.
No tactical mod plays fair, just read their code.
Interesting concept but beside the point. I believe the real issue is that people don't play fair. Too many strategies you can read on the forums are rather straightforward, not the result of well thought out combinations. Too often they use a quick win feature that no opponent in the game would or could use. It is difficult to decide where the limit lies but please don't blame modders because they introduced a few counter-measures to help the player enjoy the real challenge.
So far we appear to have several types of brute force method:
Insane or Heart of Fury type difficulties just makes all the numbers bigger,
Ascension, and apparently things like Tactics, add some scripted effects that break the rules to make the encounters more challenging, but loses verisimilitude and stops the game from operating "by the rules" - which can get a bit cheesy.
Even simply adding more or stronger enemies is a way of adding challenge, and as far as I can tell, the game already does this automatically with enemy spawns based on level.
Then we have SCS's attempt to improve the AI to replicate optimal player behaviours - A lot of SCS is a lot more subtle and doesn't often "cheat", though sometimes being "optimal" means things can get a little predictable.
We have handicapping of the player's resources.
Most simply via the level cap, no pre-buffing (doesn't BP2 forcibly dispel your prebuffs when you fight?), no using certain crutch items (this can be either a self-handicap or a mod to make these things only available later on when they're less imbalancing),
And refusing to to use meta-knowledge to pre-emptively prepare for optimal character choices. - There are randomised Trap and item location mods if I recall, which serve to limit the player's ability to do this as well as the player working to keep to in-character knowledge.
And finally we have the core challenges themselves - the strategic scenarios around which everything else is based, and this, as @bengoshi correctly states, is more something for the developers themselves. I agree, but I wasn't limiting this to talking about mods in the first place, especially since SoD is coming out soon, and if that's a success, why not more? If the Black Pits encounters, for example, succeed in being fundamentally challenging in and of themselves, then there's no need to mod them to be any more difficult, right?
Several people so far have said that if a player uses cheese like endless spell pre-buffing for "surprise" ambushes and abusing item mechanics, then only cheese can bring a challenge back into their game. Is it possible for loopholes to be closed in a smooth way within the infinity engine to ensure challenge for cheesers without making things too extreme for anyone else?
For example:
If currently in combat and in sight of enemies, Invisibility effects instantly apply the improved invisibility "haze", rather than complete undetection. By the description of the spells, the fact that they become semi visibile is because people know they're looking for an invisible target, so invisibility would break most spells, but things like the staff of the magi couldn't cheese immunity to everyone by reapplying invisibility.
Shadow Door might be an exception, because the effect explicitly gives the illusion of retreat.
Meanwhile thief backstab from invisibility might be a percentile chance per hit while in an imp. invisible state, rather than guaranteed in invisible, impossible when imp. invisible (your average character did not forget the thief was around and will be on the lookout for them). This would remove much of the motivation for mislead cheese (if not permit scrapping the ridiculous spell entirely), while continuing to grant an avenue for thieves to use their class features without completely gaming the AI.
If you don't want the computer to "cheat", you can settle for accepting that it won't be a great challenge. That's completely fine for a whole lot of people. But a lot of other people are not willing to settle.
The current solutions available may not be optimal, but they are the best we've got. The debate, while interesting as an academic exercise, will I fear not do too much to improve the situation, simply because most participants (I included) are not familiar enough with the intricacies of the Infinity Engine to know what can and cannot be feasibly achieved. I do not doubt that it's at least theoretically possible to find some "fairer" way of upping the challenge, but I also believe that at its core, rule-breaking will remain a fundamental necessity for providing an adequate challenge for the more demanding players.
Nobody WANTS the computer to cheat, but it's something many people are willing to accept if it means a better game experience for them. Since all of this is optional (and usually modular), it shouldn't touch upon those that wish to avoid it. When it goes too far for your taste, just don't use it. I get that it might seem like you're forced into an awkward compromise if you do want a challenge, but that's just how it is. And not without reason.
I wouldn't necessarily say these are "cheats" any more than a DM does in that sense, the DM has every resource in the game world except for your players.
But I would say that there is a fundamental difference between a handicap within the game rules compared to one that steps out of the game system.
Compare:
You have an enemy attacking your party. He is a noble duke's son, and if you kill him, the duke will burn down two orphanages and murder your favourite NPC and ultimately lead to a game over.
You are attacked by an enemy with a Min1HP belt.
Both are handicaps against the player, both generally enforce the fact that you will probably not be killing this enemy, but one operates within the conceit of the game system, the other enforces an artificial game mechanic.
The Wise Old Monk wears a magical blindfold and magical handwraps attuned to his bloodline. The innkeeper warns you that this blindfold grants him the ability to see invisible people just like undead or dragons, while the handwraps disrupt magical enchantments.
The Wise Old Monk has a script that runs every fifteen seconds where he instantly and uninterruptably casts True Seeing and has dispel on hit.
Both scenarios are "unfair" against the player - the monk cannot be stealth'd against and he dispels magic. One uses magical items as a justification, the other just has it happen.
Which brings me to the starting questions of the thread again - and you're right, it's just intended to be a discussion I thought might be interesting, not a crusade for change:
How do you feel about these two different choices? Are both equally preferable so long as the challenge they pose is similar?
Can challenges be created which both ostensibly follow the rules of the game system and still pose a challenge to powergamers who are already familiar with the setting?
I might consider it if so
If you really care about the RP, imagine something global around it. You're a Child of Bhaal. Your very presence distorts the Weave. Anyone caught up in your whirlpool of fate through positive association has their spells stretched to a breaking point - meaning the slightest disturbance can cause them to fail. Or turn it around. You're the spawn of an evil god. Fate itself is twisting to repel you, making the most unlikely things happen just to bar your way.
The beauty of RP is you can justify almost anything if you really put your mind to it. The beauty of powergaming is you don't have to. Pick a spot between the two, if that is your thing. There is an option to have mages buff as combat starts, meaning if you did that they'd just be fully buffed again as soon as you engage them (via an unstoppable script, naturally, that gives them everything instantly). However, I believe you could in theory still walk away and wait out the duration (like actually wait, not rest) and they would only partially rebuff. Not sure as I just don't play that way but I think that's how it works.
I am a player of that old cheating mods like Tactics, I love them.
And I would say that they where not created to counter player's cheese, but is the opposite, players invented cheese to counter the blatant cheating of those mods, lev 9 spells in CC, undisruptable 0 time casted reallyforcespell scripted spells, spells casted on characters that should not be targetable and so on. And there was a lot of creativity and resarch in inventing all that cheese, I choosed my name to honor that generation of players.
The problem is that now al that cheese is well known, no more creativity, no more fun.....
Just a surf on the web and you have all the "cheesing tools" you can ever need
So a new era begun, whith SCS, that focus on a better AI, rather than cheating scripts.
But, no matter how good are the modders, they can not overcome the limits of an old engine, they made a fantastic work, but an human is ever smarter, more adaptable and creative then AI. So is easy to counter the tactics mages and thieves use, you are no more forced to cheese, but once you spot the improoved tactics enemy use is easy to find the cure. The enemies have become fair, scripts don't cheat no more, but now you are the unfair, the "cheater". Before enemies was using something illegal that you could not use, now you use something "illegal" the enemy will never use, a brain.
I would really love the "perfect mod" that dynamically adapt enemy's tactic to what you do, that every run or reload change tactic, nerfing your metagaming knowledge, that makes each battle a new and unespected battle, even if you have fought it many times.
But that mod is not possible, and is not a modder fault, is an engine limitation. Playng whith that old mods I try to follow the above guidelines, at least some of them.
Actually I use SoTM, CF, Belm, RoV, and some stuff from item upgrade mod but not SoB or Cloack of Reflection.
And I don't know what kite means related to gaming so may be I do it.....
But I roll good stats, something like 85-92, not 100 or more, don't prebuff (ok some stoneskins, obvious things like Cahotic Command if I know, from thief and not metagaming that I will face humber hulks, but 4 rounds of prebuffing is really not my style) and don't use cheap tactics like Cloudkill from off-screen, maybe 3 3Xskull trap sequencers from 3 different mages, after scouting and spotting unseen the enemy.....
Also I try to not do unfair things like looking the scripts, how will you judge the coach of a basketball team that sneaks into rival's office and look at his notebook whith all the schemes?
If the coach is able to understand the schemes of the oppositor looking at as he acts on the field then is different, is what a good coach is supposed to do, is what I am trying to do.
I try also to play whithout metagame, but since I have played the game many times on that I am cheating myself, I can pretend that I act as if I don't know, but since I know
About higly optimized parties mine are optimized, no doubt about it.
But are optimized to win all the battles of the game, and each one in many different ways, actually I usually reload many times and fight the same battle in many ways, not in all I succeed, but in at least some I must do it, I regard the others as poor tactics and wrong hypothesis.
So I'll better call strong and versatile parties then specifically optimized for a given set of mods.
About cheese I use it, other people cheese and also some personal recipes.
But after I try to win also whitout it, I am not satisfied until cheese becomes just an option to spice, when I want, the game, not a necessity.
And I am not satisfyed of all my battles, to win some of them I still have to cheese or prebuff or set some CC that I have not clue from the game that will be needed. I have to improove a lot.
And I don't nerf my PI or whish, I use them as are implemented in that CRPG, don't pretend to play PnP.
Doing this i have a lot of fun. And I think that the old cheating mods can be won by fair means, if it is not possible the fault is in the player, not in the mod.
Improoved Anvil: never tied it, I like mods that pose "impossible" problems, not mods that force you to some specific tactics, that limit freedom and creativity. and from what I have read, last time just in this topic.....
SCS: never tied, I want to finish my experimentation whith the cheating mods before.
But I have great expectations, I really hope that the improoved AI is not so stupid as I fear it is.
If so I will prostrate in front of the modders, given the limitation of the engine.......
Seeing that almost all the experienced players play whith keep me optimist.
@Pantalion gave difficult to implement suggestions, but some are kinda easy. Make the party unable to rest (yeah I bring this up often) within Nalia's keep or Firkrag's dungeon and suddenly mages will be unable to spam their spells and forced to keep some of their best ones for later, or create more situations like SCS option which makes you face Spellhold maze without your precious gear. For example the circus quest on the promenade could have made illusionary creatures almost OP for any party without True Seeing (right now you can just bash all of them), some areas could be dead/wild magic zones or filled with stinking/poisonous/acid vapors, an ambush could start with some party member entangled/webbed/injured/hostage, etc.
Also, raising the difficulty by increasing enemy HPs and dmg output (like Insane mode) is easy yes, but it's a really poor thing imo. Increasing the number of enemies and their available abilities (e.g. give archers more special arrows, add the all the missing PnP abilities many in-game monsters lack) should be the way to go - alongside the above mentioned "handicaps".
Last but not least, LIMIT PLAYER'S POWER CREEP. I know I'm biased on this because of my mods but even SCS had to deal with it with a few tweaks aimed at fixing the more glaring issues. If you are willing to exploit vanilla's Staff of the Magi invisibility, if you love using Shield of Balduran and Cloak of Mirroring against Beholders, if you add even more ridiculous items to your game like Sanchuudoku then don't say "I want a challenge". Same is true for cheesy stuff like infinite spells loop, armies of planetars via Project Image, etc.
If you want some real challenge then all those things need to be rebalanced, not just AI scripts.
I'm uncertain whether it's NECESSARY to make the AI cheat, but I don't see a feasible alternative. It's probably theoretically possible to construct some truly massive script that takes into account twelve dozen different responses and counter-responses, but that is just not practical to code or run on the engine. And anything on a lower complexity scale can just get exploited by smart players easily. Even randomized scripts can, and those also run into the issue of being sub-optimal in situations as the dice roll.
Since I don't on principle object to AI "cheating" and it is much more elegant a solution than a decision tree the size of Yggdrasil, I'm all for it.
Academic discussion aside, it is in the end just a matter of practicality. All good ideas, but devastatingly exhausting to implement comprehensively. It would essentially require painstaking case-by-case design, testing, balancing and implementation, whereas things like SCS scripts are simply globally available and can be adapted to any situation on the fly. Again an issue of practicality, but I do absolutely agree on the principle behind it. Creative solutions to difficulty rather than "cheating" or number tweaking are a great thing. But there is a reason people resort to "cheating" and number tweaking - it's much, much, MUCH easier to do. This one I can 100% get behind, as I'm sure you can tell by my continued praise of IR and SR. There are many strategies that are simply too good, and many items and spells that are simply too powerful. Tweaking and balancing always has to be a TWO-SIDED thing, and players need to realize that "nerfs" are a good thing if done properly. While an amazing item might look cool and awesome in the beginning, trivializing your game experience is very often detrimental in the long term. And this game is a connoisseur's choice after all, with a longevity attached to it that outlived entire franchises let alone single fire-and-forget titles (as many modern games tend to be these days). Long term matters!
The only thing about which I disagree is calling cheesy the infinite spells loops since no exploiting is involved. they can trivialize the game, be cheap and so on but for me no exploit=no cheese.
Armies of planetars via Project Image, 4x PI via CC, fake talk and attack and so on involve exploiting and are cheese.
But I don't like if things like that are nerfed in difficoulty increasing mods, for 2 reasons:
_ I don't like mods that tend to limit the freedom of players, maybee a player wont to enjoy a new mod, but don't like one of some of that nerfs, while he would like to enjoy other things of the mod like better AI or
the suggestions of @Pantalion. The nerfs can be implemented as optional parts of the mod but then my second reason
-there is no need at all to do it, usually a player enjoy that kind of things, for a long or short period, then he nerfs them by himself. When he discovers that the anti beholder shield trivialize that battles and spoils them of the fun usually he stop to use it, and when he discovers that selling and stealing items from the same fence for easy infinite money spoils the fun stops to do it. Or maybe nerfs it in his way, the one I had recently proposed on this forums seems to me interesting, no potion staking and no reload of failure, so you have a reason to develope the stealing skill of a mage, and iv the powerfull Robe of Vecna is sold and he fails to steal it back he looses forever that fence and the robe.
But the player is free to nerf something when is ready to do it, when he feels that he wants more challange, and sometimes finds his creative ways to do it.
IR and SR are very different things, more then nerfing alter the enviroment. A player using SR uses a magic system similar but different from the vanilla one, not a nerfed version of the vanilla one.
You can eliminate a whole mountain of cheese just by doing this and increase the challenge as much as you want. And best of all this solution is completely flexible by altering how many rests you permit yourself.
For example, if you want a mild increase in challenge so that you're not going into every big battle armed to the teeth with a full spellbook and all magical items charged, limit yourself to 1 rest per 24 hours. If you want more of a challenge where you truly have to ration your resources, make it 3 rests per chapter. If you want a real challenge, make it 2 rests per chapter. And if you want to go completely hardcore, make it 1 rest per chapter or even no resting.
You can also easily justify this from a powergame or roleplay perspective. For powerplay, just realise that resting in BG2 (and to a lesser extent D&D in general) is completely stupid - you go to sleep for 8 hours and hey, in that time you magically learn how to recast 40 spells and all your magical items get recharged. It's a moronic game mechanic; the PnP mechanic is different and has some logic but that is lost in the translation to CRPG. From a roleplaying perspective, for 90% of BG2 you are in a race against time. If this were real and you were in a race against time to rescue your best friend or to save your life, you wouldn't dawdle.
That said, I generally play as you describe. I try not to rest while in a "combat zone" unless it's absolutely necessary (I like to think of the film,Blackhawk Down). When I rest at an Inn, I will rest several times in a row to simulate my party actually taking a day or two off and really sleeping, eating, taking power dumps, hooking up, whatevs.
It's a role-playing game. Have fun.
You would not go to face powerfull mages whitout spells memorized, and, being moronic or not this is how the magic system works. I agree whith you that a mod is not needed to limit the rest, also for me the fun of the play is setting some premises (for this run I will allow this and nerf that) and then be faithfull to them.
I am convinced that almost all the players had tried cheap tactics and they stop to use them growing as players.
But I see the limitation of the rests only as a way to increase difficoulty and compell player to do a very wise and stingy use of the spells. Also I see it as a way to alter the balance of power beetween phisical damage dealers, that begin to suffer from that after a quite long time, and casters that are really limited in their functionality, they risk to become bad ranged attakers, 1 APR. And that is supposed to be what they do to utilize the time between a cast and another, not their main activity and role.
There are people that really love BG2 magic system and using them (not necessarily powerusing, just using).
My first years of BG2 was like that, NPCs always complaining and asking to sleep and a scab CHARNAME.
And my experience in doing so is that the game becomes a lot more a point and klick thing, loses a lot of depth.
Not a thing for every player, also if some love much playng that way.
This of course is the fault of the whole Vancian system, but it is what it is.
That's kind of the point. With zero restriction on resting to prepare spells, taken to the nth degree a caster can enter every battle with every spell available to them. Part of the true balance between casters and non-casters in a true D&D environment is that the casters have more power (their spells) but that power is only available some of the time. Warriors and thieves don't have the same short-term firepower but they have more consistent capability.
That balance does not exist in BG2. Casters have more power and they can have it available all the time since there is no restriction on resting and preparing spells. So BG2 is naturally biased in favour of casters (this is pretty obvious, yes? Every true power-class that people bang on about is at least part-caster). So voluntarily restricting resting redresses the bias to the extent that you want to. Unless you go for extreme limits to resting, it does not bias towards non-casters (especially when you factor in the hideous amount of magical accoutrements available to casters which I referenced above).
Oh, sure, you can do it because it's fun and you want to, but if that is your mindset you don't need a system in place because obviously you can police your own behavior.