Need Help with CTD

I'm in the Fire node. I can't win the battle because the game keeps crashing to the desktop before I'm finished. Not sure exactly why. Im not wearing Scather so I don't have that bug. but aside from how hard the battle is, I get some way in and crash.

Is thee any way I can use the console to kill all the enemies on screen just so I can get on with the fricking game. really frustrating.

 

I managed to get around it. What I did is exploit the magic weapon lareths staff of striking bug so that my mage did phenomenal amounts of damage. Then I just hit the balor twice and he was toast. Meanwhile my other guys were killing the small fry.

Note that I had protection from evil, magic circle against evil, etc which is supposed to prevent charming and fear (not to mention courage from my paladin) and that did no good at all. This game needed a LOT MORE DEBUGGING. I know if it weren't for Co8 it would be worse, but boy if my group did a program with this many bugs we would be the top of the layoff list. Great graphics, great engine, but I think it needed about a year more debugging.

This game inspires a lot of mixed feelings.

Never did find the beast from Hextor stalking me. Mona isn't there anymore so I can't talk to her so I'm just going to finish the game if it lets me. Got all the stuff to destroy the skull and then it's on the big boss.

 

Troika did kinda go belly-up. There may have been a good reason for that, as I've heard their other games also tended to have a ton of bugs when released.

 

It's not like I don't know how it is. I've been programming computers for 33 years. I know that some bugs are murder to find and fix and I know about deadlines too. But my suspicion is that even though I think my own companies have been less than optimal with bugs, I suspect they've been paragons of virtue next to game companies. At least with the companies I have worked in, the government was the customer and bugs had the potential to be very bad indeed so there was a lot of effort made to try to make the code as free of bugs as possible.

Do these companies have a good process and well trained people, or are they just hacking this stuff together? I'm not an artist and when I try it always turns out badly and some of the people at these game companies are, and good ones too. But I wonder what kind of work ethic goes into them to do things right and find and crush those bugs?

No-one dies if these games have bugs, but the reputation of the company is at stake. Where is Troika now? Bethesda has had similar problems yet they did a better job with Fallout 3 than Black Isle did with Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim still has bugs but fewer than Oblivion and Fallout 3. There is some kind of tolerance level for players. Do the bugs prevent you from playing.

My experience from this post was the answer was yes. I played the encounter maybe 10 times and all crashed to the desktop no matter what I tried. I didn't even try using Scather. Crash crash crash. I couldn't complete the encounter at all. And my guys were getting charmed all over the place despite protection from evil and magic circle against evil. So a hard encounter but not finishable because of crashes. The only way I could win was using the staff of striking exploit to kill the monsters Quickly.

 

One of the crashes might well have been a Balor Death animation. Two were when my mage was trying to cast magic weapon on Lareth's club of striking. Another might have been from a lot of summoned creatures that all my magic users were summoning more or less out of desperation.

In all the cases the crash was maybe 5 or 6 rounds in when the Balor had already made all my folks afraid (despite the Paladin't aura of courage and the various protection spells running and the spell resistance and in most cases after it had charmed the paladin and sometimes the fighter (which again should have been impossible).

Yes that is baffling. Some days I haven't had a single crash. Yesterday I had 10 in a row. That fight is hard enough without the bugs frankly and despite being about 4 levels over where I should be in this game.

Heck there are other things like the fact that the Paladin can't heal anyone but himself and that Holy word and dispel fire doesn't ever actually work. That's consistent.

 

I'm fairly sure I've used Paladin Lay on Hands to heal someone else, but it's been a while so maybe not... It's funny you complain about Holy Word not working, I've seen plenty of posts claiming Holy Word is drastically overpowered, killing enemies outright that it shouldn't be affecting. Maybe it's purely based on caster level, and doesn't take target level into account as it should. IDK.

 

I never had a problem with using Lay on Hands on other chracters. Try right clicking on them to pull up the radial menu.

 

I've always right clicked on the character, selected the spell and targeted the spell (similar to magic missile. It certainly wasn't clear that you could right click on your target for a spell like lay on hands but it does work.

I polished off Zuttmoy (sp?) so I think I'm done. I missed some things in Verbobonc but there was a lot that wasn't clear.

There are a lot of these games I never played. I may try Baldur's Gate next. Maybe I'll come back and try the added content for TOEE again later. I hope Baldur's has fewer bugs.

 

Enjoy BG2! It has few bugs but lacks the depth of tactical options available in Toee.

 

If you're playing thru BGII you might want to consider a few of the mods available for the game.

Here's a link to SPELLHOLD STUDIOS & BLACK WYRMS LAIR a couple of great places to find mods of all types for the Infinity Engine.

If you choose to use no additions at all, I would still strongly recommend Baldurdash, the original and classic fixpack for BG2-ToB by Kevin Dorner converted to WeiDU version by King Diamond, and expanded with many fixes collected by modders and players.

 

I'm actually planning to play BG1 first. I bought the compilation with 6 games that supposedly work on Windows 7. They installed ok but I haven't tried actually playing them yet. Yes, I like the tactical options of TOEE. Too bad that engine wasn't used on more games.

 

Interesting. How are they going to be enhanced?