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Just can't enjoy Siege

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  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    @lefreut Beamdog can't change content in the original games. The canon party of Minsc, Jaheira, Khalid, Dynaheir, and Imoen is ALWAYS going to be the case when srtarting BG2. THere is no getting around it. SoD at least gives SOME justification for why these characters come with you at the end of SoD (All of them having story reasons for following ANY charname). As for Safana showing up. It makes perfect sense for the Dukes to hire her in the event of your party missing a thief. I don't see how thats a plot hole at all.
    tbone1ShadowdemonFenrirWolfganger
  • lefreutlefreut Member Posts: 1,462
    ThacoBell said:

    As for Safana showing up. It makes perfect sense for the Dukes to hire her in the event of your party missing a thief. I don't see how thats a plot hole at all.

    The party is missing a thief only because Beamdog choose to remove Imoen. I'm fine with not having Imoen during the crusade but I don't understand why they decide that you can't have her at the beginning.

    I only played SoD once (mostly because it's not translated in my language but it's out of topic) and it's been a while so I may not remember correctly but I think that when you start, Safana is forced into your party and you don't even get any dialogue or explanation.
    QuartzPermidion_Stark
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    @leufreut
    Imoen has started her mage training and doesn't have her thief skills. While I personally wish they let you keep Imoen for the intro, it makes sense within the story as written. Safana is also the logical choice for the Dukes to hire for your expedition. Montaron is Zhentarim and dangerously violent, while Alora is too carefree to trust to a sensitive mission. Unless I'm missing a thief, that leaves Safana. Who is neutral and is probably used to doing thiefy things for coin.
    FenrirWolfganger
  • AstroBryGuyAstroBryGuy Member Posts: 3,437
    ThacoBell said:

    Unless I'm missing a thief, that leaves Safana. Who is neutral and is probably used to doing thiefy things for coin.

    @ThacoBell - Coran, Skie, Tiax
    ThacoBellQuartz
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    ThacoBell said:

    @leufreut
    Imoen has started her mage training and doesn't have her thief skills. While I personally wish they let you keep Imoen for the intro, it makes sense within the story as written. Safana is also the logical choice for the Dukes to hire for your expedition. Montaron is Zhentarim and dangerously violent, while Alora is too carefree to trust to a sensitive mission. Unless I'm missing a thief, that leaves Safana. Who is neutral and is probably used to doing thiefy things for coin.

    theres a 4 week time skip after the intro dungeon so she should have been able to be with us during that. just say she started her training after.
    lefreutThacoBellsemiticgoddessQuartz
  • UnderstandMouseMagicUnderstandMouseMagic Member Posts: 2,147
    edited June 2018
    The whole "Imoen started her mage training so she can't thieve" is utter nonsense. It's only is a thing because of the rules of D&D.

    I wrote a storied playthrough with charname dualing. I'm not a writer, have no experience writing and managed to come up with a better and more plausible reason for why a character or NPC can no longer thieve. They were seriously injured in a fight so simply couldn't perform the tasks until they healed and therefore did something else.

    Kind of straightforward and pretty much based on realism, people take time to rehabilitate after serious injury. In the meantime they do/learn what they can or something else.

    If you are going to have rules that make a story senseless, adapt the story. They had the stupid poisoning but not poisoning incident in the palace, hey presto, the poison left her somewhat paralised, no thief skills until she fully recovers. In the meantime, she learns magic, it's book based isn't it?

    That uses no reference to arbitary rules that when looked at, fail to convince. Especially as it also gets past the "oh look, I've remembered all my previous skills".
    And for what reason is that pray tell?

    QuartzPermidion_StarkAndreaColombo
  • UnderstandMouseMagicUnderstandMouseMagic Member Posts: 2,147
    edited June 2018

    yep. now you don't need to head canon why the canon party is with you at the start of 2 and play whatever party you want in bg1 and sod.

    Instead you have to headcannon why Minsc and Dynaheir are sitting in the Three Kegs when you killed them less than a month ago......

    Yeah, I can really see how that is so much better.....

    Seems to me that whereas BG2 had understandable and forgivable reasons for why the cannon party has to be present at the start of BG2 (constraints on the development, kicks the story off, could be played as a standalone game which many, many people did, ect.), SOD doubles down on the insistance that these NPC are the ones you should play with.

    It dictates evenmore how you should play. But then, with SOD, the whole design is to remove as much "R" from RPG as it possibly could.
    QuartzAndreaColombo
  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235

    ThacoBell said:

    Unless I'm missing a thief, that leaves Safana. Who is neutral and is probably used to doing thiefy things for coin.

    @ThacoBell - Coran, Skie, Tiax
    Ah, that's right. How many of them do you trust to hire?

    @UnderstandMouseMagic But Imoen starts BG2 as a Thief>Mage. That needed to be explained. Having take some time off and train under a mage makes perfect sense. SoD also doesn't railroad the playing any harder with the story than any other of the BG titles. You always have to stop the Iron Crisis, You always stop Sarevok, Minsc, Jaheira, Khalid, Dynaheir, and Imoen somehow always traveled with you in BG1, you always chase after Irenicus, etc. SoD does an admirable job fitting those retroactive railroads into a coherent storyline.
    StummvonBordwehrFenrirWolfganger
  • RaduzielRaduziel Member Posts: 4,714
    edited June 2018
    I honestly don't see SoD as a bridge but as a deck. EET makes it something closer to what a bridge would be.
    Post edited by Raduziel on
    tbone1the_sexteinMirandel
  • the_sexteinthe_sextein Member Posts: 711
    edited June 2018
    I agree, I really like what EET does to help add some interactivity and personal connection during the crossover. I keep checking the site in hopes that the Icewinddale part of the mod is going to come around. Fingers crossed that k4thos shows up at some point.
  • VasculioVasculio Member Posts: 469
    I have mixed feelings when it comes to SoD. First, what was the point of Romancing Corwin and Safana? Its not like the romances pick up in Baldurs Gate 2. Sure, this was scripted in way before the 2016 backlash. Where they could have seen them get added later. But even so... Siege of Dragonspear was too linear and too short to have anything solid with them. Second, In terms of New Characters. I HATED the M'Goblin. Just something about her voice and dialog that made me cringe. And Third, Glint. I didn't keep him in my party long enough to know just how *** he really was! Not that theres anything wrong with that! Just... not my cup of tea. Fourth and Finally, The Unfinished Business with the Hoodedman plot. Left a mystery to stay a mystery. Despite the game being mediocre. I think it was good enough be part of the Trilogy.
  • ArtonaArtona Member Posts: 1,077
    Vasculio said:

    First, what was the point of Romancing Corwin and Safana?

    I agree. Every romance in SoD seemed painfully awkward and forced, even in comparison with yuckiness of BG2 romances. Especially Corwin - one or two neutral talks, and then suddenly she admits some attraction. Very bizarre.
    Vasculio
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    had it just been the ee npcs that were romanced then it would not have been an issue. but they decided the new npcs , safana, and vicky needed one to. safana's is the real issue as you know it's not gonna last [ but to be fair npc project did the same thing with coran which may be where they got the idea.]
  • VanDerBergVanDerBerg Member Posts: 217
    edited May 2021
    Resurrecting a 2 years old thread again...

    I am currently playing SoD with SCS on Insane and I am also having trouble enjoying it. The first playthrough I did about a year ago was fine, but in this setting it feels unbelievably tedious and just...not very much fun. Aside from a story and characters, which both have good and bad moments, the biggest problem I find are the fights themselves. While some of them are quite fun, mostly at this level of difficulty it is just repetitive fights against the same armies of enemies. It's an army of spiders, or an army of orcs, or an army of goblins, or an army of shadows or an army of skeletons (probably five or six different armies of enemies that just get rotated on every map), but every fight (and there is lots and lots of them) looks exactly the same. A priest in the back buffing the enemy group, a few archers, a few frontline berserkers and a few thieves with infinite supply of invisibility potions. And wherever you move, at every step, you encounter these armies. One example is Dead Man's Pass, where in one map you have literally like 15 of these groups waiting for you.

    None of these fights is particularly difficult with a bit of preparation, they are just tedious and require the same preparation and doing pretty much the same thing every time. My avenger throws a web and morphs into a sword spider, mage throws fireballs and skull traps around, frontline fighters attack enemies, a thief detects illusions. Forget one of these things and you are dead. If your thief stops detecting illusions and automatically attacks somebody, three or four thieves come out of hiding and gib one or two of your chars. Don't throw the web and 10 fighters gang up on your thief or mage and they are dead. Again, in moderation, this is quite fun, but if you have to do it every few steps it just becomes boring.

    So far (and I am almost at the siege part), there wasn't a single fight of the type I most enjoy in BG1 or BG2 - a fight against a group of adventurers/bounty hunters of approximately the same size and composition as yours (Drasus' party or pretty much every end-of-chapter fight in BG). These kind of fights can be won using many different strategies (backstabbing, individual disablers such as blindness or dire charm, mass crowd control, mass AoE damage...). But the same is not true for the SoD fights. Basically, my favorite spells in BG1, such as dire charm, ray of enfeeblement, blindness or anything that is a single target are really pointless, because if you disable just one enemy, you still have 30 others attacking you. So the only thing that seems to work in all fights are mass crowd control and AoE damage spells. And this makes the game so repetitive.

    Rant over, coming back to playing.

    FenrirWolfganger
  • PokotaPokota Member Posts: 858
    VanDerBerg wrote: »
    the biggest problem I find are the fights themselves. While some of them are quite fun, mostly at this level of difficulty it is just repetitive fights against the same armies of enemies.

    I think I've made this comparison before. The encounter design tries to be like that of Throne of Bhaal, but it's jarring in the context of a full tri^H^H^H tetrology run - Baldur's Gate is tuned to specialized but small encounters, Baldur's Gate 2 (or at least the first half) is tuned to specialized but small encounters. New wine in old wineskins and such.

    In Siege it's especially bad since you don't have the right tools to actually handle the scope of combat the way you instinctively would want to if you're fresh off ToB or even an Icewind Dale game, just due to your relative levels, and especially in an unmodded game (the Icewind-Dale-ification mod helps considerably with this, by adding in more lower level AoE/Crowd Control spells).

    Yes, I am in fact still bitter about having a charname with the godbow get swarmed and killed by that cave of trolls. What gave it away?
    FenrirWolfganger
  • jasteyjastey Member Posts: 2,669
    Pokota wrote: »
    Yes, I am in fact still bitter about having a charname with the godbow get swarmed and killed by that cave of trolls. What gave it away?
    @Pokota :D
    My main tactic in SoD (without SCS) was go slowly around the areas until the lifted FOW revealed a waiting enemy. Stop so they wouldn't notice the group. Blast as much fireballs as the group has onto that spot. Go in with fighters and end what is left.
    Worked great.

    Timbo0o0o0FenrirWolfganger
  • VanDerBergVanDerBerg Member Posts: 217
    edited May 2021
    My main tactic in SoD (without SCS) was go slowly around the areas until the lifted FOW revealed a waiting enemy. Stop so they wouldn't notice the group. Blast as much fireballs as the group has onto that spot. Go in with fighters and end what is left. Worked great.

    Well, with SCS tactics is pretty much the same. Since with better calls for help everyone will join the fight immediately, the tactics is basically - see a single enemy, pause the game (because you can be 100% sure that -every- single time that one enemy is supported by an army behind him), throw web or some other AoE disabler, throw cloudkill and/or spam fireballs. Then clean up with fighters. Every single fight on every map.
    In Siege it's especially bad since you don't have the right tools to actually handle the scope of combat the way you instinctively would want to if you're fresh off ToB or even an Icewind Dale game

    This is true. You pretty much have -one- way of handling these fights. Or at least one way that I have found out, which heavily relies on AoE disablers or AoE damage. Everything else - backstabbing, single target disablers, gung ho march with fighters etc etc falls flat on its back. And throwing around fireballs or cloudkills was my least favorite way of doing fights both in BG1 and BG2. But even that, in moderation, is fun. What is not fun is having to do this at literally every step of every map, and with the same groups of enemies.
    FenrirWolfganger
  • jasteyjastey Member Posts: 2,669
    @VanDerBerg I understand the sentiment. I am one of those players that see fights as a nuisance I have to go through so I can get the next NPC dialogue, so I actually enjoyed that this tactic worked every time without me having to deal with micro managing the fights.
    MirandelTimbo0o0o0FenrirWolfganger
  • VanDerBergVanDerBerg Member Posts: 217
    edited May 2021
    @VanDerBerg I understand the sentiment. I am one of those players that see fights as a nuisance I have to go through so I can get the next NPC dialogue, so I actually enjoyed that this tactic worked every time without me having to deal with micro managing the fights.

    That wouldn't be so terrible if the story wasn't...well, I don't know how to put it in a nicer way, but...purely ridiculous.
    Caelar Argent is mobilising armies for a crusade with the goal of...Wait, we really have no idea what her goal is, neither do the people who follow her, but that's fine. Then at some point midway through the game we find out that her goal is to return those who died from Nine Hells and, for some reason, to accomplish that she is marching to attack...Baldur's Gate? And she is burning villages and people are running away from her because why not, that's obviously the best way to accomplish her dubious goal. Then she is also, for some random reason, very interested in the child of Bhaal because of course she is. Then, at the end, somehow her sidekick turns out to be the semi-main villain, who opens the gate to Nine Hells to let the main villain out, who will take over the world. Then your mid-level party descends down into Nine Hells and defeats the main main villain. In other words, your mid-level party which barely survives the groups of 10 crusaders or so somehow manages to defeat the villain for which Caelar was mobilising the whole army.

    But, to keep suspension, we are also introduced to a mysterious hooded figure, who is totally pointless and irrelevant to the game plot. And also, we have 5 dream sequences which are basically... CHARNAME says something, then someone else says something, then the hooded figure says 'You don't understand' and then someone turns into a slayer.

    Oh, wait, there is also an excellent element of gear hunting. Yes. it is simply impossible to resist fighting ten groups of 30 enemies each, in order to get that shiny +1 short sword that has an amazing feature that if you roll a 17 while fighting an ogre, you have 5% chance of being affected by a bless spell for 3 rounds, but only if you are half-elf skald with intelligence of precisely 13. Who even came up with all those ridiculous weapons and pieces of armour that give you a small chance of getting a bonus that ordinary level 1 priest/mage spells give you for much longer duration?

    I finally gave up from ever playing this game again. The only half-decent (and actually pretty good) part of the game is the Temple of Bhaal. Wish the rest of the game was at least half as good as that.
    OrlonKronsteen
  • FenrirWolfgangerFenrirWolfganger Member Posts: 31
    I know most of this thread is constructive criticism but I'm on my first play through and getting lots of useful tips here. Thanks all.
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