You are missing the point.

JA 2 was designed in a way that thoughtful tactics and strategy can get you through the game without a save and reload marathon. Good game design is making a game that can be beaten without being relying on luck or "precognition".

I never played enough BG to know how that is the case with those games. The first one wasn't really difficult, but apparently the second one amped the difficulty quite a bit. And from what I heard it is that kind of "fake difficulty" were you only know what to do after you died. That was the point Fenix was trying to make.

To master your skills in JA2 you had to fail multiple times too. If you're trying to imply that iron man mode is used only by noobs, and not by people who know the game by heart, you're full of shit.

That kind of arguments make no sense. In this case only X-com games are tactical games, because environment and enemies numbers and placements were random.

If learning from your mistakes doesn't make the combat tactical, then I don't know what does.

By the way, you couldn't save during combat in Baldur's Gate by default.

Ok, in Baldur's Gate 2 there were many CHEATING enemies (I mean, spamming 10 high level spells at once, when it was impossible in AD&D rules), but thankfully, Icewind Dale 2 fixed that, and you could actually kill miniboss with single spell.

Yes, exactly, thank you. If you're a really good tactician in JA 2, you won't get into situations that you can't get out of in the first place.

If you can't adjust your tactics DURING the combat in BG1-2 , you die. There are only a few situations in entire saga when you can die instantly if you don't know AD&D rules well.

If you know what spell your enemy is casting, you know how to counter that, if you find out your enemy has some kind of ability or restitance, you can counter that too, without waiting to die first.

Guess, you're not a good tactician.

By the way, you always need to get to know the game rules, etc etc. to be good at it. It's always trial & error. I don't know any people who finished neither JA2 nor BG2 first time without reloading. So please, stop bullshitting.

When you're good in infinite engine games, you don't need to reload often. and if you do, it's because YOU fucked something up.

There's a huge difference here, tho. In JA2, learning from mistakes generally made you better at the game, learning to adapt to situation. It teaches you proper placement of your troops, line of sight, managing your resources, everything influenced outcome of a battle, INCLUDING what you took with you - but that was just a small part and you could get around it if you were clever enough.

In your example from Baldur's Gate 2, you met an opponent that you clearly had no real information about in advance (at least no about how do you fight it,) died, loaded game, changed loadout and won, just like that. You can't apply this experience to any other kind of enemy that you might meet later on. You will just die again, in the exactly same manner, and then win again, in the exactly same manner, by shuffling loadout. You can't realistically predict what you're going to encounter until you encouter it and no ammount of experience will change that.

This does not happen in JA2, you can get out of pretty much any given situation. The fact that you suck has nothing to do with it.
I am just using an example you provided me with earlier.

Not really. All the spells and abilities are known in advande. Hell, you obviously could learn about everything if you wanted to read, I don't know, any kind of AD&D book.

Yeah, I admint, AD&D games are played better if you know something about the gaming system it uses.

Also, it wasn't that random. If you were plundering the catacombs, you should know from the beginning it's good to protect your team from any death oriented spells in the first place.

You're not warned about the tigers, tanks and Deidranna's automatic missle launcher too, by the way.

I can stand people saying BG are bad games, but I just can't stand saying the combat in AD&D games is not tactical. It's not my fault you were rushing through the fights and were surprised you were turned into a meatball Dying often is quite common only in early game. After that, if you think, you won't die that much.

You need to know what every spell and ability does to you, but it's knowledge avaible in-game. And you learn about that just like you learn how to set your troops in JA2.

One thing i'd like to add before I'll go out of this topic :P

Battles in D&D games ARE randomized. It's dice-rolling system, you know. Sometimes you CAN win a battle with exact same approach as before, only because you had more luck in dice.

But it doesn't mean you can win this game with no tactical approach at all.

And you often don't know which spells and abilities are waiting for you around the corner, that's exactly the problem. But I digress,
I am not saying they're not tactical, that would be bullshit. I'm saying they suck as tactical games. They're RPGs, of course they do, that is kind of to be expected. This is because tactics are much more than just bringing righ tools for the job, tactics begin with reconnaissance, proper troop placement, their formations, basically there's much, much more to it that what you'll get in a game of Baldur's Gate.

You can say what you want, but I do know that in BG games, bits which you quite simply can't be prepared for are quite often, much more often than in JA2 (Just by playing BG, I got someone killed much more because circumstances I couldn't have possibly predicted. In JA2, I usually thought that I'm really, really stupid for doing something. And the example where someone died and then changed loadout is THE most common example of tactics in BG2, pretty much every fan of the series I've talked to is using this one.)

Is this because I suck? Do I suck because I didn't know which spells did that particular mage have in his spellbook? Do I suck because I have encountered invisible monsters that my scout was unable to see? Do I suck because I don't quite know what level does that guy over there have? Well... Fine, as you wish. That doesn't change the fact that BG games fall short in the tactical department, they're mostly about numbers and rolls. As they should be. They're RPGs. I'm really not trying to insult BG series at all here.

you can haz invisibility, you know? ;p I always send a thief to a room before i'll jump there with my crew. You wouldn't know that in real life too, you know? ;P You need to learn to recognize the threat in the moment he is casting the spells. You can haz active pause, for that kind of shit, you know.

For example, when I see a guy that is starting to cast instant death spell, I'm quickly casting Protect from instant death spell (it's a shorter spell so I will get protection in time). Most of the time you need to counter your enemies' attacks before they'll have a chance to finish them. It's not good to wait and see what that mighty spell can do with you.

BG requires different way of thinking than JA2, it's obvious.

Look, I found this on wiki under the entry of "tactics."

It means that tactics = penises

/discussion

Yeah, it ends here :P

I need to play some JA2, thanks to you :P Do you have any economics tips? I was always good in JA2 combat, but I couldn't defend my cities properly....

I hereby rest my case and will for now and ever with Fenix in regards to tactics.

And Penises.

You said he wasn't being objective with his reasons for prefering BG, and insinuated that the real reason for prefering BG was the nostalgia factor. If you are dismissing someone's reason for liking one over the other as nostalgia, and accusing them of not being objective for insisting that that nostalgia had nothing to do with it.

DA was trying to be BG. They have said countless times that it was a 'spiritual successor'. DA failed at living up to this claim in his view. That's not nostalgia talking, that's DA trying to emulate BG and failing. Nostalgia arguments don't have much merit IMO when DA was built to cater to nostalgia-to emulate the best parts of BG. The fact that many people still prefer BG over it doesn't mean they are wearing the rosy glasses and turning up their noses because it's a modern game, it just means that DA was made pecifically to be directly compared to BG-a mdern version of it, if you will, yet is inferior to the original on many of the points where they are comparable.

I'm not seeing what you are trying to get at here, going after BG for not being tactical. It is one of the most tactical rpgs out there-compare it to Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, or Fallout and you will see a lot less depth in viable options. I don't see how you can hold up JA2 as tactics perfected (a claim that has some merit) and then complain about not remembering who has what spellsin BG. JA2 has a LOT more things to keep track of, which you will absolutely get destroyed if you forget. Things like bringing the correct ammo type in sufficient quantities, remembering which upgrades are compatable with what weapons, what ammo goes with what gun, remembering to remove Night Vision goggles during the day and making sure you have enough first aid kits on hand all of the time. It's a bit of a double standard.

Your comment "This does not happen in JA2, you can get out of pretty much any given situation. The fact that you suck has nothing to do with it. " makes me wonder how completely you have played the JA games, because you can easily have mercs be crippled or killed in unavoidable circumstances due to the RNG deciding that a rent a cop with a pistol is going to hit you from across the map in the head and kill you instantly. This can happen on any difficulty. You also pointed to difficulty levels as some sort of thign that makes BG mroe tactical, despite the obvious fact that BG itself has an adjustable difficulty slider.

BG has plenty of tactics, I'm just not sure you understand them.
Train as many rebels as you can, as early as you can. You will usually lose a few per battle, but they can really help, and it is hard to have enough mercs to cover everything unless you go for the bottom of the barrel quality mercs. Having more than one IMP can help. Also, mine income is randomized, and one mine per game will always run out after a while to an income of zero, so get two mines asap. Always go for Drassan first, then either the central city or the NW city.

Thanks, I'll try that. But do I need to keep at least one merc in each city I visit in need to recruit more rebels? Because even if I managed to defend a city one time, they often get it back second time. And I never could afford that many mercs... ha,ha it happened to me in JA2UB once. I saved unfortunatelly just second before battle begins, and guess what...

Enemy soldier killed my merc instantly no matter how many times I loaded. My merc was crouched. in front of a window. Three buildings away. He shot everytime, perfectly , through THREE WINDOWS, of THREE DIFFERENT BUILDINGS and nailed it to my merc's head, killing him instantly, every time.