Saturday, December 26, 2009

Baldur's Gate: Start of chapter one, your first party

Herein lie a few spoilers.

Before leaving Candlekeep

Before leaving, you're going to want the following items (including what you have equipped):

- (3) slings, one for yourself, one spare, and one for a future party member
- (5) stacks of sling ammo (bullets)
- (3) short bows, one for Imoen, one spare, and one for a future party member
- (5) stacks of arrows
- (1) studded leather for Imoen

The slings and bullets along with the short bow are not that expensive and will stand you in good stead once you meet up with the mage (Xzar) & thief (Montaron) on the path near Candlekeep. That will let you equip all 4 members of the party at that point with ranged weapons before heading to Friendly Arm Inn (FAI).

The other two party members that you'll meet soon are found inside of FAI where you can buy equipment from the inn keeper. So there's no need to carry equipment for them all the way from Candlekeep.

Basic combat tips

Hopefully, you took my advice and went into the game options and set things up to auto-pause when enemies are sighted (along with a few other events). This pause will allow you to quickly issue orders for all of your party members, or to reposition into a skirmish line.

First off, don't charge the enemy, make them come to you. Keep your fighters (tanks) in front, with the weaker ranged party members in the back. Draw the enemy into a kill area that is safe where the fight won't spill over into uncleared areas.

You should go into each party member's profile page and choose "Customize Character" and then "Script". This is where you can change how the party responds if you happen to leave the AI turned on. Now, I tend to be a micromanager, but if you pick the proper scripts, you can probably do less micromanaging of the party members.

Your opening attack should always be ranged, either via weapons or spells (including dispels). Four or six party members all plinking away with ranged weapons can do a lot of damage to an incoming ogre before it gets close enough to engage with melee. Have your fighters switch to heavier hitting melee weapons once the target gets within range.

Use line of sight to draw ranged enemies closer. Send a sacrificial lamb forward to get their attention, then run back around a corner to draw them in.

The number keys (1-6) can be used to select your party members. In addition, keys 7-9, 0 and the minus can be used to select portions of the party. The select all is, by default, the equals sign. To make things easier, I recommend that the character's ranged weapon always be placed in the first weapon slot. That way you can select the character and then hit F3 to have them attack with their ranged weapon.

Save your spells for dire situations. Have your mage use a sling on low-level critters and save their spells for either large groups or the tougher enemies.

Enemy spell casters should be your primary target in most cases. Such as the assassin who jumps you when you try to enter the inn in FAI. It's important to hit them with ranged attacks before they can get spells off, hopefully interrupting their casts. (After failing the FAI fight a few times, I went back when 3 characters equipped with ranged weapons. The fight suddenly got a lot easier.)

Montaron and Xzar

This thief and mage pair are found soon after you join up with Imoen. Unfortunately, if you're going to form a "good" alignment party, they're going to eventually leave you. But for the initial journey to FAI and dealing with the assassin that lies in wait, they'll do for the moment. After that, I suggest not shedding any tears if they pass away by accident or on purpose (unless you're going for an evil party).

Xzar can use a sling and bullets, while Montaron can use a short bow and arrows as their ranged weapon. Montaron is not a very good fighter (very low hit points) and is more of a ranged / thief type. Xzar has a miniscule amount of hit points unless he uses his drain spell, so keep him well back from the action.

Use them, and then abandon them once you find better choices.

Party balance

The ideal party consists of the following roles:

- someone to take a beating, preferably two such people
- someone to heal, preferably two healers
- a thief to detect/disarm traps and open locks
- evil parties will want a pickpocket thief
- a high charisma person to be leader
- an archer or two for ranged support
- at least one mage for lore purposes and to use scrolls

Some characters can serve multiple roles, even if they don't multi-class or dual-class. For instance, at the start, Imoen has a high charisma, so she's a good person to send off to talk to the inn keeper to sell goods. Later on, Imoen makes a good dual-spec mage / thief.

If we look at the five characters that you'll run across within the first hour or two of play:

Imoen - thief & 16 CHA
Xzar - mage
Montaron - fighter/thief
Jaheira - fighter/druid & 15 CHA
Khalid - fighter

That means that your character can really be any of the main archetypes without encountering any issues at the very start. You could multi-class as a fighter/cleric or play a bard or play a pure class like mage or cleric. Since you'll also run into other characters once you move south from FAI, you can fill in any holes before you encounter any serious opposition.

Labels: 2009, BaldursGate

posted by Wuphon's at 11:45 PM (0 comments)

Baldur's Gate: Starting with a cleric

There's a lot of useful information out there for getting started with Baldur's Gate, but not much directed specifically at starting a cleric and getting past the start of Chapter One. Nonetheless, you'll want to at least read the manual (available in PDF form on the 4-in-1 boxset) and make a list of the default key strokes (look for the "Keymap.ini" file to see what the current configuration is). Looking for "Baldur's Gate Character Creation Guide (by Tazar)" and the massive "Baldur's Gate: FAQ/Walkthrough by DSimpson" are also recommended.

To start off, Baldur's Gate is hard - really hard at first. The AD&D 2nd edition ruleset is very strict and Baldur's Gate follows it rather closely. Combine that with a character who starts at level 1 and there are going to be a lot of fights where running away is the best choice. The UI is old and dated, and as such the feedback about what actions are about to be performed can be subtle to nonexistent. You will want to save after every major battle, save before resting, and save before entering a new area. While you can use the Quick-Save feature to accomplish this, you should also create multiple permanent saves just in case the quick-save was in a bad location or you need to back-step farther.

On the flip side, the voice acting is good, the characters and storyline are well written, and it will take you a few weeks or longer to progress through the storyline. A few dozen hours if you do only the main quest chain up to thrice that if you do a lot of side quests and exploration. Give it at least 2 hours and don't leave Candlekeep until you've got a basic grasp on group combat, how to position your characters, and have the options for pausing set to sane non-default values.

Specifically, you'll want to go into game options and the "Auto Pause" options. Turn on the options for "Enemy Sighted", "Character's Target Destroyed", "Weapon Unusable", and possibly "End of Round". This will slow things down enough that you get frequent pauses during the action and can take corrective action and issue new orders.

Rolling up a cleric

A lot of the guides recommend a human fighter so that you can dual-class later on into a cleric or other secondary specialization. Since I'm not interested in playing a human or a fighter or in multi-classing, I'm rolling up a pure dwarven cleric instead. This will give me a high constitution, a good bit of wisdom, and the charisma of a love-sick ox. Since some of the other NPCs will have a good CHA score (such as the first NPC that joins your party), this is really only a problem during the prologue inside of Candlekeep.

That being said, there are ranges within which you'll want your ability scores (attributes) to fall. Refer to the end of the manual (pages 134-137) to see the table of attributes and how they impact some side issues.

STR (Strength) - If you bash your opponents over the head with heavy weapons, this stat is important. Fighters value this above all else, and it's somewhat important for cleric. It also governs the amount of weight that you can carry. No matter what, try to stay above 8 points to avoid some negative modifiers and preferably above 16 for a melee focused character.

DEX (Dexterity) - Only of modest importance for a cleric, you can shave points here if you need. You'll want something in the 7+ range for a cleric, but you don't have to go much past 10 points here.

CON (Constitution) - As a dwarf, I consider this to be a key stat. Remember that AD&D clerics can wear plate armor and get into the thick of battle. This also controls how many hit points you gain when you level up. You'll want a minimum of 15 points, but there's not a lot of benefit past 16 points for a cleric.

INT (Intelligence) - Key stat for a mage, not so important for a cleric. Still, stay above 10 points and preferably closer to an average score of 12 points.

WIS (Wisdom) - Key stat for a cleric. Go for at least 16 points here as it governs many cleric abilities. The closer to 18 or 19 you can get the better. While there is a book of wisdom that can boost your score by 1 point later, you may wish to go with maximum WIS out of the gate.

CHA (Charisma) - Not terribly important for a cleric, but you'll want to stay above X-Y in order to avoid some negatives. You can go as low as 8 without negative adjustments in reaction by other NPCs, but 10 points might be a more comfortable middle ground for a dwarf.

For the weapon proficiencies, I recommend taking a melee weapon for one point and a ranged weapon for the other point. For clerics, this means putting a point into missile weapons (slings and bullets/stones) and a point into either spiked or blunt weapons. It's a bit of a toss-up for spiked vs blunt, but I'd recommend blunt at the start.

On the initial spell pick, make sure you choose Cure Light Wounds at the start. The other spells won't matter much. As a cleric, you won't have to go rummaging for spells in the dark corners of the kingdom because your deity will teach them to you automatically. If you want to memorize a different set of spells, open up your prayer book (P) and left-click on the left side to clear spells and then pick from the right side to choose spells. You'll then have to rest for 8 hours in order to memorize the new spell selection. One thing to keep in mind is that if you have 3 spell slots, you can memorize any combination of up to 3 spells, including simply learning Cure Light Wounds three times. After casting a spell slot, that spell is spent until the next time that you rest for 8 hours.

For the character portrait, any BMP (Windows Bitmap) file that is properly sized will work. These go in a "Portraits" folder created in the same location as the BGMain2.exe file (this folder does not exist by default). The filenames should probably match except for the last letter which should either be "S" (small) or "L" (large). The large portraits are 110x170 (24 bit) BMP files and the small portraits are 38x60 (8 bit). Large portraits are used in the character screen while the small portraits appear along the right side of the main user interface.

Equipping a cleric

At the start, you're going to have ~70gp to spend and you can easily earn / find another 50 or so before leaving Candlekeep. Your primary equipment list is approximately:

- 2 melee weapons (in case one breaks)
- 1 or 2 ranged weapons (a sling for a cleric)
- 3 stacks of ammo (bullets for your sling)
- a medium shield
- regular or studded leather
- a helmet

Once you have purchased these, you should equip everything to get it out of your bags and to free up inventory slots (which are very limited). You can put 3 stacks of ammo in your quiver and you can carry both the ranged and melee weapon at the same time in the quick weapon slots. I tend to drop the 2H staff on the floor outside the inn rather then continue to carry it around.

Note: If you want to give an item to another member in the party, simply drag and drop it onto their portrait along the right side of the window. It will then appear in their main inventory bag and can be equipped / used from there.

If you're thinking ahead, I suggest also picking up (1) short sword, (1) stack of arrows, (1) stack of bolts and (1) regular or studded leather for later.

Labels: 2009, BaldursGate

posted by Wuphon's at 7:30 PM (0 comments)

Baldur's Gate: Black box bug on NVIDIA cards

So I got the Baldur's Gate 4-in-1 boxset recently and installed it on my Windows XP box. Everything works fine (unlike some other older games), except that the sprite overlay animations (butterflies, birds flying overhead) would display as black boxes. This is due to a bug in the NVIDIA display drivers that has never been fixed. I'm using a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB pair of cards in SLI mode.





One solution to this is to use the NVIDIA DDraw Fix by JLanger (nvidia_ddraw_fix_1.0.3.zip). You place the DLL and EXE file in your Baldur's Gate directory, then patch the BGMain2.exe file. The downside of this fix is that it will prevent you from using other patching type modifications of the original game executable (such as trying to use the widescreen mod via WeiDU).

Note: Baldur's Gate 2 uses OpenGL for rendering and not DirectDraw, so it will not encounter this problem.

Labels: 2009, BaldursGate

posted by Wuphon's at 12:27 PM (0 comments)