@Wanderon, unless they fix it do not enter Naskhel with less than 3 reputation points, there's a bug with the bounty hunters in the vanilla game, where they spawn infinitely and with no control.
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I seem to recall running into something like that at some point in one of my many BG1 campaigns - thats why my first three rules for playing BG are:
1)Save often! 2) Save often and not just quick saves! 3) Don't forget to save!
Wow, I only just realized that I have never tried tinkering around with the difficulty setting once I was a good ways into the game. Anyway, I agree that higher difficulty settings should have an impact on the enemies' AI because stupid enemies with pumped up stats are no challenge, they're just boring.
Unfortunately, the better the AI is, the more the flaws in the source material come out. No "DM's mercy" so to speak. It took til 3.5 before this ever got any better. Well, pre "complete divine" era anyways. It was mostly a mess from there on. Low level spells ment to obliterate many low level foes at once with no defense or recourse kinda fall apart when the enemy has them, even if it is easily justified. If a spell has a 1/3 chance of resulting in a party wipe, odds are no more party by the 13th cast.
I usually play with the SCS on the "Insane" level difficulty (the highest possible on the slider) with 1-3 party members. It makes the game much more challenging and also more interesting in my opinion. I don't like to start new games very often, so my current party is two 5th playthrough characters and one 3rd playthrough character. Sure, some fights are really easy at that point, but many of them are extremely challenging. In Ust Natha, for example, an entire army of about 100 level 20+ drow fighters, mages, and clerics, come after you, and when you fight Irenicus you also fight a dragon and several other powerful opponents. What it does is make it so the game is still challenging and interesting, even though my two main characters each have more than 400 HP and and are primarily using level 9 mage and level 7 cleric spells.
Another interesting way to make BG2 more challenging/interesting is to try playing ToB and SoA in reverse order, either by importing weak characters into ToB or by using the MoveToArea cheat to send a SoA party into ToB. I've tried both and it is fun both ways, but doing it by using cheats can lead to some pretty interesting glitches.
Comments
1)Save often!
2) Save often and not just quick saves!
3) Don't forget to save!
8-)
Another interesting way to make BG2 more challenging/interesting is to try playing ToB and SoA in reverse order, either by importing weak characters into ToB or by using the MoveToArea cheat to send a SoA party into ToB. I've tried both and it is fun both ways, but doing it by using cheats can lead to some pretty interesting glitches.