Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

Auto crusade : ON
=> 0 management.

And then you miss out on a bunch of sidequests, and it can lock you out of Lich.

Never but never turn auto crusade on. It's a trap option that will mess up your ending at best, and could halt your progress in certain mythic paths at worse. At least for now

I don't mind the "management" part of the crusade, it is not very different from kingdom management in PK, and the main character is supposed to be the leader after all.

The army battles on the other hand are disconnected from the rest of the game in a way that feels a bit immersion breaking. I have a mage general who, after gaining a few experience levels, became some sort of superpowered entity. His spells do 5000-6000 damage and decimate the enemy armies in one-two casts. He is so much more powerful than my character, her party and frankly the entire crusade army, it is hilarious.

Why? There's really no connection given that Kingmaker has been out for a very long time now and has been in an excellent state vis-a-vis bugs for a very long time now also. If anything, playing Km now and waiting a few months to play WotR would be the logical thing to do.

This I agree with. Completely turning it off is not ideal at all. And the same was true with kingdom management in Kingmaker. Best is to set it to the easiest setting short of auto and also play around with some of the difficulty options to get an optimal setup. And in time there will surely be a mod that will give what some people want: turn off managing the crusade altogether, but while still retaining access to everything else.

Who are we trying to fool here? I doubt you were ever that open on the idea to begin with.

I´m surprised..not

There is a setting (found on the crusade in-game screen, *not* in game settings) that performs battles automatically. And importantly, the game tells you the result of the auto-battle and then you can choose whether to accept that result or fight the battle manually.

This has been a huge help in limiting the number of easy-but-tedious battles I have to sit through.

It was on by default in beta and it was all sorts of messy, for the record.
Like, giving you a flawless victory on some super-tough unwinnable battle or a crushing defeat on something that was a complete pushover if done manually.

Oh yeah, it's a very messy system and would be completely terrible if you didn't get the choice to accept the auto-result or fight manually. Based on my experiences, my theory is that the auto-battler doesn't use General abilities. So if you're up against an army with lots of high-DR monsters (that your General's spells would easily kill), then the auto-battler sucks. But if you're facing an enemy army that is tough because of their General's abilities, then the auto-battler makes the fight much easier.

I can confirm that some fortresses with an enemy sorcerer general that could wipe out an entire stack with Scorching rays could be winnable with minimal losses using the auto-battle.

So between what the two of you are saying, am I correct to conclude that if you have strong abilities with your general, go manual. If the enemy's general is very strong, go auto-resolve?

I think that the auto-battle is bugged several times, it caused me losses of 30-40% in fights where in manual fights I did not have to use any spells (9 vs 4). These were fights without an enemy general, so something must be broken.

Good to hear that someone else is seeing the same things I am.

Yep! Of course, there's no downside to always having auto-resolve set to "On" because you get the choice whether to use its result. But you can expect a better manual result if the enemy general is weak.

I guess except for when this happens. I assume the auto-battler just randomly simulates units-vs-units which can lead to things like having the enemy-heavies decimating your low-AC-archers. Whereas in a real battle you'd be protecting your archers. Not a "bug" per se, but just suboptimal battle AI.

What others have said. The AI doesn't know how to make use of the general's abilities. I think it's a really simple unit strength calculation. This unit is this strong, this unit is the strong, what would the result be.

Anyway, the more I play the game the more I like. My life got better when I realized that some bosses are optional. Playful darkness was making my want to tear out my hair -- it's level 37 min-max boss vs a level 12 party.

I had to google how to beat the bosses at the end of Drezen () just last night and I'm telling you, I very, very rarely do this (looking up on how to beat a boss). I play on hard and after clearing Drezen I more or less have an idea (or maybe I don't) what to expect from this game, and holy shit this fight was completely nuts. Eventually managed to pull it off with my very average party and far-from-optimal buffing thanks to a very lucky attack of opportunity at the end of the cutscene that automatically wrapped up the fight, and I'm not even sure what triggered that AOO. I'm about to redo this whole section because I previously skipped that bigass optional boss in the dungeon, and obviously you can't go back there after this act has been finished. I've spent 2 whole days just on this Drezen part.

Anyway, I read a reddit thread about this fight, as well as another threat in which the OP posted a screenshot showing the class split of a certain rogue/alchemist enemy that looked pretty crazy. Apparently, judging by the things people say in these threads, I think this game just gets lots of things blown way out of proportion, with insane enemies, mini bosses, insane builds with insane stats, funky ways to insta-gib aforementioned enemies, whacky difficulty spikes, "major" bosses being a joke with out-of-the-blue god-tier enemies casually thrown at your face, who promptly wipe the floor with your party, right after you've just wiped the floor with aforementioned major bosses. Some of the posters mentioned the Playful Darkness and an "easy" way to beat it. Apparently many enemies are meant to be next to impossible unless you figure out just the right solution to the puzzle.

Someone said that clearly devs didn't give a shit about "balancing". They weren't trying to challenge you through well-designed encounters. They gave you the difficulty options, then just put in things to kill you. "Makes sense", I thought.

It's such a stark contrast when comparing with the carefully crafted designs of DOS and DOS2 and probably BG3 too. I wonder if the devs were trying too hard to make this game like BG2, or even trump it, what with the overall scale, sense of "epicness", combat craziness, and so on. If they're going to make another game of this genre, I think it'd be better if they, like, "take it easy", just a little bit.

Hmm, in regards to the auto crusade talk, I should mention that I had participated in alpha 1, and the crusade system -barely existed- back then. As in, ALL fights were auto resolved by default, and it was basically a stat calculation that also appeared to have some amount of RNG baked into it at the time. General abilities (and generals at that) did not even exist at the time.

Alpha 2 added actual battles, but it also introduced a prototype of the banner system that was subsequently taken out during beta 1 and 2 testing. During alpha phase 2, you basically had weekly objectives that you had to meet, or else your morale/finances would plummet. Some objectives had cumulative progress meaning it was possible to get way ahead (such as winning fights that increased daily income and defeating specific armies as quest objectives), but others only counted for the specific week that you attempted to do them. One such objective in the latter category was to win at least 2 army fights per week. This forced people to 'ration' fights near immediately.

If the stuff from alpha 2 had made it into the full game, there would have been way more raging involved from everyone.

Dunno, the optional bosses in most games are usually more difficult than story bosses, that´s why they are optional (From demogorgon or Kangaxx in bg2 to the optional bosses of FF). That´s usually what most games do. Some enemies require specific tactics to beat them. They may be difficult until you know the trick to beat them.

If when you meant "balancing" means you can beat any enemy with every party composition, every character at every level with any equipment you have, in the way skyrim and other games do.... I do not think that would be a game I want to play. Too much balancing makes things boring, makes changing tactics or switching classes or party members pointless.

PD: I assume you already read it, but in the final fight of Drezen Just needs a trick that you may not get the first time you fight. And that´s a good thing, makes things more interesting than beating every fight you encounter on the first try doing the same thing.

Nah, I don't think it was it at all, since I experienced wild and hardly justifiable variations in results even when no generals were involved.

It got so bizarre at some point that I was even theorizing they accidentally inverted some crucial value somewhere, because it seemed like the harder a battle got, the kinder the auto-solver was to you.

But once again, this is the beta 3 we are talking about. No clue how the current auto-solver is any different, since at least so far I'm absolutely refusing to mod/tweak the default "core" game to any extent.