Seems like I get to be one of the lucky ones with problems getting it to install and launch properly on my PC.
No error, just click “Play” and the program ends.
Going through all the various fixes now. Not what I wanted to be doing with my time.
Downloading now. Fingers crossed.
Of course he has a beard. Her name’s Jaheira ! <badum, tsh>
Ugggh. My desktop isn’t working right now and my laptop has an integrated intel chipset. 
I’m almost about to drop the 20 bucks just in case “not supported” means “it’ll work but we don’t promise.”
I really hope when they do the Enhanced Edition for Baldur’s Gate II these new NPCs make a return.
From what I’ve read, that’s the intent, that they (and the status of your friendship/relationship/whatever with them) will indeed be in the next game. Fingers crossed that they’ll have the money and ability to revamp BG2.
I’m also really looking forward to the iPad release of BGEE. It’s a shame they couldn’t work out “bundling” deals due to the various distributor requirements, but oh well.
I just don’t know if I’ll be able to wait that long. Characters exported from BGEE should work in the existing BGII, right?
I expect they would, but don’t know if anyone’s tried.
Speaking of the new NPCs, I saw on another board that someone missed one who should be pretty easy to find, so here are their locations:
Dorn: Standing in the main room in the Friendly Arms Inn, where you go to find Jahiera and Khalid
Neera: In Beregorn, not too far east of the entrance to the city
Rasaad: In Nashkel, across from the inn
There’s a bug that prevents you from completing Neera’s stuff that myself and a bunch of others have run into, hopefully they fix it soon. 
There’s a bug that completed fucked Yeslick for me. It was especially annoying because I spent an hour leveling him because my other characters were already L4s when I found him.
I actually stopped playing this because 1) there are a headscratching amount of bugs, and apparently they optimized the graphics for tablets because I can’t play in fullscreen without it looking crummy or my cursor disappearing on the inventory screen, and 2) this gave me the overwhelming urge to play BG2, which I have re-installed.
Seriously, this game is ancient. Why are people seeing quest bugs?
I had the same problem with the disappearing cursor. The trick is to start in windowed mode, move one of the items in inventory that made the cursor disappear (for me it was helmets), and then switch back to regular mode and it should be okay.
I’m not having a lot of problems with bugs, unless there was always an issue with completed quests not being marked as completed.
But I’m going now through the dilemma I have experienced before: Most low-level spells seem useless, because except for Sleep early on, and then the root-n-nuke suite, they generally aren’t worth the casting time against low-level creatures, and more powerful enemies shrug them off. It occurs to me that maybe some of you are playing a subtler game where it’s actually worth the time to stop and cast Aid for the slim advantage it gives rather than simply trying the fight again to see if it goes better this time? Any favorite spell strategies?
They had a bugfix yesterday.
So far I’ve restarted three times, each time rebuilding my char completely. 
I finally settled on a plain-jane fighter with excellent stats*, designed to dual to Thief in BG2 at level 13 (meaning he can get to 39 as a thief and basically lose nothing of consequence). I’m going for a Neutral/Evil party aside from Imoen, as the game’s best Thief and 2nd-best Mage.
*I got spoiled. My first toon ever in BG was a Ranger, and in BG, stats are rolled AFTER you select a class. Classes each have minimum stats (because in pen n’ paper you roll stats and then qualify for classes), so you can never roll under the stat minimums for your class. This means that Rangers and Paladins, who high multiple stats minimums and those are quite high, always come out with good stats and often ridiculously good stats.
I never played the original all the way through before, but in BGII my favorite tactic is to creep forward to just before a big concentration of enemies, have my wizard and cleric cast entanglement (?) and Stinking Cloud/Cloudkill, and then simply lob fireballs into the area with my tanks in front to deal with escapees.
Web and Entangle can really mess up a group of enemies. Magic Missile is good for interrupting an opponent’s spellcasting. Fireball speaks for itself.
One of the cheesier tactics I’d use was to cast Invisibility on one character, use him to clear away the “fog of war”, and then fire arrows at the enemies from outside their field of vision. Usually the bad guys will just stand there, getting hit by arrows until they die.
Yeah, I have my thief get just to within sight of the enemies, then the casters line up behind her, cast Entangle and Web. I don’t usually go for Cloudkill, but I can’t recall any reason why at the moment.
Right now, being lower level, I don’t really have any area-of-effect damage spells. I rely on everybody in my party being archers. Enemies that insist on wading in with a melee weapon usually find themselves chasing one person in circles while the rest of the party continue to lob missiles. Or, in tricky situations it may be necessary to slow and distract a foe with summoned monsters, either to keep them out of melee range or to give them something to waste devastating blows on when I’m forced to wade in myself, because I need my melee weapons’ magical pluses.
So, besides the classic root-n-nuke suite, and the summoning, and the occasional need to defend your mage with Mirror Image and such, what should a standard party’s load out include?
A bunch of characters who you don’t meet until it’s no longer worth swapping your leveled characters out, unfortunately. I’m now discovering that that’s one of the huge improvements that BGII made - you could access more or less all of the NPCs very early on.
I just leave my party in one spot and have my main character, an archer Bard, move around until he sees things, within a certain range. Then my party moves to another spot and repeats until the entire map is uncovered.
When I spot an enemy, I flick an arrow at it and then retreat to the group. Single enemy follows, gets slaughtered by the group. Rinse and repeat to take care of larger groups of Hobgoblins, bandits, etc.
The only characters I didn’t consider worth grabbing are found in the actual city of Baldur’s Gate, and not even all of them are bad. It’s just that you tend to get attached to the ones you have before them. Everyone else (which includes the best characters anyway) is either available from the beginning or in the Cloakwood.
However, the game wasn’t set up to be played quite how most people do. Bioware seems to have expected that many people would actually reach the city about level 4-5, and still have a great deal to do in the countryside. As near as I can tell, people had so much fun plundering the map that half the time they’d already shredded every last encounter and claimed every last magic goodie by the time they got to the last few chapters.