Author Topic: Difficulty Setting  (Read 2836 times)

Offline Chris

  • Planewalker
  • *****
  • Posts: 19
Difficulty Setting
« on: March 13, 2006, 11:22:02 AM »
Hello all :)

I wonder if anyone would be so kind as to put me out of my misery and explain to me what specific effects raising the difficulty slider in the options screen would have on FotD?

I've spent hours simply trying to discover what this does to the vanilla version of the game, let alone FotD, with little success :(  The only thing that I have been able to establish is that enemies do more damage.  Is this the only difference or are there other changes like more random encounters, better enemy THAC0 and AC for example?

Furthermore, is there a simple tweak that can be made to influence the way that the game uses the level of experience and number of characters in the party to decide what monsters it generates in a map?  One of the reasons why I decided to solo through the game was in order to make it much more of a challenge, but I have been disappointed to discover that this strategy has been undermined by the game's seemingly automatic adjustment of the volume and level of difficulty of random encounters and spawned monsters to reflect the fact that I am only using one character.  I just went through the Ulcaster dungeon and I only encountered a handful of monsters, but was hoping for much more of a challenge :'(  And I really don't want to have to resort to artificial self-imposed constraints such as not using certain armour or weapons for example.

What I would ideally like to do, is to get the game to treat my party of one character as though it was a party of six characters.  Is this possible, would it simply be a matter of tweaking some value somewhere, or is this an unchangeable hard-coded feature of the game?

If anyone could shed some light on this for me than it would be most appreciated ;)

Kind Regards

Chris

Offline Echon

  • Global Moderator
  • Planewalker
  • *****
  • Posts: 1944
  • Gender: Male
    • The Fields of the Dead
Re: Difficulty Setting
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2006, 08:42:36 AM »
As far as I know altering the difficulty slider only affects how much damage NPCs do. It is no different in FotD.

Spawn points are limited to their current behaviour.

-Echon

Offline Chris

  • Planewalker
  • *****
  • Posts: 19
Re: Difficulty Setting
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2006, 09:27:33 AM »
I see, thanks Echon.

It seems a bit of a shame to me that since the creators of the game went to the effort of creating a difficulty setting in the first place, that they didn't implement into it a wider range of effects, such as THAC0, AC and spawn points of enemies.  I wouldn't have thought that it would have been very difficult to do and it seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity really :-\

Aparantly, Baldur's Gate II has some kind of difficulty setting which might be more fully featured.  I bought the game months ago, but haven't tried it yet because I want to play through FotD a few times first :)

Offline SimDing0™

  • Back In Black
  • Global Moderator
  • Planewalker
  • *****
  • Posts: 3496
  • Gender: Male
  • Word Enhancer
Re: Difficulty Setting
« Reply #3 on: March 14, 2006, 07:00:03 PM »
I wouldn't get too excited about BG2's difficulty setting (excluding mods)...

 

With Quick-Reply you can write a post when viewing a topic without loading a new page. You can still use bulletin board code and smileys as you would in a normal post.

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Name: Email:
Verification:
Type the letters shown in the picture
Listen to the letters / Request another image
Type the letters shown in the picture:
What color is grass?:
What is the seventh word in this sentence?:
What is five minus two (use the full word)?: