I really appreciate the encounter variety of SoD. IWD's endless waves got old after awhile, but having a couple large packs on wilderness maps was a nice dose of variety to BG's typically small encounters.
yeah sod combat encounters are more like iwd then bg. might be due to them working on iwd ee prior to sod so it was fresh on the mind.
This is one of the aspects of SoD I really liked. The battles felt so much more satisfying than most of the battles in BG/BG2 (with a few notable exceptions)
To this day, I am still amazed that they pulled off the actual siege as well as they did - that battle was a thing of beauty.
yeah i'm surprised how many sprites the ie can have on screen thanks to sod. to bad on low end computers it chugs.
Interesting to hear the different opinions - while I liked SOD very much overall, I was definitely not a fan of the wilderness encounters. I felt they were in a bad spot of being (in combination) too frequent and requiring just a little bit of focus and resources while not providing a real challenge either. You couldn't snooze through them, but they were not exciting either.
Interesting to hear the different opinions - while I liked SOD very much overall, I was definitely not a fan of the wilderness encounters. I felt they were in a bad spot of being (in combination) too frequent and requiring just a little bit of focus and resources while not providing a real challenge either. You couldn't snooze through them, but they were not exciting either.
I did actually think that the wilderness/map encounters in SoD could have been improved. They often felt "cramped", like there were too many monsters jammed into a small map. One example that sticks out in my mind is the entrance to the Crusader caves. You have a ridiculous number of Displacer Beast Packlords roaming the eastern side of the map (who are so powerful that they would massacre any crusaders leaving their camp!), and a camp full of ogres who used to live in the caves before the crusaders evicted them and took it over, and despite that the crusaders are OK with the ogres setting up a new camp literally a stone's throw away?
The wilderness areas were beautiful, but yeah, WAY too cramped. All of them should have probably been blown out to about 3 maps instead of 1. However, that was a relatively minor quibble.
I think the problem here is that it would be hard to rationalize wandering around the land while theoretically on a march. It's not quite like BG, where walking two days or more to a remote ruin was perfectly reasonable.
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yeah i'm surprised how many sprites the ie can have on screen thanks to sod. to bad on low end computers it chugs.
I did actually think that the wilderness/map encounters in SoD could have been improved. They often felt "cramped", like there were too many monsters jammed into a small map. One example that sticks out in my mind is the entrance to the Crusader caves. You have a ridiculous number of Displacer Beast Packlords roaming the eastern side of the map (who are so powerful that they would massacre any crusaders leaving their camp!), and a camp full of ogres who used to live in the caves before the crusaders evicted them and took it over, and despite that the crusaders are OK with the ogres setting up a new camp literally a stone's throw away?
I think the problem here is that it would be hard to rationalize wandering around the land while theoretically on a march. It's not quite like BG, where walking two days or more to a remote ruin was perfectly reasonable.