right as a twisted kinda guy i played through bg2 then bg1 and found that in comparison bg1 is one hell of a lot more difficult did anyone else find this?

I think BG1 requires more subtlety. You don't have enought brute force to solve problems so you have to be clever. There is more room to use strategy.

There are few enough spells that you can and should learn the details about each one. Certain combinations are very powerful such as skeletons and poison gas!

I just like BG1 better.

Well, as I keep saying, BG2 is a breeze with a Wizardslayer.

BG1 concentrates mostly on tough fighters and so forth, they're almost always tougher than the party members. Therefore, you have to come up with unique ways of tripping these fighters up before they can systematically cave everyone's head in.

In my opinion, BG1 is tougher because
1) Your Fighters don't have a good enough THAC0 to be able to take out most enemies with ease
2) Your Mages don't have any good defensive spells
3) Turn Undead is next to useless (By the end of the game, you can destroy skeletons. Hoo boy.)
4) Your party is low-level, so only your Fighters have any hitpoints. So if anything happens, you die.

I've always wondered why stoneskin was never introduced until SoA... was it considered too powerful a spell or what? Could someone please put my mind at ease. [img]smile.gif[/img]

BG1 is indeed a bit tougher, especially if you've played BG2 as well. You just don't have the hitpoints you did in part 2, and one critical hit could, indeed, be critical. Of course, the monsters aren't as powerful as in BG2 either.
Another thing making BG1 tougher is that you can go almost anywhere from the start, and chances were you blundered into an area with monsters too high for your level. Personally, I kinda liked that freedom [img]smile.gif[/img]

I found BG2 a lot more...flashy... than its counterpart. Lots more spells.
In BG, if you take a mage as a main char, hitpoints= 4. Come on! If you graze your knee, u die!

I have to prefer BG1 because it is so much more of a challenge. The lack of EXP chances compared to BG2, where you get EXP from scroll writing and thieving, makes it harder to progress to power so the start of the game is a fun challenge where even a wolf is a problem.
Stratagy is required over runnning in and hitting things and the lack of flashy spells makes the game alot simpler, cos you dont have to keep checking up on what does what. Also its mostly outdoors in the wilds and there are loads of different locations. Number 2 was too restricted for my liking.

That's what so great about BG1 - you could easily die - f.x. taking on the ogre with the girdles was always a challenge for a lvl 1 party.

I have to say I totaly disagree! Apart from running into an area of too high of a level, if you follow the storyline in BG I, you should not have any problems at all. I found the battles in SOA alot harder, especially with all those lame mages with all their protective spells. I played through BG I after I just finished SOA and I found, that the areas I remembered as frightning before, was not nearly as bad as I remembered(this could off course be due to my lack of memory). I think I like SoA better, because I feel the story is more clear from the start, I had this feeling in the start of BG I that my character was just wandering around pointlessly(it was fun though), this is just my opinion, I love both games