Combat in Baldur's Gate

I ordered Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 after seeing high praise for both of them on this very forum. They arrived early this week and I installed BG1 and started on it. So far, I’ve logged about 5 hours on it, most of which has been involved in getting to the first city and having my party wiped out right outside the inn. Wolves in the woods are having the same effect.

I tried fighting the illusion monsters in the first town but that doesn’t seem to help. I always win those fights pretty easily. Once I get out of town though, every battle seems to be hit or miss. The guides I’ve checked out all seem to assume a familiarity with the game that I don’t possess. I feel like that I must be missing something fundamental and once I have the “A ha” moment, I’ll be off like a shot. It really does look like there’s a good game waiting for me once I get over the learning curve. Any doper insight? I really don’t want to go back to Otis in Dead Rising just yet.

Also, is there a way to make those little guys run? Their leisurely stroll is really starting to bug me. :stuck_out_tongue:

Man, you know I just don’t remember if you can or not. I’m thinking not. But otherwise…

1.)When possible always scout ahead with a hidden rogue/thief/whatever. You never want to just blunder into combat.

2.)Using a scout to pinpoint location - bring up a “bombardier” ( i.e. some mage-type with a ranged, preferably area effect offensive spell of some sort ) to the edge of “Fog of War” position where your opponents can’t see him. Then have him/her launch an offscreen surprise attack. More devastating if you can launch a simultaneous deabilitating strike with a spell like web.

3.) If necessary retreat your spellcaster(s) behind a waiting wall of “tanks” ( solid fighter types ) and snipe with distance weapons/spells as your attackers close, then pause if need be to switch to close combat. Sometimes you can draw out posted guards one or two at a time and pick them off.

4.) Try to take out spellcasters as a first priority. In BG II this often involves stripping off layers of protection first, but earlier on may not be necessary ( can’t recall ). Not engaging your hidden scout, but rather having them close from behind and backstab is a viable tactic. So is having the scout strike the first blow by trying to assassinate an enemy spellcaster, instead of using your bombardier to launch an area of effect attack. Just be sure you have room to run if you do that and a speed enhancer of some sort helps.

5.) Pets are useful - have summoning spells on hand to even the odds in close combat against multiple foes.

That’s one ( or more, fairly standard ) set of tactics, anyway. A balanced party always helps. Generally I’d recommend no less than two dedicated tanks, to reduce flanking - otherwise they tend to get swamped. At least in BG II you’ll need a thief to scout, for traps and for locks. And a dedicated mage for the heavy artillery. The other slots can be allocated as your play preferences suit you.

  • Tamerlane

The three fundamental rules of combat in Baldur’s Gate:

  1. Pause
  2. Pause
  3. Pause

At the beginning of the game, you might not have the bombadier. And if you get random encounters when it is just you and Imoen, best bet is to just reload. Tamerlane’s responses, however, will help you through once you’ve built your party and a few levels.

The fight outside the in can be tough. I make sure the town guard is nearby, as they’ll fight the guy for me. A one-or-two spell mage is useless, a thief slightly less so. As soon as he first starts talking, you have an opportunity to run behind, or at least closer to, a guard before the cut scene. As soon as the cut scene breaks, keep moving away and the guard will intercept.

In options, set autopause for enemy spotted. Helps immensely.

Always keep the pantaloons. ALWAYS!

This could be part of my problem. I’m stuck in the mode of treating each battle as a contained fight that all members of the party start at the same time, a la console RPGs.

I came in to mention frequent pauses. Pause, direct your orders, unpause, watch them start to get carried out, pause again when someone dies/enters the battle, reprioritize and redirect orders, unpause, and repeat.
By the way, if the problem actually IS the difficulty, you can turn down the AI and see if that makes a difference. Push the slider back up when appropriate.

I tried so hard to like that game but the combat was a HUGE turn off so I quit. I didn’t understand what was fun about casting a spell and then having to sleep a day before you could cast it again.

Boring.

I’ve always been much more successful when I let the enemy come to my party, rather than rushing out to the enemy. Everyone needs missile attacks. If your enemies don’t have area attacks, then keep your group together. If the enemy DOES have fireballs, etc., then spread your group out.

And yeah, pause, pause, pause.

This is the absolute number-one failing of the D&D combat system, IMO. I play an arcane damage blow-it-the-hell-up spellcaster in almost every single RPG type game I play. It’s just who my Game Persona is.

Baldur’s Gate? Fighter. NWN? Fighter/Weapon Master/Champion of Torm. NWN2? Ranger/Weapon Master (and I HATE rangers). D&D-system games that don’t have compelling enough stories to keep me going as a non-preferred class, even if they are otherwise great games? Not really an option to play.

Really quite disappointing, sometimes.

Did anyone mention pausing yet?

You can tweak some of your options to speed the game. Considering its age and the computers it was designed for, you can max every setting. I believe two that will help (and I may be confusing BG2, in case you don’t see one) are ‘Path Search Nodes’ and another one around AI. You can probably increase each by a factor of 10. It will help some, but the pathfinding in BG I shows its age.

Pardon me if this is completely obvious, but this is one of those games where concentrated fire is often extremely nice. The one exception to this, IIRC, is against spellcasters: you want to get your tanks up close and personal with the casters, to prevent further casting.

Daniel

Don’t forget to save. After every battle, I save the game. The saved game marked Autosave takes you back to the last time you left an area.

Saving after a fight is as important as pausing during the battle.

BTW: I’ve just finished BGII, reading to start the Throne of Baal add-on.)

Pause, Pause, Pausing has done the trick. It’s like I’m playing a completely different game now. Thanks everyone!

I installed BG2 one evening just to see what it looked like and got a real chuckle when I maxed the resolution and the game told me that I needed the best computer available to run the game in that mode. :wink:

I’m also loving the snide remarks that the characters make. “Please don’t click on me, I don’t want no trouble!” made me laugh out loud. :smiley:

I set up the autopause to pause the game when:

  1. An enemy is spotted
  2. A current target dies
  3. Weapon becomes unusable
  4. A character dies

I also use the sneak-up-and-nuke-'em technique mentioned above. Once you can cast Web or Entangle, you’ll want to do what’s called root-n-nuke – just like the above only you immobilize as many opponents as possible before you nuke them.

I recommend holding off moving into melee as long as possible. The game taught me this because eventually you run into archers who cut you down as you run toward them to hit them with your swords. It made me wonder why the hell I wasn’t doing that. Equip everybody with ranged weapons and force the enemy to suffer free potshots until they can get close enough to use their thwackers. At that point you can use one or two ‘tanks’ to draw their attacks and have everyone else continue to attack with ranged weapons. Or, you don’t even have to have someone actually getting hit. Often you can get a bad guy to chase one character whom you keep moving to avoid actually being in weapon range while everyone else in the party attacks with bows and slings.

Also, you can use your thief (Imoen) to sneak up to the bad guys until you can see just one, hit that sucker with an arrow, and then immediately run. You’ll have to get a feel for how to nuance this technique, but often you can draw one enemy away from a group and deal with him or her individually. This is known as ‘pulling.’ I think it was easier to do this in the first game because they’d give chase for a long time. In Baldur’s Gate II, they’d be shyer about leaving the group, but this didn’t turn out to be more ‘intelligent’ behavior on the bad guy’s part. It just meant that you could shake off a bad pull more easily.

Once Imoen gets good at sneaking, she can take on one or two enemies all by herself. Sneak up and backstab, then run around the corner and initiate sneaking again. If it fails, run around another corner until she can try again. When the enemy runs around the corner after you and you’ve already hidden in shadows, you can back stab again and run the other way around the corner to do it all again. In Planescape: Torment I got through almost all the battles of the game with Nameless and Annah backstabbing and running around corners, back and forth.

That’s the D&D ruleset influencing the game mechanics, unfortunately. BG2 - I forget if BG1 allows it - has a class called a sorcerer that lets you pick a smaller pool of “understood” spells (compared to how many a wizard could put in the spellbook) and then cast X number of level 1 spells per day, Y of level 2, and so on. More flexibility on a per-day basis with the tradeoff of having fewer spells you could choose from overall.

Yes. If you ever decide to replay it, there’s the BG Tutu software project that allows you to basically play BG1 under the BG2 ruleset, UI and graphics. Since the walk speed was boosted in BG2, it has the effect you want. But it’s not necessarily an easy thing to get running, and it changes the underlying game a bit and so I wouldn’t recommend trying this on your first playthrough.

Baldur’s Gate is not realtime, it’s pausetime.

If you want Khalid and Jaheira:
get the two nasty-personality dudes who are in the first area, at the path,
then head to the inn without exploring a lot,
save before the fight,
and keep reloading until you kill him before he kills you,
then grab everything those two have, dismiss them and sell their stuff :smiley:

you can do a small quest there (get a ring from some baddies). Once you’ve done that and discovered (but not visited) those areas you can, head back south. The largish town a couple areas south of the inn and the areas close to it are good for learning how to move your characters, work formations, grab some nice loot, etc. And the mining town all the way south has some nice characters to complete your group with.

It gets better in BG2 (the talking sword is pretty funny), and Throne of Bhaal has the funniest cutscene not in a humor game.

ETA: Plus, in BG2, every NPC has a dedicated cutscene with every other NPC, so whatever combo you have, they’ll talk to each other. Some are serious, some are seriously funny.

Or make sure Montaron is closest to the mage outside the inn when combat starts, so he gets targeted and takes a full magic missile blast and buys the farm. Montaron! You are so aggravating to my demeanor!

Poor Montaron.

He doesn’t die, no matter what you do! He’ll pop up again! And if you are especially masochistic, you can find a mod that will return him to your party :eek: