Couple of questions regarding modding BG from returning player

SleepingSamurai

Hello, good people of this forum.

I'm returning player to BG games. I did couple of playthroughs of SoA and ToB many years (without mods), however i never beat BG1 and i've been waiting to play complete saga from beggining to end. Recently, i finally bought SoD so i think i'm ready for this epic experience.
There are, in fact, only two mods i really want to try for a long time and consider essential for me: Imoen Romance and Ascension.
And now, i have a few question to more experienced players:
1. Which mods for would consider friendly for first timer of BG:EE?
2. Is installing EET for first playthrough of entire saga a good idea?
3. Do you have any recommendation for BG2 and Tob mods which would make next playthrough more enjoyable (bear in mind that 10 years passed since my last time playing Baldur's Gate)?

Sorry, if those questions are tedious, but there are soooo many mods for BG, from which there are a large number of cool mods. I'm feeling a little bit lost and i'm a complete newb, so i'm looking for some community feedback.

Thank you.

ThacoBell

1. For the first playthrough, I would recommend no mods.
2. NO. EET is pretty complicated and all it really gives in return is continuous npcs and some cosmetic benefits. Save EET for when you know what you are doing and want to start using large numbers of mods and some megamods.
3. Ascension is a must for ToB, barring that I usually like to add kits and npcs. Sirene is a great npc to try out, Faiths and Powers, Tome and Blood, and Might and Guile adds dozens of great kits as well as gameplay tweaks if desired. Tweaks Anthology also has a bunch of optional components to tweak the game to your liking.

hybridial

Hi.

I personally feel it's fine to use mods for the first time, and everything I use is laid out in this thread for the first game -

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/60317/bgee-recommended-mod-list-for-new-players/p1

I would suggest checking each one out and see what you think, I myself found BGEE NPCtweak to be immensely useful in making the recruitable NPCs more interesting by giving them lore friendly kits. Not to mention it takes advantage of the fact all of BG2's functionality is available in the game.

The second game is a little more complicated... that might be best mod free, but it does have some extremely good content mods. BG2UB, the restoration project, CoM Encounters and Ding0's quest pack all to a degree enhance the game's existing content and make it an all round better game in my opinion.

As for the all important Tweaks Anthology, you probably should play through the first campaign at least once to understand what impact the tweaks will have, but believe me you will use it in further playthroughs.

For EET, I can't say, I'm not at the stage of using it, because it's a drastic overhaul arguably and I'm really still figuring out what individual mods I like and consider mandatory. I haven't even played ToB properly (I... have my issues with the story but I guess I need to play it eventually) so I won't use Ascension till I've done it a few times vanilla. Ascension seems like a steep increase in difficulty.

I agree wholeheartedly that Sirene is a great NPC mod, it's implemented perfectly, she's interesting, she comes with cool items, she fits in seemlessly. I want to do an NPC mod myself one day and Sirene is the model I would follow.

PaulaMigrate

You are not completely new to the game and you want to play the whole trilogy.
So;
I would go for an EET install - even if you later decide differently, you can still start each part of the game as a new one even in EET. If you find that BG1 is not your thing. Stop it and go for SoD or BG2, no problem. Otherwise you go through one full game all the way.
Based on this
1. BG1NPCs is a must - Unfinished Business - BGQE - then add some NPC mods given preference to those you can keep across the different campaigns like Isra or Sirene - take the mods that make Neera a *full* NPC. Dark Side and Northern Tales in their new EET format are valid additions to BG1 - advantage is that you can install them and decide during game to follow their quests or just follow the main plot.
2. Use EET - you get all the game contents in a continuous format. Also you have the same engine, GUI, rule behaviour etc throughout the game. Install SCS and you will have a sufficient challenge level growing with you.
3. Everything in BG2 is optional, just if you decided on mod NPCs in BG1 then take their BG2 sequel as well. All bigger BG2 quest mods stay very much in tune with the vanilla sidequests, so it's pretty much up to you how many extra quests you like. If you plan for a stronghold in BG2, then take the mod for it along (if one exists).
Ascension and Wheels are a must for ToB, Longer Road adds the interesting scenario of having both Sarevok and Irenicus as companions for the final challenge (again, you can implement them and still decide later on if you want to let them join).