First replay in 15+ years. Some questions.

It's happening to me every time. The frogs, sea hag, and lizard men are in the battle from the moment I enter the map, and then the gar joins them in the second or third round despite no one moving in his direction. It's extremely frustrating.

 

I think you must be either moving a bit in that direction, casting a summons too close or accidentally hitting it with a CC/spell of some type. The gar can be avoided but is very easy to pull by mistake. Or maybe it does eventually enter if you remain stationary? I used to automatically regroup to the party to the SW - where the Gar definitely does not follow.

IIRC the best place to move and screen weaker party members is to the SW. Generally you need a block of the frogs, and a block of the hag/lizards if CCs went badly. Often the Lizards can be CC'd until the frogs or hag are removed - the primary focus depends on the individual success of the first two rounds of CC. In my experience summons/grease/enfeeblement are all good ways to reduce the frog/hag threat and web/entangle can deal with the lizards/hag.

There are some other CC's, such as the bard's fascination effect to remove the frog(s) for a couple of rounds. I don't generally use the bards fascination effect as I think it is a bit exploity, but at lower levels it is not so bad as the bard's perform skill has not risen to godly heights yet. It can work on the frogs but not the enraged hag (? - I forget if ToEE enrage blocks that?).

Accidentally pulling the gar does make that fight much harder.

 

The gar really isn't that tough to be honest. It's the king giant frog and the sea hag that are the problem. The king frog has around 120 hp, and his grapple is very difficult to break. The sea hag hits twice per round and can poison and paralyze. On top of that, she has fairly strong magic resistance and makes pretty much every savings throw.

 

I finally won the battle, and moving my party SW definitely helped a lot. I assume you're talking about going between those rocks that form a natural barrier. Getting on the other side of those made a big difference because the king frog can't fit past them. I don't think the gar can either.

 

I looked into this. There are several things going on here.

1. The lizardmen are more easily triggered because of the Co8 protos overhaul that gave them skill ranks in Spot. This increases their sight range a little.
In vanilla ToEE, the leftmost party member (in the initial formation) is just shy of the closest lizardman's sight, even with 5 party members. In Co8, if you have 4 or less party members that spot isn't occupied, and the lizards don't detect you (at least at first). I guess at least there's an advantage for smaller parties here

2. Temple+ does add greater ability for the AI to pull in allies, which is also what causes the gar to also join eventually.

The pull in range is about one 800x600 screen away, maybe a little less, which is just enough to alert the lizards. I hadn't considered the impact on this encounter, but in other cases not having this did cause absurdities (e.g. NPCs in the same room not joining the fight).

However, note that the frogs are initially far enough from the lizards that this by itself does not trigger them - so if you manage to gank the little frog that gets the jump on you the first round, and keep the kingfrog away from the lizards, then it'll prevent the lizards getting pulled in. This is of course assuming you didn't initially trigger the lizardmen (but it may also help with the Gar).

Lastly, there's an easy way to get around all of this: put your party in sneak mode before travelling to the map, and neither the frogs nor the lizardmen will spot you!

 

Are they really allies to each other? I get the impression that on any other day they'd be fighting each other

It's not like we walked into the middle of their card game

They are three distinct groups of enemies to the party, but that doesn't really make them allies to each other. Some in-fighting between these groups would be neat to see.

 

Yes, they all have the same explicit faction number.

 

Fwiw, even when going directly to the SW part of the map as suggested, the gar still joined the battle eventually. Only difference is that it wasn't until like the 5th or 6th round.

I never even thought of that. I'd probably feel guilty for exploiting it though.

 

Nice. That's a fun battle because it requires you to think without pre-buffs.

I thought I'd mention some other battles have been tweaked since you last played 15 yrs ago, that you might try:

• The Nulb house is fun to do unbuffed (it is an ambush and the hints do not suggest it will be as such - only that they have been asking around). I think this requires at least average party level of 6 to happen, as well as certain quest conditions. Note that this is certainly not an easy battle at level 6.
  
• I personally really like what was done with the reactive temples: both the Earth and Water temples turn into a very fun challenge, when they go into a defensive state.. Air and Fire reactive temples are not quite as challenging, but also tweaked. It's avoidable...but good fun to intentionally make this happen, especially if you have not tried it before. The fights will be hard.
  
• Later, if you do the Monster Mash, I'd recommend not allowing protection from evil/alignment on any party members. This changes the fight to a decent challenge instead of a wasted detour. ToEE is all about the game engine fights, no?

Yes, Mobs really need a bit of a detect AI tweak. For both stealth and invisibility. I liked how Baldur's gate SCS (Better AI) had casters/rogues do the occasional detect which could expose you as you were doing sneaky stuff. It seemed to me that it was maybe a 50% chance of activating.

 

Small bug I noticed , although I'm guessing you guys are already aware of it. A charmed enemy will still wake up other enemies that have been affected by sleep/slumber spells.

 

How does joinable NPCs and loot work now? I remember NPCs would take anything that wasn't nailed down in vanilla. I'm thinking about taking some NPCs for flavor. Is there a minimum I have to give them?

 

Our Ironman team of 5 was doing it around level 4 - and slowly winning - until the game bugged out and our party couldn't take any turns. I used DM Mode to warp us out of that buggy mess until levels later when we had AoE damage spammage.

 

By default in Co8, Humble NPCs is on, so they don't take anything.

 

Just hit level 6, and I'm going to give my spellcasters crafting feats. (I already have craft wand). I have 1 wizard and 1 cleric as my magic-users. If I'm going to give Craft Wondrous Items to one of them and Craft Wondrous Arms to the other, what would be the best choice of who to give each feat to?