This page is about unofficial content that is only available via fan-made mods.
Summary[]
Sword Coast Stratagems (SCS) adds about 90 optional components to Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition (including Siege of Dragonspear), Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, Baldur's Gate Trilogy, and Baldur's Gate 1 TUTU, mostly focused around improving monster AI and encounter difficulties, but also including a number of cosmetic and ease-of-use components, tweaks to abilities and spells, and a full implementation of the Icewind Dale spell system in Baldur's Gate. On the lowest difficulty settings, SCS mildly improves the intelligence and immersiveness of the game's enemy AI (and makes full use of the Icewind Dale spell system or the Spell Revisions spell system, if you have them installed). At higher difficulty settings, you should notice enemies behaving much more intelligently and realistically.
Current Version Details[]
- Author: David Weimar
- Version: 35.2 (December 11, 2023)
- Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian
- EE Compatibility: Fully Compatible with BGEE and BG2EE (2.6)
- Platforms: Windows, Linux (Enhanced Edition only), Mac OS X (Enhanced Edition only)
Mod Description[]
(info below taken from the official SCS readme)
Overview[]
Sword Coast Stratagems is a collection of mini-mods for Baldur's Gate series of games. It is compatible with the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate I and II, the original edition of Baldur's Gate II with the Throne of Bhaal extension, with the "EasyTUTU" conversion of Baldur's Gate to the Baldur's Gate II engine, and with the 'Baldur's Gate Trilogy' and 'Enhanced Edition Trilogy' combinations of the two games. (It is not compatible with the original BG1, or with the original BG2 without Throne of Bhaal.)
Sword Coast Stratagems contains many optional tweaks to various aspects of gameplay, including a full implementation of the Icewind Dale spell system, but at its core it is a tactical/AI mod. It carries out a fairly systematic restructing of the games' core artificial intelligence, affecting spell and proficiency choices, kits, high-level abilities, and most importantly enemy AI scripting, with a full install rewriting the AI of practically every creature in the game, though in most cases without significantly affecting their core abilities. It further offers a large number of tailored components that modify individual set-piece encounters at various points throughout the two games. The idea throughout is to make combat more challenging, interesting, and most importantly immersive and realistic, insofar as that can be done with a 1990s-vintage game engine - I focus on trying to get enemies to use their abilities intelligently and effectively, and in the harder parts on making moderate changes to their powers and spells, rather than the brute-force method of increasing hit-rolls, saving throws and the like.
Since there are a lot of tactics mods out there, of very different styles, it's probably simplest to describe the distinctive features of SCS. (I don't want to suggest that all of these are automatically advantages: there are lots of different styles of play, and different mods fit different people.)
- SCS plays fair. I've made a fairly sustained effort to ensure that SCS opponents fight by the rules and don't use powers denied to the player (other than obvious things like dragons' breath weapons, liches' ability to see through invisibility, etc!) This is probably most notable for spellcasters - SCS mages don't randomly get uninterruptible spells, improved casting time, free Alacrity, or the like. (In fact, I've removed these powers from creatures in the vanilla game occasionally, though I haven't done so systematically.) However, "fair" is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, so please do read the component descriptions if this is important to you!
- SCS is highly sensitive to the difficulty slider. SCS has five difficulty settings (Basic, Improved, Tactical, Hardcore, and Insane) and the great majority of enemies are affected by the slider. At the lowest settings, SCS is about as difficulty as the unmodded game on Core difficulty; at Improved and Higher then enemies will behave much more intelligently; at higher difficulties, the enemies make more systematic use of their powers, and occasionally gain ability boosts. The difficulty of each individual component may be set in Enhanced-Edition games via a new control on the Gameplay page, or on non-Enhanced games by a new special ability granted to your character; in either case this overrides the difficulty slider for that component.
- SCS is very focussed pure AI. Most components of SCS muck around rather little with the core powers of creatures, and hardly at all with their abilities, resistances, saving throws and the like. Its main focus is on getting creatures to do as much as they possibly can with their existing abilities. In particular, its targeting is very careful - hopefully you'll almost never see a mage do something stupid like cast repeated spells at someone immune to that spell.
- SCS is quite low-key in its changes. Where SCS does modify something other than AI, it usually does so in a relatively undramatic manner - adding a few more creatures, giving a creature a couple of other magic powers in keeping with powers it's already used, and so forth. It doesn't give new ultra-powerful spells to creatures who didn't have any magic before, or give creatures massive damage resistances, for instance. (Again, there's not necessarily anything wrong with doing this, it's just not what SCS is about).
- SCS is very customisable. Feel free to install whichever combination of components you like - there is a separate one for each major AI / tactical change.
- SCS is systematic. I've tried to be very thorough in making sure that there aren't "gaps" in its AI modifications - so that all hostile wizards, for instance, and not just some, are upgraded.
- SCS tries to be as compatible as possible. I've done the best I can to ensure that SCS will install on top of other mods (especially non-tactical ones) without causing problems for either. In particular, SCS dynamically alters its scripts to take (some) account of new magic items introduced by other mods.
Overall, playing SCS shouldn't exactly feel like a whole new game - it should feel like the old game, but with your foes acting much more intelligently and realistically.
SCS also makes a number of small tweaks to the spell system, all intended to modify the game in small ways that are helpful from the point of view of tactical challenge - some make the game a little easier, others make it a little harder. These spell tweaks are installed by default since the AI scripts assume that they are present, but advanced users can deactivate them. (See under Spell Tweaks for the details, and under Customisation for how to fine-tune them.) If you are playing with Spell Revisions, almost all of the tweaks are skipped.
SCS also incorporates, as an optional component for the Enhanced Edition only, most of the new spells in Icewind Dale, which will be used intelligently by the AI if they are installed.
Finally, SCS contains a few miscellaneous tweaks to gameplay, a few ease-of-use features (notably, an ease-of-use player AI script with a large number of convenience features) and a few "flavour" features that don't really affect gameplay but hopefully aid the feeling of immersion in the game world.
Installation[]
(As of SCS v.31 (current version is 35.2), SCS is fully compatible with EE (including 2.6) and needs no more fixes or patches)
- If you have installed version 31 or earlier of SCS, you must completely uninstall (and preferably delete) it before installing this version.
- Installation is fairly straightforward. Run "stratagems.exe" and tell it to install in your BG:EE folder, BG2:EE folder, BG2 folder, BG1TUTU folder, EasyTUTU folder, or Baldur's Gate Trilogy folder, as appropriate. If nothing happens, run "setup-stratagems.exe", in this folder.
- (Finding this folder for the Enhanced Edition can be a bit tricky; it's the folder with "CHITIN.KEY" in it.)
- On Enhanced-Edition installs, SCS requires version 2.6 of the game (for all I know it works on 2.5 and earlier, but I don't officially support it).
Batch mode installation option[]
SCS, like any multi-component mod, normally asks about a component, installs it, then asks about the next component. Since some of SCS's components can take a while to install, this can be tedious. Version 34 ships with an experimental 'batch mode': if you select this (by installing the 'batch mode' component, which should be the first component offered to you) then SCS will ask about all components first, then install all of them. After you've done this, a file (stratagems.bat) will be created in the weidu_external/batch subfolder in your main game folder; clicking on it will uninstall and reinstall all your chosen options. Batch mode is currently only available for Windows installs (basically because I don't know how batch files work in OSX or Linux and don't have a testing environment for them).
Special Note for Siege of Dragonspear from Steam/GOG[]
Good Old Games (GOG) and Steam both package the additional content for Siege of Dragonspear in a method that WeiDU, the tool used to install this mod, cannot access. You must run a program called Modmerge on your SoD installation before you can install this or any other WeiDU-based mod.