Which combat enhancing mod do you like the best?

SCSII all the way. Highly customizable so you can get just the experience you want, and well done too. The only drawback (which is acknowledged in the readme) is the occasional pausing while scripts load.

Tactics is too inconsistent.
Never played Improved Battles.
Improved Anvil is way too hard, and my understanding of recent versions is that you’re fairly restricted in terms of tactics that will actually work (the trick is finding out which tactics the mod’s author wants you to use).

 

I agree with Splunge. SCSII. Tactics was all over the place, Anvil was play-style restrictive. Not my cup of tea. Never played battles either, as I never read of anyone praising it(though I didn't go searching it either... so no offense to the modder). SCSII lets you detail to your style of game. The Vanilla game had some very easy battles and some real cheese tactics for beating Liches, etc..., mods help clean that up.

 

I have SCSII, Tactics, and Improved Battles installed. I would like to add Improved Anvil too, but that's impossible.

 

I love how SCS (both I and II) turns the imbecile mob packs into groups that actually try to co-operate. All the dirty tricks you learn during a plain-vanilla playthrough have to go through a steel bath to survive against SCS, while not resorting to hugely overpowered abilities to do so. If that ain't golden, I don't know what is.

 

Combat enhancing mods just never appealed to me. I can sort of understand the appeal of more difficult combat - to overcome the challenge so you feel like you've actually accomplished something - but most of the time the difficulty just makes me want to stop playing. The line between challenging and frustrating is very thin indeed and I prefer not to get too frustrated while playing games. I don't play games to challenge myself, just to relax.

 

I think Improved Anvil (I don't know the newer version though) is pretty well done
and I liked it, though it is a tad too difficult for me.

I have no problems playing vanilla either, as I'm not tempted to use cheese tactics like using the green scrolls or equipping spell deflecting Items (Baldur's shield, this special cloak ^^,etc.).
Some Spells (like the mage duplication spells or Wish) I won't abuse either but that's just my personal playstyle, so I don't feel like installing SCSII.

IA on the other hand feels like a completely new game so it has some appeal for me.

 

improved anvil was (I don't know the newer versions) nice and technically speaking extremely good but ultimately the design decisions put me off. Having an "optimum" party, foreknowledge of which quests/bosses are even doable until you can cast 2 ruby rays of removal. And then that I could have saved hours of boredom from knowing that golems can be hit by vampiric touch made stop playing altogether.

My choice goes to scs 2, for all the reasons mentioned above.

In retrospect what I like most about scs 2 is the intent to make game more difficult (primarily) by making the enemies use their resources more efficiently.

..god vampiric touching golems still makes me angry.

 

SCS (I+II) is those fitting me best.
I would like to state other mods enhances AI also naming a few: aTweaks, BP, Ascension, Rogue Rebalancing and to a degree Spell Revision.

 

I prefer SCSII, but sometimes the difficulty of magic encounters gets to be a bit high for me. I mean... it almost makes playing the game into a chore, since enemy mages become so much more dangerous and difficult to deal with. Its not unfair, at all, its completely within the rules of the game, but sometimes it makes me reload too often!

What I like about SCSII is that it standardizes and fixes a whole bunch of stuff, so you dont have crazy stuff like lawful good demons etc.

 

^
Well said. The moment it becomes a chore the moment you'll loose the fun out of the challenge.

 

SCS2 is perhaps the mod with the word of mouth that's recommended to hardcore difficulty seekers. I have tried to play this mod over 10 times but it creates a lot of problems like, stutter every 5-6 mins for seconds or so, crap load of slow down at certain parts esp. tob and random crashes despite the best rig and Win XP installed and so have stopped playing till the maker changes the program installer or makes some changes to still rough parts

I also felt the engine or the EXE it uses is not at all friendly with the program compared to weiDU.

Otherwise it's a nice little mod which you can install as per what suits you in difficulty and scale.

 

Amnasty, SCSII is a huge mod that almost certainly overloads the override folder, which can cause the problems you are experiencing. I recommend you use this, which is a mod that "biff"s the files in the override folder to the data folder, which helps the game run more smoothly and quickly. Take care to read the documentation for it though, and if you want to change which mods are installed you will need to unbiff the files first.

 

I have all of them installed in my new megamod. I was really pleased by the gameplay offered by Imp. Anvil last time I played a megamod back in 2008 - despite having overpowered items, the IA enemies were quite challenging. Not entirely bug-free, but enough fun to pick up again.

The author unfortunately doesn't support his mod in a megamod of any kind, unfortunatley. There's no info on how to get it set up in any megamod, so I had to do some guesswork.

I was fortunate enough to have kept the old IA 4.2, a very old download of the mod. By the time I was playing it in 2008, it was already replaced online by 5.0, which rewrote existing spells, adding much more incompatibility to IA.

Now, I've set up the megamod exactly as BiG World Project recommends, with the exception that I added Imp. Anvil near the end. I still had to compensate for annoyances, like the absence of the Shield of Balduran, Cloak of Balduran and Cloak of Non-Detection, which IA deletes from the game. Thankfully there is override folder, for reintroducing the lost items. At least now I know why I could never find those items back in 2008!

I voted for IA, though I don't have any experiences of Improved Battles or SCSII yet to compare it with. But it definitely beats Tactics. I'm sure I'll love them all!