11 replies to this topic

[Kharhaz]

Hey, sorry if I shouldn't make a new topic for this but I saw several feedback topics and it didn't seem to be discouraged, and I didn't want to put it in my other thread due to the initially negative approach I took.

In any case it was a really fun mod and me and my friend both had a great time playing through it with the additional challenge. However, I thought there were a few parts that may have been a bit lacking compared to other parts of the game, namely battles near the end of the game. I know that you didn't alter that many battles specifically, so I'm just giving my opinion some that you did, and some that could definitely use some help. Here are some of the battles I found lacking, even with all of the AI and Tactical components installed on Core difficulty:

1) Ael'Letac - I think this guy could use some serious work (not sure if you altered this one), he casts hold person (death gaze?) on the mages you need to kill making them even easier than they already are, since the only one who even casts spells is their leader, who dies relatively fast (One time I glitched the event by accidentally killing her in 2 hits before she initiated dialogue). I realize that death gaze is supposed to make this a hard battle, but basically my Paladin was able to solo the entire battle while everyone else waited upstairs (The Kensai helped kill a few of the cultists before retreating upstairs, so she didn't get death gazed). I'm not sure what could be done besides making the mages more aggressive, but I don't think a level 8 Paladin should have been able to solo the hardest fight in the game.

2) Sarevok - I know you buffed this battle specifically, but I don't think it was enough, the strategy of just distracting him with summons while you destroy his acolytes trivializes the entire battle. I would suggest giving Sarevok more HP for sure, and I'm not sure if the engine or scripting would allow for this, but have the mages cast fireballs, lighting, cloudkill, or other AoEs at Sarevok, since he's immune to magic, and maybe an animate dead or two from one of the enemy mages. I really think he went down too easy, he hits hard as a truck but a fully buffed Paladin and Kensai killed him in like 10 seconds after the acolytes were defeated.

3) Slythe and Krystin - A bit of a minor battle but it was pretty much a joke at the point you fight them, for a plot based battle. Perhaps a few invisible thieves or assassins assisting them could make it more challenging, just the two of them pose no real threat to a party that's probably at the XP cap and geared to the teeth.

4) Thieves' Warrens - Kind of slow pacing for being right near the end of the game, there's only like 5 enemies here and not very many traps. The slimes here are also a joke, but perhaps you could significantly boost the respawn rate on them so that they approach the player's party from the back, so the slime threat was more in line with what the story suggested. Additionally, the narrow halls could make for some interesting encounters.

5) Davaeorn - I think the battle was pretty easy even with the tactical changes, the Battle Horrors were a nice addition but not particularly hard to deal with. Mainly my problems are that Davaeorn will just stand in his own cloudkill or hurt himself with his own lighting,
dwindling his already low hp. Some reinforcements coming down the stairs mid battle or something could make the battle a bit more interesting, nothing overwhelming, just something to catch the player off guard.

Now I don't want to make this sound negative or anything, I think it's a great mod and we had a lot of fun playing through the entire game, so I'll list some of of my favorite battles and features as well:

1) Balduran's Isle - The finale was simple awesome, we were very poorly equipped to deal with the Loup Garou since we only had the silver dagger and Balduran's Sword and having my Paladin solo the boss on one side while the swarm of like 20 wolfweres attacked from the back definitely takes the highlight of the game.

2) Durlag's Tower - I'm not sure what you changed because I've never done the original version of this dungeon, but my god this is everything a dungeon should be. The traps on *everything* the hellish enemies, the insane chess battle, and the epic final battle with the Demon Knight (we didn't use the mirror) all gave us a deep sense of accomplishment when we finally finished it after so many hours. Though, one thing that could use some help is floor 3's 4 guardians, I'm not sure if they're supposed to be hard but they were weaker than the normal enemies in the tower. The outside and upper floors of the tower are a pretty easy source of experience though, I remember we went there and killed all the battle horrors and greater basilisks etc. for some pretty easy early experience. I know these floors aren't supposed to be hard, but it almost seemed like free experience that was larger than any quest reward.

3) Bandit's Camp - I'm not even sure if we're meant to fight them all at once (I wasn't able to kill any of them without them sounding the alarm), but this battle was pretty fun. We tried a lot of strategies like abusing web, traps, and summons all of which eventually failed, and by accident we found that we could just hole up in one of the tents so that we couldn't be surrounded or sniped, which won the battle for us. I liked this battle because it really forced to develop a good strategy and execution. I guess we kind of abused the game mechanics here, but it was a fun portion of the game nonetheless.

4)Improved Mages - Probably the #1 thing that screwed us over in any given situation, I really liked how more much of a threat mages were in your mod (even though 1 mage casting dimension door 5 times is cheating, it was still awesome). Nothing hurts more than a mage casting chaos on your entire party or charming one of your heavy hitters, and you only really have two defenses in BG1: high saves and dispel. Definitely a source of amusement the entire game, our Kensai had terrible saves so she'd end up getting charmed and killing 1-2 party members. On a side note, I really liked how the priests would rebuke my undead minions, I used animate dead a lot so I thought it was pretty cool.

5) Phase Spiders - Oh man, I didn't find the spiders to be as hard as the installation suggested but these guys were a source of many reloads, I can't count the number of times two or more teleported to Edwin and killed him almost instantly. I'm glad there was only one Astral Phase Spider in the game, that thing was pretty tough.

All in all, we had a lot of fun with SCS and we both plan to start SCS2 and play through that, so I'll be sure to comment on that as well. Granted, we did have a stupidly strong and geared party since we finished Durlag's Tower before going back to Candlekeep and the rest of the expansion material in chapter 4 or 5, the Paladin and Kensai pretty much destroyed everything, with the other characters offering ranged support, buffs, and the occasional CC or summon (we just gave Minsc a shield and had him guard the 3 squishies). I'll list my party with some stats in hopes that it helps somehow (these are the endgame stats with items equipped, but they didn't really fluctuate too much between chapters 5-7):

(Name/Class) (Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha) (HP) (AC) (THAC0) (Saves)

Paladin (Cavalier) 19/16/19/13/19/19 Attributes, 123 HP, -6 AC,  2 THAC0,  3/ 5/ 4/ 5/ 6 Saves
Fighter   (Kensai) 18/19/16/19/10/18 Attributes,  85 HP, -2 AC,  4 THAC0,  6/ 8/ 7/ 8/ 9 Saves
Imoen	  (Thief)  9/18/16/17/11/16 Attributes,  74 HP,  1 AC,  8 THAC0, 10/ 9/ 9/13/10 Saves
Minsc	 (Ranger) 18/16/16/ 8/ 6/ 9 Attributes,  79 HP, -5 AC,  8 THAC0,  9/11/10/11/12 Saves
Branwen   (Cleric) 13/16/15/ 9/15/13 Attributes,  60 HP, -4 AC, 12 THAC0,  6/10/ 9/12/11 Saves
Edwin   (Conjurer) 10/18/16/18/10/10 Attributes,  53 HP,  0 AC, 16 THAC0, 10/ 6/ 8/10/ 7 Saves

I hope you find my feedback useful, it was a lot of fun playing through it and we're looking forward to starting SCS2 soon.

Edited by Kharhaz, 09 May 2011 - 09:50 AM.

[DavidW]

Belated thanks for this. I'm probably not going to do a content update (as opposed to maintenance fix) for a little while but when I do this'll be useful, especially the comments on Sarevok.

[veyn]

Didn't see any sticky "feedback" thread on this forum, so I thought I'd revive this one. I've just finished my first Tutu playthrough (with BG1NPC, SCS and some other mods), and I'd say I'm impressed at how vastly better it is compared to original BG1. I've played some other BG2 tactical mods before (Tactics, improved battles of Ascension, IA) - SCS felt quite different from them. Below are some comments on some parts of the mod:

1) Improved mages. Gonna agree with the topic starter, mages are the most serious (and almost the only serious) threat in the mod. Single mages weren't usually a big problem: my usual tactic for them was sending 4 hasted melee characters to hit them - they usually only managed to cast one spell before their stoneskins/MI's were gone, and then they spent the rest of their time either trying to restore the defenses or getting their longer casts interrupted. Two or more mages is a completely different story; such encounters required some more complex tactic. Some more comments are necessary here:
a) Dispel/remove magic are too powerful IMO. It is also either very unreliable (if enemy is of equal level as party), very biased toward enemy, or simply unnecessary (simpler just to kill lower-level enemies in melee without wasting spells). For party, there is no good way to counter it, other than moving the target away from the rest of the characters to minimize effect (and this feels like an exploit). In many harder fights the dispelled melee character is very vulnerable to elemental damage or mind-affecting spells, so he can't return to the combat without spending few rounds drinking potions. The effect on enemies is worse: it will randomly either be completely ineffective, or will become near-immediate death sentence for enemy mages. I'm wondering why doesn't MGI protect against dispel - this would help enemy mages somewhat. I'm also thinking dispel would be better if it either removed single buff without level check or make level check for each removed buff separately - not sure if it can be done without executable hacks, however.
b) One more comment about dispel and MGI: dispel never seems to remove MGI itself, and "spell ineffective" line is shown in combat log. Further testing showed that other buffs seem to be dispelled normally even if MGI is present. I'm wondering if it is expected behaviour? (the MGI description seems to contradict that)
c) Summons in general and especially wand of monster summoning seem to be very overpowering; enemies in BG1 lack effective way of clearing summons. Even if they did, one can simply summon more. It was probably my mistake to install "bg1 summoning spells" component of Tutufix - but then summons would be almost a waste of spell slot, considering that even a single spell often summons more than 5 creatures. Maybe they could be tweaked to summon less but more powerful creatures.
d) Not sure if it is a bug, but fireball-like potions (I think they are called "oil of fiery burning" and "potion of explosions") seem to bypass MGI completely. Considering that they are instant-cast and aoe, they are very effective at disrupting spellcasting: not many (none?) mages seem to have 100% fire resistance. It would seem logical to tweak them to be blocked by MGI, just like fireball.
e) One "feature" that was adding more annoyance than difficulty is the tendency of some mages to run really far away; they would often "forget" about the party soon after wandering out of line of sight, making fights actually simpler (this was especially noticeable for first group in ToTSC ice dungeon and in last fight in caves under candlekeep). Similar thing also happened with archers - they sometimes tended to retreat to another area and then stay there - I think the whole "go to other area during battle" thing should be disabled both for party and enemies.

2) Chapter 2 boss (Mulahey). I had a weird bug there: when I've entered his building, only a bunch of neutral "kobold elites" was present there. I've thought some script misfired, so decided to exit and re-enter the building - he still didn't apprear. I've then decided to reload, but it turned out that most recent save I had was auto-save just before entering the building for the second time. Upon reloading it Mulahey and some monsters immediately appeared outside. I then proceeded to fight him; some more kobold reinforcements appeared during fight. Kobold elites didn't join the fight, but were hostile when I later entered the building. I'm quite sure this isn't correct, but I didn't really investigate the issue at that time, and I don't have that save anymore. Note that fight was very easy, and I don't think a bunch of kobold elites would change much - basically, Sleep took care of kobolds, and Hold Person of the boss.
a) Side note - the whole nashkel mines were very easy, despite being "improved" according to readme. Sleep spell took care of each pack, just like it did for most other monster packs in the first half of the game.

3) Chapter 3 finale (bandit camp). That is definitely my most favourite fight in the whole game. It reminded me about some IA fights for some reason I didn't make an effort to "infiltrate" bandit camp, and I'm not sure if it is somehow possible to not fight whole camp at the same time. Web was the big winner here, as well as mass summons. Even my super-tanked Kagain (with something like -20 AC vs. missiles) was getting serious damage when I tried the fight without summons. Anyway, that's probably the only difficult fight in the game that isn't difficult because of mages.
a) That is probably the only fight in the game where I wished I had PfNM - too bad you can't get one until after that fight. Maybe a few scrolls can be added to mage shop near Beregost, just to give this spell a moment to shine.
b) Often my summons would turn hostile in the middle of the fight; at first I thought it was due to friendly fire from AOE, but then it happened even when I casted no AOE at all. My hypothesis is that since some of the summons are hobgoblins, they hear some shout of the enemy hobgoblins and turn enemy themselves (I see there is "not charmed" check in shout response scripts, but nothing similar to "not summon" check). I've also had the similar issue with summoned wolves even when no fight was going on - I think it might happen because of global "realistic wolves" checks. Finally, I was semi-successful in charming hobgoblin chieftain (Ardenor Crush) with algernon cloak, but he would sometimes go hostile after few rounds (though there seems to be "not charmed" check in his scripts too).

4) Chapter 4 boss (Davaeorn). One bug in his Battle Horror companions' script is that they don't do anything until Davaeorn is attacked. On my first attempt, I didn't see any reason to hit him in the beginning (he is well protected, and battle horrors present more danger than he and are easier to kill), so I kept wondering why they don't notice Kagain killing them and run to Davaeorn instead I also think that his teleporting around and casting spells into the intersection of corridors hurts him more than helps (first, it reduces pressure on the party that is fighting battle horrors; second, he simply wastes spells like fireball casting them when it is evident it will hurt no one; third, once I've removed his MGI, when he teleports to some room, he starts running back to the party on foot and gets stuck in his own web/stinking cloud). All in all, this felt like a strange and not very hard fight.

5) Chapter 5 finale (top floor of Iron Throne tower). The clerics seem to cast uninterruptable Unholy Blight as first spells. That was devastating to the party (they start in position where it is somewhat hard to spread out fast, + 2 unholy blights at the same time are very damaging. So what I did was send single (evil!) Kagain with >100 fire resist, and once clerics started casting something, the rest of the party joined and fired some fire aoe (wand of fire, explosive potions, necklace of missiles) into the center of the room. Most enemies didn't survive or were "near death" after that.
a) Side note is that most clerics seem to love Unholy Blight. And why not - aoe, very damaging, very fast cast time. Too bad Viconia can't cast "good" equivalent. Next time I'll play full evil party!

6) Chapter 6 finale (party under candlekeep). Doesn't feel like boss encounter at all. Besides, their mage always seemed to run away and lose interest - I've reloaded a few times to try to fight a "proper" fight - no luck.

7) Sarevok. Nice fight, though I wonder why Tazok, Semaj and Sarevok himself have such good saves (all 1s?). I can understand it for Sarevok, but why others? This makes controlling spells mostly useless. Diarmid is an interesting character there (uses pro.Magic scroll?), but dies to 2 melee characters really fast.

8) Chess fight in Durlag tower. Interesting fight where summons are almost useless. However, mass AOE clears almost all enemies here, and with absorption potions characters can go anywhere they wish.

9) Demon knight in Durlag tower. Very hard if mirror is used, trivial otherwise. I've just sent forward one character, and as soon as he casted his dispel, the rest ran into melee and just killed him.

10) Aec'letec. Interesting fight, dispelling arrows really helped, though I've used only 2 of them - the rest of his death gazes were taken by Kagain under invulnerability potion (he is almost guaranteed to save against it, being dwarf). Used summons (but not very many) to distract Aec'letec while I killed acolytes - his melee damage is very heavy to tank him straightly. The key to this fight was spreading around the room very fast in the beginning, so that only 1 character is affected by dispel and silence.

11) Improved spiders. The webbing spiders are tricky, especially considering that as soon as single character is webbed, all spiders run to eat him - this makes encounters in cloakwood quite deadly. Phasing spiders are very weak - they have little hp, and even though they tend to teleport to mages, it is easily countered with Mirror Images. Their only strength is their insane poison (10 damage per tick?), but they usually die too fast for it to matter. It is strange that hardest spiders are worth so little XP, compared to supposedly "tougher" counterparts (sword/wraith spiders) - maybe these other spiders should also be improved? Note that considering strength of the spiders, the Spider Spawn spell is disappointing: the webbing spiders summoned by it don't seem to use their web, and phasing spiders always teleport to party's mages (and thus away from enemies). Standard Monster Summoning spell of same level is much better.

12) Assassin groups. There was a weird bug with "randomized" assassins spawning after Nashkel. I was travelling around, waiting for the attack - but it never happened. So I decided to look at the scripts and investigate. When I checked "DMWWC3Assassin" variable in game, it was set to 2 (i.e. supposedly after Lamalha was spawned) - but I've never seen her. When I set the variable back to 1 via console, it would immediately reset to 2 or 3, but no group would appear anywhere. I've then decided to spawn Lamalha directly via console - after dialog she didn't turn hostile and her friends didn't appear for several rounds. Even then, her friends seemed to spawn really far away from her. Anyway, after I've killed them and rested, next assassin group spawned and turned hostile correctly. I didn't find any obvious errors in the dialogs and scripts, so I assume it might be some engine bug.
a) Last assassin group (just outside Sarevok's hideout) was actually quite interesting to fight, though their archer with detonating arrows seemed to have no problems firing his arrows at two fighters with 90 fire resist when they were right next to other enemies.

13) On second level of cloakwood mines, I had a mega fight with whole level at the same time. I don't know whether this is intended (it was a fun battle), but the shouts seem to have very big range there compared to the distance between enemy packs.

14) Improved calls for help. I didn't really remember about this component - it's just very natural - until I've found a place where it didn't seem to work: doppelgangers in Seven Suns building. I've never used the "advance few steps at a time" exploit in vanilla BG, but that doppelganger issue really showed how it could be unrealistic not having this component.

15) Minor issue: one of the mages on the second floor of magic shop in Baldur's Gate seems to be using his wand of fire first, and then casting his "prebuffs" only round later. On my second attempt I've just sent hasted fighter with explosion potion into the middle of their group - explosion potion took that mage to "badly wounded", and then he killed himself with his wand of fire's fireball. That was kinda hilarious (and not really intentional).

All in all, I've enjoyed the SCS battles very much, though I've missed the encounters with unique feel like in IA. There were a few in SCS, but some of the others felt like "another generic improved mage". I'll probably play BG2 with SCS2 soon (though I'll have to investigate what mods are available and compatible first), most likely I'll try some sort of full-mage party (some multiclassed, etc.) - non-mages seem to be very frail, not having PfMW, stoneskins, mirror images and dispel protection. In IA there were workarounds for that (heavy regeneration abilities, undispellable damage resistance potions, and in general I remember much less dispels from enemies), and even then in late game cleric had to spam mass Greater Restoration at times - I don't think SCS2 has similar things, it looks much more mage-centric.

Thanks a lot for the great mod!

[Dakk]

veyn, on 29 April 2012 - 05:26 AM, said:

a) Side note - the whole nashkel mines were very easy, despite being "improved" according to readme. Sleep spell took care of each pack, just like it did for most other monster packs in the first half of the game.

Just out of curiosity - seeing as you could use sleep on "each pack" how much do you rest during your dungeon crawl? If you rest a lot your available magic power might be overpowering any improvements (and SCS doesn't police this behaviour). I personally play with a quite restricted rest allowance while dungeon crawling. Not saying that your way is "wrong" in any way, for the record.

[veyn]

Dakk, on 02 September 2012 - 07:38 AM, said:

Just out of curiosity - seeing as you could use sleep on "each pack" how much do you rest during your dungeon crawl? If you rest a lot your available magic power might be overpowering any improvements (and SCS doesn't police this behaviour). I personally play with a quite restricted rest allowance while dungeon crawling. Not saying that your way is "wrong" in any way, for the record.

My protagonist was a sorcerer with ring of wizardry from friendly arm inn area, so he had plenty of 1st level spells even at low level (8 or 10 or something like that). I usually play without resting until most of my party's resources are expended, or until I reach particularly difficult encounter - so I had 2 or so rests in nashkel mines (don't really remember exactly, since it was quite a long time ago ).

[DavidW]

I didn't see this - very helpful - feedback thread when it came out. Thanks! I'll give it some thought... but I did want to single out this:

veyn, on 29 April 2012 - 05:26 AM, said:

a) Side note - the whole nashkel mines were very easy, despite being "improved" according to readme. Sleep spell took care of each pack, just like it did for most other monster packs in the first half of the game.

The "improved kobolds" component is probably the single component, across SCS and SCS2 combined, which has led to the most complaints for being too difficult and too unfair. My invariable reply is that people's tastes, playstyles, and tactical abilities vary widely. Thank you for confirming it!

[Dakk]

It would seem that rushing the mines is popular, while I understand that know you personally never venture down before you're at least level 3. That's how I play it too, and I feel it's just perfect. Around that level you can laugh at single kobolds, but it gets downright hairy when ~20 kobolds (and no joke) descends on you at once - sprinkled with K guards, commandos and chieftains. It's a masterpiece

[DrAzTiK]

Personally I like the improved kolbods component. Of course I think the party need to gain 2 or 3 levels before venturing in mines but it makes sence and a good reason to discover some maps around Naskel for gain some Xp.

[veyn]

For the record, I did not rush the mines - I generally tend to postpone main quest and do sidequests first instead - so my party was probably lvl.3 or something. However, I think that even at level 1 the Sleep would solve most of the problems in nashkel. I think the main problem would be that even if single kobold from the large pack would make his save, he could one-shot someone before he is killed (in fact, this - that any enemy can get lucky and one-shot some character with a crit - is one of the main reasons why my favourite part of BG series is chapter 2 of SOA ).

In general, I feel that Sleep is very overpowered for the first half of the game: I've chosen Sleep and Blindness as initial sorcerer spell picks, and never did regret that - 90% or so of the encounters were solved with 1-2 sleeps, and blindness helped against early game ogres and the like.

[Zen]

Just on a related note, with v21 the bandits that spawn on the Coast Way with the bandit leader (Kaigen's Quest) sat there doing nothing even though they were equipped with bows.

[The Fred]

To chime in a few points...

Improved Kobolds - I feel as though the vanilla game expects you to head straight to the mines; you'd be a L1 or L2 party at best, depending on party size perhaps, at which point the kobolds themselves aren't a big deal necessarily but the attrition and Mulahey are. Of course this is SCS, it's for people who have already got the knack of the game, but looking at it from the point of view of a Sorcerer with the Ring of Wizardry is not really fair IMO (try adding Hard Times too).

Improved Bandits - I actually thought this was kinda overkill. It does really make sneaking in more attractive, but when I first tried to fight I had the whole camp descend on me. I guess that's more realistic, but even with copious applications of Web and the like I had to flee and come back several times, and the calls for help and the like meant all the bandits seemed to seek me out pretty quickly and reliably. It sure shook things up, but it seems tougher than a lot of the other components.

Spiders - Yeah, the spider part of Cloakwood was already tough; this makes it a lot tougher. That's OK, but one thing I'd say is that an option to limit the range of the Phase Spider teleport would be a nice addition (I had a few lines which seemed to work for that but they were for the vanilla version I made anyway). It's just annoying to enter the area and have two Phase Spiders pop up right on top of you immediately (and I'm not sure if the same happens in other areas, like Durlag's Tower).

The Improved Mages are certainly the highlight, though. I'm not sure using quadruple Hasted melee guys is a good metric for measuring anything by but their tactics are at least a bit less predictable (and a lot better) than in vanilla. ;-)


And now I remember it, I did also have a weird bug with the code which heals folk when you leave and return; it ended up working overtime on Bassilus, healing him as I damaged him and making him, effectively, invincible. I figured maybe it just got confused, though.