Default difficulty under GemRB? (IWD2)

[PracticalKat]

I started playing IWD2 under GemRB, and the game was difficult even at the default (midway) setting. I failed to load the savegames after reloading IWD2, so I replayed the Prologue on Easy under PlayOnLinux to get it over with. That was using a default party (Winter Rose), tweaked a bit to be more powerful.

 

Now I've started again with a 4-person party, on the hardest setting, and it's a breeze in the first part of the Prologue. I have two questions:

 

1. Does GemRB implement a more difficult setting (Heart of Fury?) by default? Under GemRB, the goblin caves in the Prologue took multiple days of resting to complete, as I needed all the Sleep spells I could get. Even so I also needed to use plenty of burning oil pots to do enough damage.

 

2. How would I implement Heart of Fury mode under Play On Linux? This link says it is possible: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4644&iTestingId=32363

 

 

EDIT: 2 can be solved by running PlayOnLinux, Configure (for IWD2), then on the General tab select Run Configuration Wizard under IWD2 Specific Configuration panel.

[lynx]

the hardest setting is beyond the difficulty slider. I'm not completely sure it means hof mode, but do check you have Nightmare mode=0 in your gem-icewind.ini . You could tell if you're in hof by the type of staff Phaen drops if xp, hp and saving throws are not indicative enough (we could also be missing extra logic there).

[PracticalKat]

Nightmare mode was at 1. Changed as you suggested and will try out when I have a chance. Tried HoF before, but that was just ridiculously difficult.

[Ishad Nha]

Last time I checked, you could not level up on IWD2. I did the levelling up in the official Bioware version of IWD2, then I used DaleKeeper 2 and Near Infinity to alter the Gem RB save files. I left some notes on this in the topic:
http://gibberlings3.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=25180

[lynx]

Yeah, you still can't, though we are closer to that goal now. I do most of my testing with the armor rebalancing tweak, so everyone gets some damage resistance and I don't have to bother that much with keeping them alive.

[PracticalKat]

Was looking at the wrong file before, under ./PlayOnLinux. The gem-icewind.ini file had the setting you suggested.

 

This is off-topic to GemRB, but for the record as I'm trying to crank up the difficulty under my PlayOnLinix install, I changed the settings in icewind2.ini (in the PlayOnLinux wineprefix) to:

 

Nightmare mode=1

Suppress Extra Difficulty Damage=0

 

I'm assuming that 1 means True and 0 means False as in C. These changes seemed to have no effect on a saved game, but made a new game really tough.

 

EDIT: Nightmare mode=1 seems to be HoF. The goblins kill my toons with two blows, and I cannot land anything on them. Also, druid spells fail indoors so only wizard and cleric can cast, and even so the goblin saves are such that the effects are minimal. Cleric Aid spell doesn't seem to help to land blows either.

 

When I switch it to 0 the game is really easy again. Getting "<<character>> is immune to <<goblin damage type>>>" messages. I think that I have messed up some settings in my icewind2.ini. Will go back to the original.

[lynx]

ok, so it definitely is like a hof switch.

[PracticalKat]

ok, so it definitely is like a hof switch.

Yip.

 

Will take this question (non-GemRB) to the GOG Icewind Dale forum, as I'm getting REALLY off-topic.

 

Quick question, how does the gem-icewind.ini relate to the icewind2.ini under GemRB? Does it replace it under GemRB? If so, I can look at that to try and replicate the game difficulty under PlayOnLinux.

[PracticalKat]

Solved. Damage immunity was due to having installed the mod that adds Armour Damage Reduction, and the goblins could not pierce this. Uninstalled that.

 

Was still having problems getting the desired balance that I had in GemRB, so went to that install and copied across the icewind2.ini from there. This helped a lot. Goblins now cause quite a lot of damage if they get close, and even archers are dangerous.

 

Spells like Sleep and Entangle are largely effective, but e.g. goblin archers can resist Entangle more effectively than axe-wielders. Makes sense because an archer will have higher Dex, and thus Reflex saves.

 

Last note: Tested on GemRB (0.8.0.1.1 according to synaptic), and killing a goblin yields 300XP vs 37XP on PlayOnLinux. Not sure if this is the same on the latest version of GemRB.

[lynx]

gem-icewind.ini is created from icewind.ini the first time you change settings in gemrb. From that point on, the original files doesn't matter to us anymore.

 

xp was fixed for this release, at least as far as the first goblins are concerned. There are newer debian packages available too (unstable already has 0.8.2).

 

If you're an explorer type, we could really use your help with the xp stuff. Seems nobody has researched it much before, save for what little was needed to do level squatting. Interested? I'd would basically be playtesting in the original.

[PracticalKat]

I'm happy to pitch in if you can put up with things taking a little while to be tested. Life is getting busy here. Will try and set up a VM this weekend.

 

Can I install the testing release of Debian and add a repository to get GemRB 0.8.2? Don't have any experience installing an unstable distro - checked for a torrent but cannot see an obvious way to access it. On a learning curve here.

 

Edit: OK, I install testing and then upgrade GemRB to unstable..

[lynx]

No idea if you can just cherry pick gemrb out of it, since perhaps the other dependencies won't match. For the tests, you don't even need gemrb, since I need only data from the original. Testing has 0.8.1 currently, which is still better than your 0.8.0. No idea how fast .2 will get there though.

 

 

Thanks, I'll open up another thread.

[Lightkey]

Could be a while till 0.8.2 gets to testing since it's in freeze for the next stable version (which can take a year for Debian).