Baldurs gate - how should I start.

[Jon Miller]

the way the system is set up, with turnbased (basically), the fact that many of the characters are better at range than melee

a number of factors I think

Jon Miller

[centrifuge]

I'll be honest I always have my characters equiped with ranged weapons. I see no problem with it, It is still possible to get your butt kicked on a regular basis

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I think it's realistic that range weapons rule, in general; being able to strike from afar has always been an advantage. But there are also a couple of things in BG that make bows cheesey:

1) Rate of fire. Bowmen get two attacks per round, to a melee warrior's one. That doesn't strike me as especially realistic; using a bow may be faster than using a two-handed sword, but I'll bet I can stab someone many times over with a dagger in the time in takes to get off a couple of arrows.

2) Range and accuracy. Any BG player knows that bows are preferable to crossbows. Yet, in medieval Europe, the crossbow was seen as an advance over the bow, and was considered much deadlier. The reason is that the crossbow is accurate over a greater range than the bow, and it has a much, much greater range, period. But neither range nor acccuracy over range plays a role in BG (for understandable reasons of programming), so the crossbow ends up being inferior to the bow.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
I think it's realistic that range weapons rule, in general; being able to strike from afar has always been an advantage.

depends on rate at which melee attackers can close. Thats why in all those rock-paper-scissors RTS's the counter to bowmen is cavalry, who can close before bowmen can get sufficient shots off. And even then the bowmen had to be protected by a row of melee troops, usually pikemen, against the cavalry charge. Even against english longbowmen at agincourt, French lost cause the ground conditions precluded a cavalry charge. With gunpowder, early weapons still required melee protection - thus Spanish tercio was a combination of pikemen and guns. The pike wasnt obsolete till the Bayonet, which was also a melee weapon. The bayonet wasnt really obsolete till roughly the American civil war, when rifled fire arms made accurate fire over a long range good enough to defeat almost any charge cavalry or infantry(see Fredericksburg and Picketts Charge


Now BG has no cavalry, but the number of archers is small, which means you dont get the power of massed archers. And the ranged weapons rule (IIUC) not only when the melee guys are charging across a field, but when theyve ambushed you and are attacking from a relatively close distance.

[centrifuge]

May be silly, but everytime that I think of proficency with a bow, I think of Legolas from LOTR. He used his bow extremely effectively, and in close quarters, (at least in the movies ...in the book they don't seem to go into as great of detail about his effectiveness with the bow)


...As for crossbows, they were more accurate than bows but I don't believe that in general that they had greater range. I agree that they were deadlier, but only at shorter range (I have been known to be wrong however )

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by centrifuge
May be silly, but everytime that I think of proficency with a bow, I think of Legolas from LOTR. He used his bow extremely effectively, and in close quarters, (at least in the movies ...in the book they don't seem to go into as great of detail about his effectiveness with the bow)

yeah, but he was the only archer in a party of nine, with one wizard, (who also fought with a long sword) and 7 guys who fought melee. Even legolas used a knife at close quarters, IIRC.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by centrifuge
...As for crossbows, they were more accurate than bows but I don't believe that in general that they had greater range. I agree that they were deadlier, but only at shorter range (I have been known to be wrong however )

Actually, there's a really interesting history here. Apparently, the range and accuracy of the crossbow was so great that it was initially considered a threat to the traditional ethics of war, since it allowed killing from such a great distance that there was no "confronting" of the enemy; for that reason, the Church at one point pronounced it an instrument of evil, and threatened excommunication on anyone who used it on a fellow Christian!

[centrifuge]

That excommunication story has loosened some of the cobwebs in my brain ...and I stand (well sit) corrected

[lord of the mark]

IIRC the crossbow dominated bows both cause of the range and accuracy noted above, and because it was easier to llearn to use than the bow. The predominant crossbowmen were Genoese mercenaries, ISTR.(highly trained) English longbowmen challenged in range and accuracy, and were better in frequency of fire, i believe.

[Standup]

Another advantage in BG rather than real life is the way fog of war works so that you can take on groups of opponents one by one as they appear on the screen. I in reality (mmh ?) a large group of Gnolls would all close as a group rather than be picked off one by one.

[Dis]

crossbows sound cool.

Anyone know how much one costs? I want to get one. I'll use that for home defense instead of my Glock pistol . But I would like to get one.

And bows are also useful in BG because many enemies do not have many hitpoints, so you can kill them before they get to you. You will find this is not the case in BG2 (except maybe at the very beginning). I think they did something to nerf bows in BG2, not sure what.

[Marid Audran]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Re superiority of ranged weapons. Is this a bug or a feature? IE is there ANY story based reason for ranged weapons to dominate? Is forgotten realms a place where ranged weapons are more dominant for whatever reason, than they are either in real world Middle Ages, or in Tolkien? Or is this simply an oversight on the part of the designers? My impression is that its the latter - the large number of melee weapons available, the depowering (?) of ranged weapons in BG2, etc would lead me to believe that it was mistake.

I'm going with oversight. In BG2 melee weapons become more powerful, and fighters eventually aquire more melee attacks per round to offset the missle-weapon superiority. I think the str dmg bonus is nerfed for missle weapons in BG2 as well (as it should be). Also, in BG2 there are more "ambush" type combats, where the enemy appears from all around you and one has to resort to melee weapons. Quarters tend to more cramped as well; there's a lot less cavorting around in the wildnerness in BG2 vis-a-vis BG1.

I think an element of missle superiority is how easily they dispatch enemy mages. Then in BG2 Bioware programmed a lot of cheese in the engine, ipso facto felling enemy mages became very difficult without the aid of an armada of "anti-magic" magicks. There was never any happy compromise. For the record I think Icewind Dale II's treatment of this problem was best.

BG1 is biased towards longbows, but if whenever I take Montaron along in my party I always let him chill in the back with a heavy crossbow and watch him punch holes in the opposition with those nasty bolts. Less rate of fire, more damage. A trade-off. More Monty's style, anyway.

[Jamski]

Yeah, the simple reason is that in BG1 there's lots of 1HD or 2HD monsters that go down after an arrow or two. This lets you kill them before they reach you. In BG2, the monsters aren't so weak, and you can get enough arrows in them before they hit the lines. However, an Archer in BG2 with 5 points in bows and boots of speed.... run and shoot and run and shoot

-Jam

[centrifuge]

Dissident

http://coolgadget.net/crosandac.html

I want one too

[Traianvs]

Originally posted by Jamski
Yeah, the simple reason is that in BG1 there's lots of 1HD or 2HD monsters that go down after an arrow or two. This lets you kill them before they reach you. In BG2, the monsters aren't so weak, and you can get enough arrows in them before they hit the lines. However, an Archer in BG2 with 5 points in bows and boots of speed.... run and shoot and run and shoot

-Jam

My tactic exactly
Unfortunately I Was constantly charmed and confused (as you know those spells never miss, they follow you around no matter where you run )
didn't know what the hell to do about that so I quit playing BG2

too much frikking confusion, and whenever I cast it myself, the baddies are immune to it
Got real fed up with it, because one confusion spell usually confused about 2-4 characters of mine on average, and those get butchered in an instant of course in BG2