Party of four...

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As you know I am traveling with a party of four: two human fighters, one elven fighter and one pure mage. They are all equipped with a crossbow, the elv with a longbow. It's going great: A lot of expirience points and it's always a joy to see how opponents are buried under a shower of bolts. They often don't like it, certainly not when "no fear" and "haste" are also pronounced. Even the most formidable adversaries quickly perish...

But...

Of course I miss the adventures and conversations that playable mates bring with them.
Is it now a good idea to do this journey with the four of us until just before the final battle to find the mates one by one and then make their journey and then take the final battle with the last available mate?

EDIT: Placed on the wrong place. Read it pleased as of I placed it on Baldurs gate EE

 

This party sounds familiar. I gave some advice in the Icewind Dale 2 forum which is based on the 3E rules, all the other Infinity Engine games are based on the 2E rules.
Some of the mechanics I advised you on are slightly different in the earlier games than IWD2.

That said, I've found that it's best to take a companion who has a specific quest in an area with you when you do another quest in that area. It requires some meta-gaming, or just talking to them about their quest. Once you fulfill their quest, ditch them for somebody else.
I tend to do this before going to Spellhold when you are raising money for the Shadow Thieves. So when you go to Trademeet, take Cernd with you for example.

 

Yup, we play BG with 5 people right now, in BG, the NPC's do not have great quests, or they involve two NPC's (like Minsc & Dynaheir or Khalid and Jaheira) so we played with five. In Baldur's Gate 2, we used the 6th slot to switch between NPC's because they have a lot of interesting side quests. And we probably end up with Imoen because she has an important part in the story and good reasons to kick Irenicus his ass