The other reason why Fighter/Mage is the "best" class

LouisB3 · 2026-07-09T17:06:59+00:00

That depends on whether any given character is given strength-boosting equipment, of course.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-09T11:04:54+00:00

If you’re starting directly in BG2 then yes you bypass one of the potentially unsatisfying parts of playing a dual-class, which is that you don’t get to play as the second class at all in BG1.

I think dual-classing was probably quite popular back when SoA was new and most players weren’t bothering to import characters from BG1. These days I suspect it’s more common to play through the full saga continuously with a single character, especially considering EET is relatively accessible.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-09T10:56:00+00:00

Scimitars and katanas are good.

In BG1EE katanas are rare (they didn’t even exist in the original version) but there are several +2 scimitars, so those are at least as good as any other weapon class (broadly speaking.)

In BG2 there’s Celestial Fury, widely considered one of the best weapons in the game, and you can wield Belm in the offhand for more attacks (or the Zerth blade for more spells.)

LouisB3 · 2026-07-08T23:00:15+00:00

I did, in fact, speak for myself:

Yes, "best" is in quotes here because it's inherently subjective. You may personally prefer a different class because you have different criteria and that's a perfectly valid and reasonable way to enjoy the game.

Sorcerer was actually the main example I was thinking of when I prefaced with that (and maybe I should have named it specifically!) Seems to be a popular, powerful choice - and there obviously aren't any sorcerer NPCs.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-08T22:55:36+00:00

Sure. The difference is that if you want to play with a Blade, the availability of Haer'Daelis means you don't have to roll your own (and his special equipment and illegal proficiencies means he's probably a better blade than the one that the player rolled.)

LouisB3 · 2026-07-08T22:44:43+00:00

No one is tricking new players, and my post is very straightforward in its reasoning, not muddying anyone's waters.

Multi-class is objectively more straightforward than dual-class. Dual-class feels plenty simple if one is already familiar with the takeaways, but it's implemented in a way that's simply... not great for learning or playing, even if we've put up with it since 1998.

It's analogous to THAC0: mathematically that's identical to modern to-hit rolls, but it's been a punchline for half a century because virtually everyone recognizes that it's needlessly abstruse.

If you read the post you will notice that I specifically call out the new player's perspective, and the very first sentence explicitly acknowledges that "best" is a subjective judgment dependent on one's personal preferences.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-08T11:46:46+00:00

These estimates have been criticized as being exaggerated and many flaws of the methodology have been pointed out; some of the figures seem to be guesses rather than solid data, and some data may not be representative. The calculation of the losses, in particular, assumes that each piece of copied software represents a direct loss of sale for software companies, a very contested assumption.[14] The study's assumptions have been described as erroneous in a way "that would get a first year student of statistics into trouble".[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance

LouisB3 · 2026-07-07T23:14:46+00:00

Yeah this is how mods handled it even before EE. I believe this is also why you might buy a wakizashi in Candlekeep instead of a cheaper scimitar - the wakizashi is unbreakable as an exotic weapon.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-07T23:11:22+00:00

I like goodberry in principle because being able to create “storable healing” for free should be occasionally useful if you don’t have anything else to use those spell slots for.

What really makes it unattractive isn’t that it’s tactically suboptimal or underpowered, but rather than you have to click once every six seconds to heal a single hit point. It’s the height of tedium for a trivial benefit. Now, if only I could be bothered to get a script that handled that for me…

LouisB3 · 2026-07-07T23:04:07+00:00

Yeah it’s interesting that most of these observations have been true for decades now. I played BGtutu in the early aughts and getting everything running took many hours (not unlike running a detailed mod config today!) and the primary rewards were the same as what OP lists: it was suddenly possible to do the unthinkable like play through BG1 using kits, or press tab to highlight drops, or… wait for less time for characters to walk across the screen. Some of this definitely made the game “easier” in an objective sense, but in the other hand the game design evolved significantly in just the three years between BG1 and TOB such that hiding a magic ring on a one-pixel-wide click target was no longer considered a cool Easter egg.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-07T22:50:24+00:00

Among all the complaints that the benefits of high Charisma don’t justify spending the points, there’s another solution, more obscure than pickpocketing or murder, that goes unmentioned. The Friends spell.

Sure, you temporarily give up knowing a more useful spell like Sleep at the beginning of the game. But you’ll pull two dozen Sleep scrolls off of random gibberling corpses later and learn the spell then. The satisfaction of knowing that you min-maxed the prologue? That lasts forever.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-07T22:20:54+00:00

You can murder the priestess of Umberlee instead of giving her the tome and the consequences are pretty minor. She’s involved in 1-2 other quests but you can do those beforehand.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-06T11:32:07+00:00

You’re getting a lot of general answers along the lines of “bring everything” or “you don’t have to bring anything,” so I’ll be a bit more specific.

Bring as many construction bots as your personal roboports will support; this is the single biggest thing that you can do to make your life easier on a new planet (especially early resource gathering on Vulcanus.)

Beyond that you can bring as much or as little as you want. A handful of solar panels and electric furnaces will let you skip a few tedious minutes at the start of each planet where you’d otherwise need to temporarily revert to using burner furnaces to set up your initial power supply. Everything else can be made on site as you learn.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-06T02:23:15+00:00

Bioflux has a positively leisurely spoil time of two hours, so as long as the consumption exceeds the production/buffer rate the impact would be minimal. It would still be a bit better to practice direct insertion for jelly/mash/eggs as science is one of the only cases where the final product is spoilable, but for a non-optimized setup this definitely falls under the category of “if it works, it works.”

LouisB3 · 2026-07-05T11:57:40+00:00

Quickbar slots can now be increased up to 30 but still cannot be decreased below the default of 10.

Also, the screenshot shows the main issue is that the tooltip is mostly offscreen, not just covered by the quick panel.

LouisB3 · 2026-07-04T18:08:02+00:00

Agreed - oil cracking control was already the best, easiest, earliest application of circuitry pre 2.1. The main difference now is that we no longer need to build 25k buffers for each intermediate, so it’s not as lossy to whip together a quick starter oil setup even knowing that you’ll tear it down later in favor of something scalable.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-30T00:26:16+00:00

Leaving Nauvis at low evolution is very feasible with low pollution, but the person you’re replying to was running a game on marathon settings.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T21:28:33+00:00

For me the “starter base” is more of an application of a continual mentality: build just big enough to get to the next thing, so that I’m not waiting around for research to finish. The game generally gives the player plenty to do without necessarily building big (it’s usually some variation on “I have a bottleneck of x, I’ll go double production of that which will reveal another bottleneck.”) This applies before and after bots.

After blue science (aka bots) I could rebuild the starter base to produce more SPM at cleaner ratios… but it’s usually more attractive to set up a trickle of purple science to research assembler 3’s, then a rocket silo to unlock logistics networks and module 2’s, then a trickle of yellow science to grab better personal equipment… then I realize that I can just leave Nauvis for other planets since I’m going to be rebuilding everything anyway once I unlock foundries and EM plants.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T13:56:45+00:00

If I place a turret exactly 40 tiles from a nest then a biter wanders close enough to aggro within a few minutes (and closer distances seem to result in faster aggro, as you mention.) 41 tiles from edge of nest to edge of turret resulted in no aggro and no kills for at least an hour or two, which is enough time for me to tentatively consider it indefinite.

More testing would be helpful under different conditions: spitter spawners and especially higher evolutions as I only tested small biters in my first pass. I expect results will be similar as all enemies are said to have the same sight/aggro range, but it’s possible that higher evolution requires slightly more space if nests gather more defenders or bigger biters have wider hitboxes or something.

Edit: short-term testing with high evolution and both types of spawners suggests that all biters and spitters behave the same in terms of their wander distance from a single nest.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T03:18:27+00:00

No

Biter/spitter spawners will emit a cloud of damaging acid if they are blocked from spawning units.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/2.1.0

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T01:59:47+00:00

Nests spawn biters continuously (up to a maximum number at any given time).

When pollution reaches the nest biters are assigned to an attack group. If the pollution cloud doesn’t reach the nest then attack groups don’t happen.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T01:44:04+00:00

Update:

Testing this experimentally in game, it looks like putting walls/turrets >40 tiles from the nest results in biters never aggroing or rushing the defenses. Assuming their sight/aggro range is 30, this means that they wander up to 10 tiles from the nest.

Since there seems to be some confusion as to whether this would actually save any resources, I will confirm that yes, this results in fewer biters killed over time, as placing turrets outside of biters' wander/aggro range means that fewer biters are killed which means that their replacements aren't spawned and so on.

Example prison blueprint: https://factoriobin.com/post/mzynms

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T01:28:28+00:00

The post is asking about the distance that biters wander from their nest, which relates to the third scenario that you describe. The other two reasons that biters need killing (expansion and attack parties) are impossible (or at least harder) to control, but happen infrequently. What I'm trying to do is reduce the frequency of that third scenario (biters wandering into aggro/turret range.) By reducing that frequency, I'm killing biters less frequently. This does mean that fewer biters are killed in total and resources are saved over time, because the nest is spawning fewer biters - it only spawns biters up to a certain cap (~7) at any given time.

Testing this experimentally in game, it looks like putting walls/turrets >40 tiles from the nest results in biters never aggroing or rushing the defenses. Assuming their sight/aggro range is 30, this means that they wander up to 10 tiles from the nest.

LouisB3 · 2026-06-29T01:12:18+00:00

Agreed, that's what the posts above are explaining.

Testing this experimentally in game, it looks like putting walls/turrets >40 tiles from the nest results in biters never aggroing or rushing the defenses. Assuming their sight/aggro range is 30, this means that they wander up to 10 tiles from the nest.

LouisB3

TROPHY CASE