Now I have read many a time that you should give your mage 18 INT or he will not be able to cast lvl9 spells. Yet I have never encountered that problem (e.g. with INT 17 Imoen). I recently wanted to find out about it and created a INT 9 !!! mage. And look, at 3mio XP he got his lvl9 slot along with his first HLA.
Is this related to ToB HLAs? Do they give you lvl9 slots so you won't miss out on them as a mage. And why is it mentioned in every SoA tutorial when you can't reach lvl18 (required to get your first lvl9 slot) in SoA anyway.
Or does this mean that with only SoA installed and an XP cap remover I won't get the slots with a low Int mage?

In true AD&D the highest level spell a character could cast was determined by his/her intelligence.

e.g. 18 intelligence required to cast level 9 spells.

I'm pretty sure that this wasnt implemented in Baldurs Gate, though the manual writers were VERY lazy and this is yet another mistake they made.

Nothing more than that to add I think. I could mumble on about learning percentiles for spells, but that wasnt the question ;)

The INT limits were not fully implemented in the infinity engine. The scribing chance varying on INT is, and the number of spells you can scribe is, but the level of spells you can scribe is not.

Also, the SoA cap is 2.95 million XP, not 3 million.

thx, i knew about and have experienced the other penalties but was wondering about that particular one. Now I'm just waiting for SOS to come around and tell me to use Skeeper to delete these evil lvl9 slots of my low int mages :D

I know but 3mio is where a mage hits lvl 18 ;)

You either have TOB or the xp cap remover installed.

The main-thing with intelligence is the maximum of spells you would be able to learn per rank (1-9).
example :
INT 18 = max. 18 spells per rank
INT 17 = max. 14
INT 9 = max. 6

but its no problem to learn any spell per rank, just drink an intelligence potion (just know the german names) and then copy the scrolls. When the effect fades the spells will remain in your book. INT 19 is needed to learn unlimited number of spells.

The potions aren´t rare or expensive (300-600 G), my mage owns about sixteen in capter 2 /level 12

I knew all that. And I know that I have ToB installed :D
All I wanted to nag around about was the lvl9 spell rule that obviously did not make it into the game.
My initial question was:
Is the fact that low int mages get lvl9 spells because of
a.) ToB so they don't miss out on HLAs - (then in SoA with XPcap remover they should NOT get them)
b.) because the programmers were too lazy