Difficulty adjustment for expanded party

[AJitateD]

Hi, just wondering if anyone has tips for maintaining balance if you use the expanded party mod? I'd like to take more companions, but don't want to water down the combat (currently playing with cosmetic only mods on tactician). If I increase the difficulty to Honor mode and take 2 extra party members would that be roughly equivalent?

[Kernest]

Nope.

The big thing about honor mode is being allowed 1 save.

There are some smaller rule adjustments, such as Pact of the Blade extra attack not stacking, but nothing so meaningful as to balance having 2 extra player controlled party members.

[GriffinPilgrim]

I mean, no. The game is meant for a party of four. Naturally having two more will make it easier.

[Ghost]

The person that made the Adjustable Party Limit mod also made a balancing mod called Tactician Enhanced. Can find them both on the in-game browser or on mod.io here:

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/adjustable-party-limit
https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/tactician-enhanced

[seeker1]

Tactician Enhanced is very nice because it scales according to settings the player chooses. So they can choose how much more difficult to make things for a party of 6 over a party of 4... the two things it scales are enemy actions and enemy HP, again based on party size and the settings you choose. You can pick between flat, linear, and increasing scaling.

It doesn't add additional enemies based on party size, but More Enemies mod does (add enemies, though not based on scaling to party size, nor player settings). Then there's Doubled Enemies. I refused to touch it until they made one change -- which they did -- you can turn off the option to double bosses (shudder) and just double the grunts (which makes far more sense.)

[Wuorg]

Originally posted by Ghost:

The person that made the Adjustable Party Limit mod also made a balancing mod called Tactician Enhanced. Can find them both on the in-game browser or on mod.io here:

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/adjustable-party-limit
https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/tactician-enhanced

I used this for the run I just did, because I didn't want to leave any Origin characters at camp lol...

It worked great, about as good as one could reasonably expect a mod like this to anyway. There were some imbalances here and there (like allied NPCs also getting the buffs that enemies do from you having a large party), but overall I'd recommend it to anyone using a larger party size. Certainly more than I would recommend going vanilla with that larger party size, anyway.

[AJitateD]

Originally posted by Ghost:

The person that made the Adjustable Party Limit mod also made a balancing mod called Tactician Enhanced. Can find them both on the in-game browser or on mod.io here:

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/adjustable-party-limit
https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/tactician-enhanced

I had seen tactician enhanced, just from what I read it didn't seem to have a balancing tool/recommendations for settings based on party size. But I may try that.

[Wuorg]

Originally posted by AJitateD:

Originally posted by Ghost:

The person that made the Adjustable Party Limit mod also made a balancing mod called Tactician Enhanced. Can find them both on the in-game browser or on mod.io here:

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/adjustable-party-limit
https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/tactician-enhanced

I had seen tactician enhanced, just from what I read it didn't seem to have a balancing tool/recommendations for settings based on party size. But I may try that.

That's actually specifically what it is for! Explicitly meant to be used with that authors party limit mod. It is configured entirely in game through a "spell" you get automatically (along with a recommended/default setting and a couple other presets).

[AJitateD]

Originally posted by Wuorg:

Originally posted by AJitateD:

I had seen tactician enhanced, just from what I read it didn't seem to have a balancing tool/recommendations for settings based on party size. But I may try that.

That's actually specifically what it is for! Explicitly meant to be used with that authors party limit mod. It is configured entirely in game through a "spell" you get automatically (along with a recommended/default setting and a couple other presets).

Yeah I saw that it said that in the expanded party mod, just it didn't seem like the tactician plus had specific settings for party sizes, but perhaps I should have just tried it first instead of asking here

[Fitness Lauch]

Played with combat extender and stronger bosses in a recent playthrough for an additional challenge. Combat Extender allows you to modify the stats of opponents like giving them more health, more actions, more ac, higher attack rolls, more movement speed, more spellsave dc etc. Stronger bosses only buffs bosses a bit without doing much else, imo combat extender is the better way.