Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Goblin camp front gate

So I dont know whats going on here but I cant for the life of me get past this fight. 1st time I tried talking to them which (suprise suprise) ended in a fight when I dident want to give into their demands.

2nd time I tried to climb the cliff, punted the one up there down and tried to engage them from high ground. Which dident work as they magicly saw through the wall that I was hiding behind. And because my AC might as well not be there, dont think a single attack of theirs missed so I went down VERY fast. Oddly enough my highest AC fighter went down the fastest....

Third time I punted the goblin down, kept my guys in cover for a turn and opened up with an attack that finished the gobbo off and actually incinerated one of their wargs.

And then....

The game replied by giving ALL the gobbos a turn before I even had a chance to interject. THEY got a suprise round, and the first gobbo ran off to the bongos and summoned the rest of the camp to the front door. So I think everyone can guess how the rest of the fight went....

WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL

Is suprise round just broken or arent you supposed to be able to win that fight because this is just insane.... I was even in turn based mode so I (hopefully) could do an attack with everyone before they would respond but nope. No suprise round for you, infact the opposing side gets it.......

What is going on?

These fights need to be retuned on several levels. Enemies chain-aggro'ing is a very bad look, but there's also just the amount of time the Druid Grove and Goblin Camp fights take. NPCs take forever to calculate their turns and execute their actions. Even playing pretty optimally (I mean, using good abilities and an offensively-oriented party, not setting the fight up in advance with barrels and all that nonsense), these fights can take more than an hour to complete, and most of it is spent watching NPCs take their turn. I've found myself alt-tabbing after each of my characters' turns.

Really? In my game enemies dont take that long to take their turns at all, but the game does ocassionaly freeze for a second or two.

But holy cow this fight is nuts. The number of gobbos are fine. Their goblins after all.

But the number that are spell casters, the number that throw bombs. Etc etc all adds up. They do to much damage and soak up to much damage. Even when getting the jump on them its IMPOSSIBLE to prevent them from using those drums, hence you are fighting the entire camp (or at least a very big amount of them) when you do go for the fighting option.

Maybe the lack of suprise round is a bug or something but I honestly see no way of doing this fight and coming out on top...

Well, I guess there will be a lot of work ahead to AI calculation more "reactive", so to say.
It's almost a given at this time in development, even if they are mostly borrowing the core of it from DOS 2 (as I would imagine).

I took this fight both upfront, reloaded and did the conversational clear of it, AND I did the sneak around and roll the boulder onto the enemy fight. I had no issues at all in winning. Whether they reached the wardrum alarm or not, i had no issues with difficulty.
So this is more a player error issue here than a feedback issue. Difficulty sliders are surely gonna come into the game, don't y'all worry.

These fights also likely need to be less horde mode. For reference, a standard goblin has a CR of 1/4th, which means for a party of 4 lvl 2 players, 4 goblins is a medium encounter, 6 is hard, 8 is deadly. 4 gnolls is also deadly. Mindflayer is CR 7, super deadly. 2 phase spiders CR 3 and 2 Ettercaps CR 2, deadly again.

Most every encounter in BG3 is in the deadly category or even with the cap of level 4, hard. There are no, or almost no easy or medium encounters anywhere in the EA. And that is without considering that many monsters (especially goblins) are all carrying super overtuned Alchemical and magical area of affect throwables that in standard 5E they typically do not have.


So yes, I agree, the encounters desperately need some tuning, and that is before calculating in areas that Larian haven't implemented the rules entirely or accurately as they are in 5E also throwing the balance into disarray.

Yeah, I haven't posted about it until now because I have very little doubt there are a number of irregularities to work out there. Sometimes they're quite responsive, sometimes they seem to reach some kind of hard cap of processing time and either stand still or move forward then jump back to where they were.

Even if they were all responsive all the time, though, a turn-based goblin fight is entirely unlike a RTWP goblin fight. I don't particularly want to watch 8 goblins take a turn before I get a chance to move one of my characters again. I think this issue is probably more pronounced in multiplayer, where you're already waiting for your friends to think about their actions and have fewer character under your control in any given fight.

Agreed, i did this fight multiple times as well, with lvl 3 and lvl 4 groups. It's definately winnable, easier when going up the cliff first and surprising the enemy. The wall up there and the planks on the cliff itself are a bit buggy still, like quite a few surfaces in the game at the moment.
I had only minor issues with surprise rounds so far (might have been my own fault :)), sometimes some enemies were surprised while others in the same group were not. But in DnD some monsters cannot be surprised, so might hae been that.

Out of interest, what is the makeup of your party? Half of my party has a very low AC and the other half is only mediocre. Might be a part of the problem but given the NPC's that ive got in the party in not sure how to go about it. I already use buff spells to increase their AC.

First time I did the fight (when I talked to them) I summoned the 3 ogres and won very easily. So easily infact that I figured it was an error to use the horn and tried again and get obliderated every single time afterwards. I saved the game so I can continue on, but I feel this fight should not require me to use those ogres as help.

Maybe the AI got a few lucky crits or something, With rng luck is part of the problem. The 2 fights without the ogre (first talking, 2nd time when they spotted me through a wall) the fights were over before I knew what happend. The last attempt where all the gobbos basicly got a suprise round would have gone so very much in my favour if I actually gotten that suprise round but was eventually grounded down and lost due to attrition.

Il see if I cant get the surpise round to happen normally and report back here.

Alright tried that fight again. Seems that suprise round itself is not working. I thought I saw a suprise round somewhere but im not getting it in fights...

That said, did it again and the Goblins dident get a suprise round either this time over. Fight lasted 5 minutes and managed to keep them from getting to the drum to call in reinforcements. I think I suffered only 1 or 2 hits.

So yeah its doable. If the game doesent pull any antics

I usually get the surprise round when I open attack from stealth.

I tried to solve this with attacking them for the first time this morning and had a hard time too, having to restart the fight several times.

It wasn't until I did not talk to them and instead just started the fight by throwing spikes and fire at them that I won.
But it feels wrong to me to skip some story/characters to have an advantage in combat.

I've had other occasions where actually triggering the story and talking to the NPCs put you and your party in a really bad position for the start of the fight. All of your characters are clustered and the enemy starts off with throwing fire or acid at your entire party.
Splitting the party in case a fight could emerge sounds very tidious.

One trick that helped me in this fight that came to me very late was just destroying the drum with an attack, to keep them from summoning reinforcements.