In case anyone didn't already know, the BG Tweaks mod has an "unlimited ammo stacking" component.
I've played with and without it. The realism of worrying about ammo was fun up to a point, but it gets to be tedious if you play the game regularly.
As far as story-justification, wouldn't a real life archer, in guerilla combat situations with lots of small skirmishes going on intermittently, be able to recover some arrows after a fight? It's not like they disappear as soon as they're fired. And you can pull them out of the ground or out of corpses and clean the heads - if the shaft doesn't break, they should be reuseable.
@Brude Yeah, I definitely agree with finding a sweet spot between realism, game mechanics and player convenience. My post was more meant to suggest that if you assume that arrows in the game are e.g. about half as effective as they would realistically be, then it wouldn't be out of line to allow the player to carry twice as many as he would realistically be able to.
it was just 20? in Icewind dale (recently played) it was 40. Anyway it was terrible.. 20 (also 40) is too low and it was a pain... so yes they should really change that.
Every time i went for questing i had to full everybody's pack of arrow and stones to be sure to have enough.
What about a slider for different ammo stack numbers (and gem stack too) in the gameplay menu? That way you can costomise your game in a more varied way. (Boo would like it.)
PS: I can't get this it out of my head, but I distinctly remember the ammo stacks in TotSC and BG2 being larger than they were in BG1 (to my relief). But playing Tutu or the GOG version now, they're the same. Is my memory inaccurate or did something change?
Judging from what I can find in the item files if I run Shadowkeeper through my BGtutu installation, there are multiple item codes for just plain arrows, and any other type of arrow you can find in both BG1 and BG2.
I think they created a new "type" of arrow for BG2 that allowed stacks to 40 instead of just 20. BGtutu uses the default BG1 item codes for arrows so they only stack to 20.
I don't recall this being changed with TotSC, but it definitely stacked higher in BG2.
BGTutu keeps it as 20 unless you choose the component 'BG2 Ammo Stacks' with the mod Tutufix
I think 20 is fine for BG1 because the battles aren't as resource demanding and the game is meant to be a grind, plus ranged combat is a little overpowered early BG1. I also think 40 is fine for BG2 because battles are longer and the devs were obviously trying to minimise inventory shuffling, plus melee becomes a little more potent than ranged towards ToB so the 40 kind of helps balance this a little.
What about a slider for different ammo stack numbers in the in the game play menue? That vay you can vary the game according to your desires each time you play. Say in steps of 1 (for the hard core solo archer players who want a difficult time), 20, 40, 100, 250 and 10 000.
The problem isn't really arrows. So many bad guys drop arrows. It's Bullets and Bolts you need to stock up on. I try to arrange most of the party using bows just because so many guys shoot arrows at you.
I'd really like to see more item-holding bags like in BG2 being sold on the Swoard Coast near Baldur's Gate. It's not just all the ammo that takes away space in my inventory, but also looted jewelry and potions. I like to give my clerics a lot of potions against any kind of threat, even though I may not use them all. And it's good for fighters to always have a strength potion ready, if they encounter enemies who are a bit too much for them. Having potion bags, jewelry bags and ammo holders for arrows etc. would make the inventory management so much more rewarding and allow for carrying more items, while still keeping it realistic.
I always kind of enjoyed the inventory "mini-game" - well actually "enjoyed" is probably not the right word - I liked the added challenge that forced me to think about my supplies and work at managing my inventory so that I had enough ammo and other essentials to last until our next chance to restock and also had enough room to store every little bit of loot we found so we didn't miss out on trading it for gold.
I liked the encumbrance factor as well - again for the challenge it offered - and also becuase it made much more sense to me that the party would only be able to carry so much and that stronger characters could carry more than weaker ones.
I probably spent untold hours over the years in BG swapping items around from one character to another after a big battle trying to grab every last bit of loot and still have everyone able to at least move even if they were a bit slow until we could make it to a border and warp off to town.
It forced me to make decisions about what to take and what to leave behind and I used to have caches all over the sword coast in barrels and other containers where I would store things for "later" when I might really need them and then I would spend days moving them all from Beregost and Nashkel up to BG City once it opened up for me.
Of course many of those items were still sitting in those two barrels outside the Elfsong Tavern in BG City when my nemesis fell at the end of tha game but you never know when they might come in handy...LOL
I really disliked the changes that new RPGs went through where now a party has a virtual shopping mall in a community backpack the size of a mature dragon and weight means nothing at all -
I did of course make good use of the bags of holding BG2 offered up - (going around gathering up my stashes) but I also appreciated that I had to work my way through quite a bit of the game to earn them.
So for me I would not mind the smaller ammo stacks and if they do decide to upgrade them it would be nice to make it an option so dinosaurs like me can go "old school" when we choose to... ;-)
Alternative solutions : Have it be infinite stacks, but each arrow, bolt or bullet weights, so you can't have 2 billion of them (for instance, an arrow, bolt or bullet would weigh 1/5th of lbs, meaning that 100 would have a weight of 20 lbs. Sure, for character like Imoen or Garrick, that would be a big deal, but then again, a magical leather armor and a bunch of potions don't have a lot of mass in 'em! This would also reflect in a balanced way the heavy weight given to Throwing Axes after all!
Second solution : Missiles bag - a bag in which you can put as many arrows, bolts, bullets, darts and throwing weapons in general as possible. It would cost, say 1000 or 2000 gold, but it would be an investment towards Inventory peace
I agree that managing the inventory is a nice extra challenge, but for me it stops when I have to put stuff somewhere in a barrel or such. Just doesn't seem like a good idea to put valueable items into some container that doesn't even have a lock, in the middle of a city that has an active thieves guild.
Now in BG2, when you get your own home, that's a different story. But by that time I usually already have the bag of holding though, which turns managing the inventory into "put all the shit in that blue bag".
Inventory management is definitely the most tedious part of the game, and ammo management is the worst part of inventory management.
If they want to restrict how much ammo you can carry maybe they should have bigger stacks but make it weigh more. One of the main annoyances is having plenty of ammo in my inventory but not noticing that I need to refill the quiver during combat.
Actually I think the best fix for BGEE would be to make some of the infinite ammo items available sooner. Add some to BG1, and make the current ones in ToB upgradeable to at least +3. As far as I know there aren't any in BG1 and the ones in BG2 are currently useless because they always lag behind the quality of the best ammo available. So you have to chose between using the infinite ammo item that gives +2 or using regular +4 bullets. That's just annoying because at that point there's no real challenge in staying stocked up on bullets, it's just pure tedium of moving them around your inventory.
If I can carry around multiple suits of armor, I can stomach bigger stacks of arrows. I can take my fighter/mage/thief and sneak around while carrying multiple suits of platemail armor...so I don't buy the realism issue as a problem with larger stacks of ammo. Given the ratio of tedium to realism involved with the 20 ammo stacks, count me fully in favor of larger stacking.
I want to have a function to automatically refill my quiver from my backpack when I run out of arrows. It's not that I am lazy, it's just stupid and tedious to keep topping off my arrows after every battle. Even if it just refills it with normal ammunition, or ammo of the same type (so I can decide if I want to use my +1 arrows on Brigands or not or save my fire arrows for a special battle), that would be awesome.
I'm sure it will be 40 in the enhanced editions, since, as I recall, it's 40 in BG2, and we're running on the same engine. Still though, I can see where you're coming from, my backline fighters (I.E. Imoen, Aerie, Nalia, etc.) almost always end up with 3/4 of a inventory of extra arrows or bullets respectively, but I shrug it off since I know they can't hold much weight anyway.
Inventory management to me is one of the least enjoyable aspects of any RPG, ever. It so rarely adds to the sense of immersion. I can think of maybe two or three games that did inventory management right, and Baldur's Gate is not one of them.
1) It doesn't add to realism in the BG series. Minsc can sneak around while he's wearing leather armor and carrying 3 suits of full plate, while Montaron can't sneak in simple chainmail.
2) Tediousness. The carry capacity limits the amount of items you can haul around on your dudes just fine, so forcing me to fill up 3 guys' inventory with smoothed rocks and pointy sticks is just boring. I consistently hack in a ginormous stack of arrows or bullets or whatever because I'd rather focus on the combat than making sure I've got an inventory full of Arrows on Kivan.
I suppose there's something to be said about punishing the unprepared for a given zone but it's artificial difficulty and I'm not a fan of that.
I'm not sure why, but sometimes the game lets me merge stacks of ammo larger than the normal amounts that I found in loot in BG2. It's definitly more convenient.
In my current game my PC had a stack of 652 arrows+2 in one slot of his quiver. He currently has 517 in that slot having spent the rest in a particularly challenging battle in Watcher's Keep.
I haven't had that happen personally. I know if you use shadowkeeper you can make the quantity some odd thousand per stack (I don't remember the exact number).
I think 20 is too little for a video game but 40 (carrying 120 arrows) is a little ridiculous.
I'm not an archer but I have been very critical against the idea of carrying enormous amounts of arrows as it's simply not something I can imagine an adventurer doing. Inventory systems in general are just not right to me.
I think stacks of 20 would be fine, if you had a chance to recover arrows from corpses after the fight. You'd end up replenishing your stock somewhat regularly, which would also mean that you wouldn't have to fill your entire inventory with arrows. (Legend of Grimrock does this to great success, I hear.)
I think by limiting stack-size, its a bit more realistic. Are you really going to have more than 60 arrows in your quiver at one time? 40 I guess is ok, but 120 arrows in a quiver is a bit much. Besides, bows and crossbows are OP anyway. Should have a downside... MAN UP! lol
@HaHaCharade Agreed. Since you get three slots in your quiver, anything more than 60 total is unrealistic. The Ammo Belt solves a lot of the inventory problems, yet requires you to be aware of the ammo you're using since you'll need to restock the quiver often.
I really hope the Ammo Belt will be included in BG:EE and that throwing daggers will be able to be put in it as well (since they stack at only 10 each).
The divide with realism would seem to arise when you look at the amount of arrows needed to bring a target down. Realistically, most human-sized creatures are quite likely to be severely wounded/crippled by an arrow, if not mortally so - but in BG a great many opponents can take several and keep coming. So a realistic supply of arrows doesn't seem to correlate with a realistic number of casualties.
That's rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrright! Talking 'bout realism, try to carry a bag filled with full plates, dual wield two weapons + win a battle on top of that, smirk smirk ;]
What about having quivers/bags that appear right next to the ammo spots? As you play through the game, you can find various quiver to put in that spot to increase the number of arrows or bullets you have (such as a quiver of holding), or even change various properties of the ammo (like giving +1 thaco to all arrows, or a flaming quiver that turns normal arrows into fire arrows when shot and turns ice arrows to normal ones). This way having a magical quiver helps explain having so many arrows at once.
Or maybe even one that automatically refills an emptied arrow slot with a similar arrow type in the character's backpack if it's there.
Comments
I've played with and without it. The realism of worrying about ammo was fun up to a point, but it gets to be tedious if you play the game regularly.
As far as story-justification, wouldn't a real life archer, in guerilla combat situations with lots of small skirmishes going on intermittently, be able to recover some arrows after a fight? It's not like they disappear as soon as they're fired. And you can pull them out of the ground or out of corpses and clean the heads - if the shaft doesn't break, they should be reuseable.
Every time i went for questing i had to full everybody's pack of arrow and stones to be sure to have enough.
(PS: i had a party of 4 with 2 ranged)
I think they created a new "type" of arrow for BG2 that allowed stacks to 40 instead of just 20. BGtutu uses the default BG1 item codes for arrows so they only stack to 20.
I don't recall this being changed with TotSC, but it definitely stacked higher in BG2.
It's 40 in BG2 and ToB
BGTutu keeps it as 20 unless you choose the component 'BG2 Ammo Stacks' with the mod Tutufix
I think 20 is fine for BG1 because the battles aren't as resource demanding and the game is meant to be a grind, plus ranged combat is a little overpowered early BG1.
I also think 40 is fine for BG2 because battles are longer and the devs were obviously trying to minimise inventory shuffling, plus melee becomes a little more potent than ranged towards ToB so the 40 kind of helps balance this a little.
I liked the added challenge that forced me to think about my supplies and work at managing my inventory so that I had enough ammo and other essentials to last until our next chance to restock and also had enough room to store every little bit of loot we found so we didn't miss out on trading it for gold.
I liked the encumbrance factor as well - again for the challenge it offered - and also becuase it made much more sense to me that the party would only be able to carry so much and that stronger characters could carry more than weaker ones.
I probably spent untold hours over the years in BG swapping items around from one character to another after a big battle trying to grab every last bit of loot and still have everyone able to at least move even if they were a bit slow until we could make it to a border and warp off to town.
It forced me to make decisions about what to take and what to leave behind and I used to have caches all over the sword coast in barrels and other containers where I would store things for "later" when I might really need them and then I would spend days moving them all from Beregost and Nashkel up to BG City once it opened up for me.
Of course many of those items were still sitting in those two barrels outside the Elfsong Tavern in BG City when my nemesis fell at the end of tha game but you never know when they might come in handy...LOL
I really disliked the changes that new RPGs went through where now a party has a virtual shopping mall in a community backpack the size of a mature dragon and weight means nothing at all -
I did of course make good use of the bags of holding BG2 offered up - (going around gathering up my stashes) but I also appreciated that I had to work my way through quite a bit of the game to earn them.
So for me I would not mind the smaller ammo stacks and if they do decide to upgrade them it would be nice to make it an option so dinosaurs like me can go "old school" when we choose to... ;-)
Alternative solutions : Have it be infinite stacks, but each arrow, bolt or bullet weights, so you can't have 2 billion of them (for instance, an arrow, bolt or bullet would weigh 1/5th of lbs, meaning that 100 would have a weight of 20 lbs. Sure, for character like Imoen or Garrick, that would be a big deal, but then again, a magical leather armor and a bunch of potions don't have a lot of mass in 'em!
This would also reflect in a balanced way the heavy weight given to Throwing Axes after all!
Second solution : Missiles bag - a bag in which you can put as many arrows, bolts, bullets, darts and throwing weapons in general as possible. It would cost, say 1000 or 2000 gold, but it would be an investment towards Inventory peace
Now in BG2, when you get your own home, that's a different story. But by that time I usually already have the bag of holding though, which turns managing the inventory into "put all the shit in that blue bag".
If they want to restrict how much ammo you can carry maybe they should have bigger stacks but make it weigh more. One of the main annoyances is having plenty of ammo in my inventory but not noticing that I need to refill the quiver during combat.
1) It doesn't add to realism in the BG series. Minsc can sneak around while he's wearing leather armor and carrying 3 suits of full plate, while Montaron can't sneak in simple chainmail.
2) Tediousness. The carry capacity limits the amount of items you can haul around on your dudes just fine, so forcing me to fill up 3 guys' inventory with smoothed rocks and pointy sticks is just boring. I consistently hack in a ginormous stack of arrows or bullets or whatever because I'd rather focus on the combat than making sure I've got an inventory full of Arrows on Kivan.
I suppose there's something to be said about punishing the unprepared for a given zone but it's artificial difficulty and I'm not a fan of that.
In my current game my PC had a stack of 652 arrows+2 in one slot of his quiver. He currently has 517 in that slot having spent the rest in a particularly challenging battle in Watcher's Keep.
I'm not an archer but I have been very critical against the idea of carrying enormous amounts of arrows as it's simply not something I can imagine an adventurer doing. Inventory systems in general are just not right to me.
I really hope the Ammo Belt will be included in BG:EE and that throwing daggers will be able to be put in it as well (since they stack at only 10 each).
Talking 'bout realism, try to carry a bag filled with full plates, dual wield two weapons + win a battle on top of that, smirk smirk ;]
Or maybe even one that automatically refills an emptied arrow slot with a similar arrow type in the character's backpack if it's there.