Fucking ToEE, how does it work

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I don't remember the game being all that difficult outside of the constant ambushing and I played with a barb, ranger, bard, sorc, and druid without minmaxing (not exactly optimal party). Pretty sure I wasn't high enough level as I was supposed to be for lots of parts of the game and I was using Co8. The worst enemy in the game I thought was the interface. With no grid I kept misclicking constantly and a lot of the time the icons would fuck up and I thought I would be casting a spell and not do so or vice versa. I really hated that bar thing on the side too, and wish they found a better way to represent your actions per round.

As far as the fighting goes the game doesn't really stop you from simply leaving and resting after every encounter so it's more a matter of "do I feel like walking all the way out and back here again" moreso than of challenge, although I have a feeling someone will say that is an "exploit" too. There's only one quest which is time-based and it was added by the Co8 pack and even in that you get thrown a random encounter that you need to solve it right before the time runs up. You can also stealth past enemies with one character and then click on a staircase/doorway etc. and all of your characters will go through, not just the stealth guy if you can't past something, but you bone yourself out of a lot of xp if you do that too much.

IIRC (and there's a high chance of me mixing things up, it has been several years and several re-plays after all), it was in the vanilla game but buggy. I had the ambush encounter in my first playthrough which was without Co8. But it activated at some weird moment, long after I'd dealt with Lareth, after I searched the moathouse again and used the hidden exit.
Doesn't really matter, does it? *shrug*

It does not. I also have fuzzy memories of my last vanilla playthrough ("I'm carrying too much stuff !"), that was a long time ago, I played on a black and white monitor and the game came on 150 floppies. Aaahhh... good times.

Re the Moathouse ambush - Dunno if Troika planned it, but it's certainly hinted at in the original module, and is fairly in-line with their (implemented in vanilla) betrayal of weakened parties.

Re Lareth
I agree that it's pretty hard at level 2. Probably doable if you buy scrolls from Burne (you should be able to afford some higher level spell after looting the other mobs / treasures in hte Moathouse), or just get Elmo. Scribing scrolls also helps a ton.

Also, note that the guards that usually stand in the narrow corridor were made to join the main group, if you had slain enough of the mobs in the dungeon and enough time has passed. So if you sneak past the other mobs, or kill them and recover quickly enough before moving onto Lareth, it should be a somewhat easier fight, because you can handle the 4 of those guards separately from the main group.

idk, I just recalled leaving via the secret entrance after killing Lareth and not seeing anything around there. Actually, that isn't completely accurate, it was more playing Co8 for the first time and being genuinely surprised by the ambush... and annoyed because my party was pretty fucked and overloaded with crap to sell. Of course, it might all have been a bug in vanilla, not as if that wasn't a problem

What do you guys think about a Paladin with a spiked chain? Incline or decline? I know that the bastard sword is probably the best for paladin. When I create a pure fighter its because I can make him into a proper dual wielder. Weapon focus in the offhand and right hand weapon.

There's really no need to "get serious" with this game since the game provides you with plenty of encounters to level up and kick ass, imo. Dual wielding fighter is overkill from what I saw.

I can understand where Skyway is coming from if it's his first run through. I'm still slowly trudging through mine, from lack of time (only played around an hour last month) to frequent crashes, I've been on dungeon level 2 for over a month. Moathouse was quite hard for me at level 2, and my characters all have fairly good stats (Main fighter has both 18 in Str and Dex). I did resort to luring a few at a time into the corridor, but its so narrow that it's quite hard to surround. I ended up reading the manual, and actually learning all the options available, 5 foot steps, trips, prepare vs approach etc, and that made it much more manageable. The ambush outside caught me offguard, so I had to load and rest my already weakened party. One entangle from a druid made the battle a joke. ToEE low level fights were a fresh experience for me after finishing up IWD2, with high level parties nuking everything. I actually had to consider all my options to make it out with minimal casualties.

Edit: Long strings of bad rolls totally fuck you over at the low levels when your Attack bonus is only +2. So many misses.

I loved having a druid but I remember crashing lots when he stacked up a few AOEs: entangle, spike growth, grease maybe? Every damn time. If not for that, druids and their AOEs are a must.

I've always loved D&D druids in turn-based combat. Real time sucks. By the time you cast grease or entangle the enemies are on top of you, making the spells pretty useless.

ToEE is awesome. It seriously lack variation though. Planning on giving it another whirl with the Co8 mod.

Heh, Entangle was among my favorite spells in BG, seemed sufficiently effective for me. Have never used Grease there though.

So, skyway. Are you satisfied?

I

Entangle took too long to cast, so you'd see a group of Gibberlings coming at you and Jaheira would start casting and 2 seconds later the Gibberlings are dead and entangle pops up 30 feet away.

I usually casted Web and Entangle just out of sight of the mobs, (stealth rogue helps), I made sure the edge of the area of effect would trigger them all running, right into the web/grease/entangle/stinking cloud/cloud kill. Made most encounters EZ mode.

Why would you waste an entangle on gibberlings if they die in 2 seconds anyways?

You basically had to exploit the fog of war in IE games since mobs of enemies could reach your party before your dumb ass spellcaster was half way through casting.

I don't see why scouting ahead is an exploit, fog of war is there for a reason. Spells took time to cast, once you accept that fact, it's pretty easy to figure out how to better use your spells.

Darth Roxor's comments on shitty encounter design make me hesitant about downloading this game. Should I ?

My point was more that the speed of movement in BG doesn't seem to be tied to a proper turn, so what could be properly cast in ToEE towards distant enemies, doesn't seem to be doable in BG. That's all.

It typically meant finding the maximum point you could position your wizard without activating enemies. Maybe exploit is too controversial of a term, but it always felt cheap to me, not that I didn't do it.

Beats me how someone can fap to M&M and Wiz but at the same time dislike TOEE's combat. This is the poster child for TB tactical combat in PC RPGs. It doesn't throw endless waves of trash mobs at you, being a low lvl adventure you get to cast plenty utility spells instead of spamming AoE all day long, there's a multitude of tactical options in combat I didn't even know exist in D&D until I played this game.

TOEE has many problems (like everything apart from combat pretty much sucks) but that one thing it does right.

I can see where you're coming from. The handling of spellcasting in the IE games was shoddy at best, most of the AoE spells had to be lead, hoping the AI pathfinding was derp enough to not walk around and charge straight for your wizard.

Honestly, I think part of the problem was that BG was (IIRC) originally 640x480 which means you were technically seeing, what, like 40 feet around you or something? It probably should have had a more distant perspective which would mean there is more ground to see and thus cover. I'm sure those newer mods for it help a bit, at least I assume. I don't recall as much trouble in the later IE games.

AoEs are shit in RTwP (especially IE), news at 11.
Now talk some more about how good ToEE combat is, ffs.