u/PostNinja365

Played through bg2 as a kid as a mage and I just remember how ridiculously overpowered it became without any real building with incredible buffs, time stops, summonings, area damage and dispelling protective spells of your enemies.

Now I'm trying to play through the game again, this time starting from bg1EE, and I would like to try something else, but I just keep remembering how ridiculous mages and arcane magic in general are. Full spellcasters do so much stuff compared to thieves or melee classes.

I know there are many ways to break the game with minmaxing and make a melee build that cakewalks through the game with infinite attacks or something similar. This isn't about what can gameplay wise beat the game, but what would give you that power fantasy feeling that rivals that of arcane caster casting time stop and killing everyone in the room before they can literally move a muscle.

Played BG2 as a kid, loved the game, tried BG1 when I was a teen, it was just a bit too janky for me to stick with it. Now, I bought the enchanced editions of both from Steam sale and I'm looking up for mods to make the experience more smooth. I know there is a modpack that essentially combines bg1 and bg2 into a single game that runs on bg2 engine, which sounds perfect for me since I can play bg2 just fine despite the jank because of my nostalgia glasses.

However, before I start the massive job of installing everything, I wanted to ask how Enchaned Edition Trilogy mod deals, for example, with classes that exist in bg2 but did not in bg2. Are they available in bg1 creator? And if I still wanted to play bg1 as one class and then change to another for bg2, could I do it without breaking the savegame with some other mod? I tried to search information through forum threads, but it's difficult to find recent information and there are what seems like hundreds of different mods, so it's easy to get confused.

So, I just decided to ask here what everything should I install in 2026 if I want to play bg1 enchanced edition while modding away some of the old jank.

Me and my friend have been playing in total now something like 12 base war of the rings games, changing sides after each game, and Shadow has won once. According to internet Shadow is actually more favoured to win, so I'm wondering what we are doing wrong.

It just seems like Shadow has so many more things that can go wrong. Sometimes you get 1 or 2 musters in the first two turns, in others you roll 4 events and bunch of eyes and your armies freeze to a halt in a critical turn. Pretty much our every game has been that either Shadow gets one or two turns of really bad rolls, or one of sieges fails somewhere at the end of the game too far away from reinforcements and then fellowship reaches the end of the doom track, finishing the game with Shadow having 6 or 8 points, never having quite enough time.

We play a lot of 2 player strategy games, so I would like to think we aren't just playing some critical rule wrong which makes the game too easy for the fellowship, but after this many games and neither of us being able to make Shadow work, I'm just at a loss what everyone else are doing different.