Early on You don't need to have one on every city later on, since you can get a helicopter to ferry you around. Early on on it might be a good idea to keep a low level merc like Flo, Gumpy, etc per city to train replacements (I usually stick them on the airport) If you are feeling cocky, and like to take Drassan quickly and secure it quickly, you can split up your starting team so you have 2 people per sector training troops This can be risky thoguh if their leadership is low, because the counterattack squads might arrive before the training is finished, but if it pays off, or you are confident enough to fight off the initial counterattack squads with your smalelr fireteams, it enables you to get a good income a few days earlier.

Early on, you want to go for cheap mercs. the MERCS website is great for this-pick up gumpy and flo if you can, and soem of the cheaper ones from the other website as well, like Buns, Steroids, Barry, or Igor. Combined with one or more good IMP mercs, and you should have a good starting task force.

Save frequently and on multiple save slots to avoid team wipes from pistol snipers, esp early on.

About 65% of the game can be won by carefully placing that spell and ordering your party to hold their ground far away, yes. However it requires that you are at least level 11 (I think) to get the 3 spells needed for that combo, and most boss fights (and a fair number of places) you can't actually use that spell combo because they are either usually in a confined area with no room to cast, or the bosses (because they can't be CCed for long due to being a boss) will simply reach your party and you can't do that combo (it takes at least 4 seconds to set it up and it has an enormous radius, and on nightmare mode it can actually kill your party before you run out of it if you didn't cast it far enough) as most bosses have a cutscene that force you within melee range of them after it. In addition generally (since you lose blizzard's slow/knockdown/freeze when you do that combo) you'll actually need a few spells to make sure mobs stay in it since in nightmare mode they have enough health to run through it without dying (once you get glyph of repulsion though that spell alone is generally enough).

i heard this thing about gaming nastalgia, and how people are rehashing the same old formulas over and over. there were two opinions, one being that there should be fresh idea's out there, the other being that rereleasing games, or using the same formula from the same old games sells well often times, so aparently its what the people want. go out of the box, and people arn't that interested. i'm not so sure about that, but i do agree that games that sell well, tend to be the same old formula's and rehashed story's from older games. thats fine with me, i love hearing the same old story told differently again and again! and no, i'm not being sarcastic, i really do! its a classic!


And I especially love playing the old games i used to play when i was a boy!

JA2 had varied options when it came to combat though. Most of the time I fought at night to make things alot easier. I had to consider what weapons to use.

That's BG1. In BG2 you have to change your tactics and options most of the time. Mindflayers can 1-hit kill your character, Beholders pew pew u, Demi-Liches can banish your characters to non-existence every few rounds, and Dragons, well they do what dragons do, don't even wanna talk about the bosses and Demonlord in Throne of Bhaal. I had to play kite, decoy, tank and dps, consider what spells I had to use most of the time and I still get my characters killed which I quickly reload.

The point is nostalgia and the era we played games has a LOT to do with what we like. Acting like it doesn't tends to make me dismiss your opinion, because you are blind to the influences in your life.

I actually never played Baldur's Gate. Always wanted to though. I think I'll get this edition, sounds interesting.

You are confusing nostalgia with high standards.

B.S.

While I also agree that Baldur's gate is not a very good game, nostalgia might not be the best word to use. It seems to me that people who were exposed to it when it first came out are more likely to overlook its grievous faults than people who started playing it later.

If you think people can't see what influences their opinions of games, how do you know that you are not blind to some influence that causes you to not like the game?

I think it's exactly opposite. When the game came out, people were noticing the obvious flaws, like animation (why they are standing still instead of having some combat stance?), etc etc than people who starded to play it later (thinking "it's an old game, it doesnt change the fact it's great! it wouldn't be so famous if it wasn't!") And like it's a bad thing to say it in company, that Baldur's Gate isn't the greatest RPG series of all time ;P
Because he's above us all.

I don't think you have understood what I meant with the 'white knights' thing. I say they need white knights only when they have black knights, to prevent factions from turning into moustachio twirlers, but really that's to try and compensate having black knights to begin with since you shouldn't be having blatantly evil characters anyway unless you're talking about cthulhu or alien horrors. Really, you shouldn't have either, in dark fantasy people should be people, with both flaws and virtues to make you understand them even as you don't agree with them. In short: no one cares when it's just twats v twats, and unfortunately that's how many of Bioware's characters and settings come off nowadays to me. Their characters have become whiny and self important, and I actually think that the main reason I don't play their games now is because I just can't stand their characters, as they have become the type of people I try to avoid in real life let alone not want to adventure with. And this is coming from a guy who likes gritty characters in his game.

Orzammer was not about hard choices, it was about the lack of information to make the choice and the only difference being a text blurb at the end. Once you know what actually happens it's easy to 'win' that. Kingsmeet, no you didn't have to let one of your companions go, on the contrary you can 'win' and get one crowned king and the other recruited into the Grey Wardens, which makes it the 'best' ending and the others you failing to pick the right choices. Another case is when you have to choose between killing the Arl's son or sacrificing the mother to free him...except that you don't have to do either, as Bioware chickens out of forcing you to choose by presenting you with Option C to go get the mages and save both of them, making the first two choices as the 'bad' choices. Not that they had done much to make people angst over the choice by making the mother as unlikeable as possible and blatantly to blame (which, since it's a game, many people would take as carte blanche to kill her off without a second thought).

In short, in my opinion Bioware doesn't have the guts to actually make the player think and when they do they fuck it up. There's the occasional glimmer of a good idea but somewhere along the line it gets fucked up.

EDIT: Oh, and just to clarify one thing: when I say that making a choice should require sacrifice, I don't mean contrived sacrifice either and you should still gain something from it as well. The Virmire choice in ME is to me one of the biggest pile of wank I have ever seen to be honest, the whole situation is contrived to make you have a choice in the most pathetic way possible. It actually has consequence, but the whole situation is just bollocks.

I disagree with the characters being twats (well except that Sebastian idiot, I never liked him). Most of the major characters have enough explanation to show why they are acting. Nobody is really acting because they are dicks, each party has their reason which are understandable. The Templars want to "secure" the mage because they know how dangerous they can be (amply shown in the game) and the mages want to live a life without a gulag and the fear of being killed of when they start itching. Also not that unreasonable. The whole game basically features this conflict without showing who is the "better" side.

But I guess that is a case of YMMV.

What I meant about Orzammer is that the obvious good choice is actually are pretty bad one (talking about who should be king). And generally at the end of each major quest you can choose the better fighters or the "morally better choice". I agree that the game should have made that a little bit harder, eg. by saying that recruiting the tougher fighters would cause less general casualties.

And the Kingsmeet option you describe is only available if you "harden" the one character. As in "crushing his spirit and making him a ruthless tactician and politician". Something I would generally describe as a bad thing. And you can only do that with a "guide dang it" situation. A player who plays always the nicest option will have to choose A or B (as I did when I first played the game). The "hardening option" isn't really obvious.

I agree on the brat and his mother, Bioware chickened out of there.

And the "text blurb in the end" is all I need in my games. One of the best games I have ever played (A Mind Forever Voyaging) is nothing but text blurbs. Those are for me as important to a game as any full fledged cutscene.

It was somewhat disheartening to see that only a few changes were actually implemented in DA2, but that is understandable considering how you would need to make basically 3 games to incorporate all the changes (as compared to a game without choices).

Bioware doesn't know how to do choices and consequences in DA:O at least. The choices have no meaning if there are no consequences. Oh mother died, you get to feel bad about it but that's it. All of the main quest choices boil down to who you want to fight with you. It stops being "Should I let her continue to imprison dwarfs in machines" and becomes "Do I want golems or do I want dwarfs?", "Do I want werewolves or do I want elves?".

So what consequences do you want? What games do it better? Alpha Protocol, but that game is the King and Queen of this. And of course the Mass Effect series, who did it brilliantly with a combination of actual in game content and fluff text. Apart from that the differences always boil down to either

a) Fluff text/ending slides (which I really like)

b) quest reward items/money/abilities (boring)

c) companions (interesting)

There are very, very few games were the actual game progress sees any meaningful change apart from the usual "crossroad choices".