Sorry not that type of offensive!

My problem is that my spell casters (even with magically offensive AI's and mage liscense) rarely use their offensive spells. For example they may cast one spell but will then join the fight or just join the fight without casting. They have memorised multiple magic missiles and others but refuse to cast them. In order to cast offensive spells do i have to cast manually.

Any advice?

Also, if a character has access to both mage and cleric spells (Eerie) are they meant to use both or do they only use one set?

this sound as if you let the AI handle your fights. Belive me, doing it yourself is much more enjoyable :)

I prefer to let the AI control magical characters because in previous RPG's i have always favoured melee characters such as barbarians and paladins. Also i didn't want to lead the party with a character more comfortable behind the action.

You may want to check then what scripts are asigned to your magic users.
Perhaps the "Wizard Aggresive" scripts is what you are looking for.

[ 08-10-2003, 04:06 PM: Message edited by: ocellis ]

i almost never use scripts, thats what the pause button is used for

The trouble is that that AI scrips provided with the game are pretty poor. And to do a decent job of one takes an age - a mage is a complex character with a lot of possibilities, and the scripting language is fairly pathetic. (I get angry about this, they use LUA for the debug console, and their own scripting language lacking even basic loops for the actual game scripting. Makes no sense.)

Anyhow, you will really get a lot of benefit from manual casting - the autopause options mean it isnt all that hard to do, just time consuming. Or you can download a better script, http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/index_editors1.htm has a few, probably better than the defaults. Google will turn up a few more as well.

Finaly, you could write your own, but to do that well is quite difficult, not only do you have to be able to program to some degree, you have to know what situations different spells should be used in, and the crudity of the language means that to get anything sensible, you have to do a lot of work. Any berk can write a script to cast your most powerful spells in order, but to get something that holds back on the weaker creatures that dont warrant a spell, trys not to cast spells on things that are immune to it, casts breaching spells before damage spells, keeps a sensible summon around if possible, or any of the other features you might want in a mage, takes effort.

"Also, if a character has access to both mage and cleric spells (Eerie) are they meant to use both or do they only use one set?"

Both of course, as you will see when you access Aerie's spells during a battle.

Hey- Dundee, I heard that you were working on a pretty good Mage script, but abandoned it because it was too long. Any chance that it's still workable?

Only got to level 4 before I burnt out from the tedium. Trust me when I say it is a !@#$% to get the script to do what you want it to do. As the script gets bigger, the odds of it failing gets higher; and with spellcasting scripts... they get very big indeed.

As andrewas said... it is simple enough to make a script that anyhow casts your spells, but it is a nightmare to make it "smart".

Thanks for the help, i will try to adapt this into combat situations by pausing throughout.