I dont know what I did to make it that way, started off playing on Explorer mode as its my 1st time playing this and havent played a turn base tactical since er... forever. i think it was when original fallout released. Didnt know scoobie about tactics etc. After lvl 10 i changed to Classic and found it wasnt any harder. Im lvl 17 now and for giggles dropped off jahan to bring in my crafting mule Bairdot, I put all her points into crafting/blacksmithing/tenebrium/loremaster. with just her starting archer skills she is kicking bottom. she even had crap armor like a bucket for a helmet. I rarely make it past my primary archer, then bairdoit in rotation, most mobs are dead by then. I did put all the resistances i could on stuff, and upgraded my weapons as I enjoy crafting but this is just silly.

my main is pure ranger/expert marksman , i rarely use her many special arrows which do less damage than her marksman stuff or her water, witch lvl 3-4. partner is wizard/duel wielding with dagger/scoundrel and uses grenades very effectively now but rarely mobs last long enuf for me to melee him. i have madora as a seriously strong tank with max leadership/man at arms and jahan shadowblade duelwielding scoundrel as well whose early magic spells were very powerful but now he is just dead wt, i did make him have lots of support spells and buffs but like i said, i rarely get to use them. his melee skills rarely get used. what kills me are insta death graves or lava, always stepping into it.

btw, im terribad at playing, really suck. often damaging myself or my gang with my spells or making myself slip on my own ice etc. for the life of me i dont see the benefit of smoke/fire as it just extends the time till i can kill them. Is there a way to change difficulty to tactician during a game? or did i mess up, doubt ill play it again as i have sunk many hrs in it and i do have a huge backlog of games, plus DOS2 is coming out soonish.

i guess i could drop off my gang and try it with just my partner or wear only whites but that seems silly. if a dork like me can blow thru this then i think the difficulty is a bit off

Go to the nexus and get the Epic Encounters mod. It's amazing, not only making the enemies harder (AI is much better - example: picking the zombie talent is great regularly, but in Epic Enc. it is a big no-no as enemies use healing magic on you, and it hurts a lot. And so many have it), but it also changes some other things in the game - by far my favourite is the change to rogues and backstabbing - rogues are beast with this, but they need to be if you want to actually win.

The page on nexusmods goes into all the details - new talents, abilities, etc.



As to the use of smoke (grenades or arrows) - this was a vital part of my main strategy for a previous playthrough. I had a lone wolf rogue and a lone wolf knight on Tactician difficulty. If you throw a smoke grenade at your feet at the start of battle (if youre playing rogue right they should always go first) then it forces the rangers and spellcasters to move within melee distance in order to attack, as they cant see you unless right beside you - which is a huge benefit to both of my characters survival in many battles. Plus you are able to wait for them, so by the time you attack you have more AP stored up.

Even though I didn't finish, it was a very fun play. I was disappointed that you could craft every type of grenade except smoke though.


The slipping on ice - combine nails with your characters boots and that won't happen.

I just started playing DOS EE for the first time this week. I chose Tactician difficulty (the hardest) because I thought it would be equivalent to what a real Normal difficulty should be...since in 99% of other modern games, "Normal difficulty" actually means "Very Easy difficulty."

I sure was wrong in the case of DOS EE! I kept/keep getting decimated on a regular basis. Part of that was because I didn't/don't know how to play. Another part of it was because I chose bad skills. But a big part of it was that Tactician mode really is quite hard.

Maybe a super veteran pro expert at the game would disagree with that...but someone of average skill or less is going to struggle a ton on Tactician difficulty IMO.

When I realized it was too hard and tried to change it down to Normal mode, the game prevented me from doing that. Then I researched online to see if others also could not downgrade the difficulty. They couldn't. But one of them said you can change the difficulty to a higher level. I'm not sure if that's true or not though.

i didnt think to toss them at my feet, thats a great idea. :) and Ancient Red Dragon, I watched my husband recently start up and play Tactician, he always plays games on hard mode and i warned him about how easy it was the other way. it was interesting to see, what i noticed is that every encounter it tacked on a few extra baddies who were harder to kill. In the end he got disappointed he was getting wrecked outside of the starter city, felt lost in the quest confusion in the city and just gave up. I kept telling him it got better and was a blast to play but hed had enuf. Being able to change difficulty modes, all of them within the same game save would have skipped all of our frustration. I dont get why they did it that way

You can Normal/Story mode toss, but You can not down/up grade Tactician mode. Tactician Mode requires a little bit of power-play and knowledg how things works. Best idea to steamroll it is take two Lone Wolf chars one with melee/scoundrel (preferaly shield as you need tank char) and second with All four magics. With those two alone (lone wolf!) i steamrolled game and it was pretty boring in the end. Now i am playing normal difficulty with normal 4-chars party. Problem is that there is a huge gap between normal and tactician modes at least one more difficulty coud be put between thse two.