The Harvester took me frikking ages. But I heard that the difficulty on the PC is higher than on consoles. Can't find proof right now however.

Yes, you have.

You dismiss the preference of others for BG over DA to nostalgia. and accused Jaime of not being objective in the post I was replying to. Your opinion is abundently clear.

There's no freeze/flame combo. There are 4 fire spells (flame blast, fireball, fire weapons and inferno), and 4 frost spells (cone of cold, winter's grasp, ice weapons and blizzard), and none of them interact in a combo. I KNOW this because I just finished the game as a mage.

And you're definably wrong, you CAN make very different mages and warriors (warriors less so). You can opt for a debuffer mage, a support mage, a nuker mage, a melee arcane warrior or a healer, at the very least.

HOWEVER! Yes, DA: O is a very easy game, even on nightmare difficulty.

BG 1 was hard, I'll agree (tactical? Not really, imo). BG2? Not really. I destroyed most of the game as a dual classed kensai/mage who basically plowed thru everything. The only "hard" part was when I was a "low level mage" during the period where I was "leveling" my mage levels to go over the fighter levels. Note that this was w/o playing throne of bhaal, just shadows of amn, I got bored of ToB everytime after 1/2 an hour of slogging through it.

Its harder, I think it was mentioned on the wiki that quite a lot of items were superior on the console versions (the wiki has 2 stats on the items, the lower value one was the PC version's stats). Tomes also gave 1 extra attribute point.

Kensai/Mage is one of the more powergamey builds, IMO. If you choose a powergamey build, you shouldn't be suprised when you plow through content. I played as a fighter/mage and it was significantly harder. At any rate, it has been noted that powergaming in DA can lead to mages trivially Soloing the game. Doing that in BG is brutally difficult. Considering you have a lot more factors to consider with the wider variety of character classes and abilities, and larger party size I would definately consider BG to be more tactical.

Also considering multiple classes were rolled into three core classes, I would hope that they have multiple builds, but lets keep in mind the sort of variety that would occur if say, clerics and mages were rolled into one class in a BG game, and how many options the resulting class would have.

Ok, so it was Grease + Fire , sorry.

and Fire + Thunder made some firestorm, yes? or Blizzard + Thunderstorm, whatever, I played DA:O long time ago...

[url=http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Storm_of_the_Century]http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Storm_of_the_Century[/url]

you could win the game with that combo...

There's also Freeze + Shatter. That one's nasty.

Considering friendly fire is ON in the PC version, this can pretty much wipe out your party in the progress ...

In open areas - cast it from distance.
in closed areas - cast it from one room to another (i know it's kinda exploit, but hell, you could also spam fireballs in Baldur's Gate ;p)+

by the way, it was quite easy to program your team AI to GTFO from blast radious automatically.

Abilities in AI scripting were amazing in DA:O

Actually this is why I have come to the conclusion that Bioware can't write dark fantasy, they fall for the same trap dark fantasy fanfiction writers fall for, which is the belief that dark fantasy = everyone is nasty and evil. Instead, you need 'White Knights' as well as 'Black Knights' on both sides in order to show WHY people go along with it and to make you care for them so that they don't become Faceless Evil Faction (TM) and you care when they die. When everyone's scum, no one cares, and that's the failing of most Dark Fantasy fanfiction authors and that's the failing of Bioware. Of course, such a setting could be done, but it is incredibly difficult and Bioware are not up to the task.

Dark Fantasy should be about hard choices, what do you sacrifice in order to save what you believe in, etc. When you have no choice in the matter, then it ceases to matter and that's the problem: whatever you do the same things will always play out in a Bioware game, and that's why I have ceased to look for C&C in a Bioware game.
Honestly, I played through DAO on hard on PC twice and still don't know what tactics I used beyond just brute-forcing it. BG did require me to think, but I also tried to limit my use of resting so maybe that helped somewhat. I'll agree with you that no game should force a player to re-load in order to have pre-knowledge of the situation.

I think that works pretty well in DA. Up until Act 3 that is. They should have put that game on hold or made a proper ending DLC. But I still liked it, the whole "in the middle of things you can't control". And I personally don't think you need "White Knights" to cheer for in a dark fantasy. Everybody has his pros and cons, just stick with what you think is the best.

And I think DA:O was dead on about hard choices. Especially Orzammer was pretty much the choice Fallout 1 makers originally wanted with Junktown. And the option of the Kingsmeet, were you had to let one of your companions go. None of the DA games really had "the best" endings. For everything you gained, you needed to give up something else.

I said there is a nostalgia FACTOR. I criticized him for saying nostalgia is not a factor AT ALL. Big difference between those statements and saying DA:O is objectively a better game.

I would say that. Any day of the week ;-P. But I really don't like AD&D, the infinity engine and high fantasy, so that might make me a bit biased. ;-)

And I never finished BG 2, so I can't say much about that.

In this case, clearly Jagged Alliance 2 has no tactics. I quick saved and quick loaded this game like gazillion times. Much more often than in BG2.
Tomato soup is objectively a better soup than chicken soup.

Task for you: find an error in that sentence. I made it easier for you. :-)

So the Iron Man mode in JA 2 is simply there for what? Vanity?

I'm not the best tactics game player, but I know of people who have played through JA 2 with never reloading a save because of a bad outcome. Only because we can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done.