Bartimaeus

Yeah, I've completed my Item Revisions "Revised" mod, thankfully, that fixes the rough spots and inconsistencies, among a multitude of bugs. Now I'm working on a Spell Revisions "Revised" on and off...about halfway through.

Okay, I actually checked my own game for Silke via a creature editor (and I currently have full SCS installed), and I'm not sure why she would have that crap. She has an Improved Invisibility, but that's the most powerful spell she has, and she doesn't really have a whole lot of offensive spells to go with it (2 magic missiles, a charm person, and a power word sleep - a little powerful against a low level party, but not crazily so), as she mostly has defensive spells. Not sure how she would've gotten the flesh to stone in your game, but it ain't in mine.

what, are you sure that's SCS - I've fought Silke a few times and can't ever remember a contingency, never mind flesh to stone, holy crap ogre mage I can understand more, and is more easily counterable (especially because iron shattering should be over by the time you get to him), but silke casting level 6 spells is...crazy

Broken Age, courtesy of ShadySands. It's a point and click adventure game, which I'm usually not into, but it's actually pretty dope - good story, good voice acting, and good writing/dialogue. I think I'm probably about halfway through after about 8 hours of playing it. It's only $4 on Steam right now, so I kinda wish I had just bought it myself...but I didn't know for sure if I'd like it or not. As far as P&C games go, the puzzles have left me...er, puzzled, a few times, but overall, it's fairly forgiving, I think. I mean, I don't play P&C games and I haven't had too much trouble.

I stick to Steam and GOG. My opinion on Steam and Valve in general has soured somewhat over the years, and I use it more as messaging platform these days than anything else. I have a relatively high opinion of GOG, and I would think that'd be the platform of choice while being supplemented by Steam for PC. Beyond that, I don't really consider other platforms (especially seeing as I'm not on current consoles).

The only thing I've bought is the BG2:EE soundtrack, which I gifted to somebody who owns the game on my friends list, who sent me the soundtrack. Taking filesharing to a whole new level, baby... Besides that, I'm pretty unlikely to buy anything. I thought I was going to buy the latest Binding of Isaac DLC, Afterbirth+, but only 25% off for a DLC that's been pretty widely criticized to actively make the game worse? Eh, forget about it. Maybe Christmas...or next year.

Potions are actually *my* biggest personal annoyance in SCS, because I personally don't use them, and they're just...everywhere. They just don't stop - everyone has them, and loads of them. Normally, I just have the "break all potions upon enemy death" option enabled, but now you're making me reconsider - perhaps I should just not install the potions component at all. It would be a shame for some fights that used to be a cakewalk that were actually made to be a little bit of a challenge (e.g. the pirate cove in the Docks in BG2), but perhaps that's worth it. I don't have an issue with mages not having "bad" spells memorized - I mean, my own party usually doesn't, and I assume enemies aren't stupid and won't be memorizing Infravision or something. But yeah, if you don't like how hardcore SCS goes, you can always just not uninstall parts of the mod - don't install the improved mages and priests components, don't install improved potions, etc. At the very least, I think the "general improved AI" is a good component to have. Personally, I'm more annoyed by the fact that spellcasters' spellbooks are actually somewhat randomized upon the installation of those two components, instead of being hand-selected. Not a fan of enemies being procedurally generated...

Yeah, that's a glitch.

There's too many decent options to really provide meaningful input, especially not knowing how much you value speed vs capacity. I'd say just look at Tom Hardware's main SSD articles [1, 2] if you want an idea of what's generally considered to be good drives combined with good prices here in the U.S. At the very least, it'll provide a baseline for finding stuff in Sweden. Their "best" lists aren't as good as they used to be, though, sadly... E: in fact, if you're not buying a PCIE/NVME drive, the SATA article is more or less worthless. Bah.

Hmm, not sure he's the best example to use, given his recent claims about the president being incapable of obstructing justice, never mind that he felt a little differently when it came to just that for Bill Clinton.

Well, yeah, she had a noted drug addiction most of her life. It was thought that she had been clean for a while, but it seems not. Perhaps related to her trying to get skinnier for the movie role...

Don't hold your breath: though it would obviously be beneficial for our democracy, from what I understand, it'd be tough to establish political gerrymandering (as opposed to something like racial gerrymandering, which was actually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in NC recently) as being unconstitutional, and while the more liberal justices may use some...creative reasoning for calling it unconstitutional, it's pretty unlikely that the more conservative justices will. It's something that would have to be fixed in Congress...and given that both parties use it at least some degree, I think that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

man, that's horrific

Not sure how I noticed a lack of an SSD but not a lack of a GPU...

No solid state drive, or do you already have one?

SCS fixes that problem of targeting, actually. Enemies that are asleep aren't targeted unless they're the final one(s) left. Additionally, when a party member is instead *held*, they are just hacked to shreds immediately, because every attack on a held character is an autohit, so kill them while they're disabled, right?

My problem with PoE was mainly with its combat system, but I didn't much like the writing of the game, either. Flavor text is nice, but when you're trying to get your first bearings on a new setting in a new game system that you've never played with before, PoE's flavor text feels like it's on steroids. There's so much new information about such a variety of things...and you just don't have the foreknowledge in order to understand what any of it means to start with. BG1's approach seems deft and masterful by comparison: when choosing male vs. female, the game tells you that both options are equal; when you're choosing your race, it gives a little profile of each different race-type without getting too much into specifics; when you choose your class, arguably the most important thing, it gives you a basic idea how the class plays, etc. Finally, after character creation, it plays a little textscreen cutscene that outlines the premise of the game (i.e. a description of Candlekeep, your character, and your foster father, and what you're supposed to do to start with). It's pretty simple and to the point, and you learn about the rest of the game world through the things you do, and can you learn more lore about the game through reading books if you really want to, but it's obviously super optional. When I first started PoE, I already felt really lost - lore-wise, gameplay and mechanics-wise - by the first time I heard "Glanfathan" from the first character that talks to you in-game. With the heaping of special abilities, playing PoE is like if you were playing a sorcerer the first time you played BG - how the heck are you supposed to make wise decisions regarding your spell choices - which you can't ever take back after choosing them! - when you have no idea how the game works or how spells really work or what's useful and what isn't?

They were unmanageable in specific circumstances and for just a few encounters, yes, I'll admit that. You just mentioned why, actually: liches (and rakshasas) are immune to 5th level or lower spells, which means True Seeing doesn't work (IIRC)...although now that I think of it, I suppose the wizard variant (6th level) might. Ironically, SCS has a component to fix this issue (the "Antimagic attacks penetrate improved invisibility" component), and it's coded in such a way to be compatible with SR...but it's disabled for installation if you have SR installed. How silly, right? As far as I know, the antimagic attacks are *supposed* to be able to pierce improved invisibility in SR (hence why that SCS component is disabled), but for some reason, they just aren't. I have to imagine the author of the mod just didn't implement it correctly, which is really a shame. Spell Immunity is also actually supposed to be disabled completely in SR, but I think you may be right that SCS still uses it anyways. As for Ruby Ray of Reversal, it's a 7th level spell, so that requires you to be level 14. I guess if you consider "back from the Underdark" to be "really late game", yeah. Isn't that kind of common sense? Liches are epic-leveled (in fact, a bit beyond that): it's not too crazy to expect you'd run into problems dealing with them before getting access to a 7th level spell. I've never done any of the things you've mentioned for dealing with encounters. I'm not much of a summonables person (I think there's a good reason the vanilla game has the strict 5 summons limit), I've never used a Protection from Undead or Protection from Magic scroll, I've never cheesed with the Mace of Disruption, etc. I had the two issues with Improved Invisibility and liches and have occasionally run into the issue of SCS illegally using Spell Immunity in contingencies/triggers - which shouldn't even exist in SR, and in fact, even not in SR, Spell Immunity is not normally usable in contingencies/triggers. I think I'll probably fix that for SCS myself so that never happens. Contingencies and spell triggers in SCS actually cast different spells upon reload, which can create the odd impression that a specific instance of a caster battle is virtually impossible, and then you reload and they cast a different combinations of protections that aren't nearly as bad and beat them. Your argument is valid even with that in mind, though: if you can't pierce improved invisibility (and you can't in the current version of SR), you're quite screwed anytime it occurs while fighting a lich or if they're protected by Spell Immunity. That's not fun to not be given a fighting chance when you should have one.

...On a side-note, I've never used a limited use/quantity item in an IE game (...or really, any game - it's a little bit of an OCD-ish thing), so I've never used potions or wands or anything - if a special ability ain't "(x) per day" (or similar), it might as well not exist to me.

The only reason I can imagine there being a situation where you *have* to wait for the spell duration to run out as a result of SCS + SR is because of Improved Invisibility. Spell Revisions, for some godforsaken reason, doesn't have antimagic attacks able to pierce improved invisibility...which, of course, is one of the first things that I fixed when I made my submod for SR (...yes I made one for SR as well as IR - since they're both game-sweeping revisions, I might as well fix some of the things they did wrong, right?). Otherwise, the highest level spell protection, Spell Trap, is piercable by Ruby Ray of Reversal, a 7th level mage spell. You shouldn't really be running into any Spell Traps before that outside of optional fights like liches, which you're really supposed to wait to do until later, and can do earlier than that really only at your own peril. If they cast multiple spell protections at once (Spell Trap, Spell Deflection, Spell Shield, etc.), then you can always use weaker spell protection breakers (like Secret Word - an absolute necessity when playing SCS + SR) to remove those weaker ones, too. Generally speaking, I like to have two mages (or a sorcerer + mage) in my party, so I really don't run into too many problems with all of this, personally...but if you don't like doing that, I can see why it might be a struggle.

It was amusing to hear Bungie immediately say that Destiny 2 will only be 30FPS on Xbox One X. A supposedly competitive first person shooter...at 30FPS. Hm, okay, Bungie.

Oh yeah, and in regards to spellcasting failure: if you're playing the original BG2 (and/or BGT), then you can get that tweak (among a bunch of others) from the ToBEx mod, which is where Beamdog got it from (as is mentioned in the description).

For SCS pre-buffing, I think it totally depends on your playstyle. If you're the type that pre-buffs yourself, I think it's perfectly fair for enemies to similarly pre-buff. It might not always make perfect sense that they pre-buff, but generally speaking, it doesn't make perfect sense for you to do so, either, so fair's fair, right? If you're not the type to pre-buff (...or don't like playing or fighting casters to begin with), then yeah, you're going to probably get ruined if you enable it, and it's probably best to select the "only for enemies that are created in sight of the caster" (i.e. enemies who ambush you - there aren't a whole lot of these types of encounters, and it always makes sense that an ambushing force would be pre-buffed) option, or to not enable it at all.

There are things that I like about 2nd Edition, and things that, yes, 3rd Edition definitely does better. In regards to SCS and fighter vs. caster fights...I find that the mod makes the game most difficult when they combine the two. Smart usage of buffs, targeting, much better spell selection in general, potion-usage...all combine to make the game actually quite difficult at times. I would've also recommended Item Revisions and Spell Revisions if you had said what kind of mods you were looking for, although perhaps not Item Revisions at this time, because the author of the mod has left it in an admittedly somewhat rough state, which is why I created my own submod to fix some of its problems myself.

What, really? Do you know how much time baking and serving cookies can take? Definitely worth the investment.