Perhaps the most useful spells are those that create additional allies for you. Animate dead, summon monsters, and summon animals are consistently useful, even if your allies won't be much help in dispatching opponents because of their lack of magical weapons and limited hit points. Even these weak creatures absorb enemy attacks and spells, giving your party members the opportunity to mount attacks or prepare defenses. Undead are particularly useful for navigating through stinking clouds, ice storms, and cloudkill spells, since those spells don't affect the undead.

Not all the creatures you summon are cannon fodder, however, as you'll find golems, elementals, devas, dryads, magical swords, and planatars are all powerful allies. Summon one or more of these creatures in preparation for almost every major battle, and you'll significantly increase your odds of emerging unscathed.

Preparing for Battle

Almost every battle is easily managed if you're properly prepared and know what to expect from your opponents. Whenever you expect a major battle, prepare your party by casting a broad range of defensive spells. For almost every significant battle, you should cast defensive harmony, protection from evil, haste, chant, and bless. Pay attention to the duration of each spell prior to its casting to ensure that you cast spells with limited longevity, like bless, just prior to heading into battle. Mages should cast stoneskin, mirror image, and blur. Paladins engaging in melee combat should cast call upon holy might, while clerics should cast that spell or righteous magic. Fighters should take giant strength potions.

Adapt to your opponents. If you anticipate engaging creatures like demons or dragons, which can cause fear and fire attacks, also cast resist fear and protection from fire. If you've been engaging a lot of mind flayers, cast chaotic commands on your frontline fighters. Similarly, if you anticipate battling enemy mages, ensure you have spell-turning, spell trap, or spell deflection ready. If you've been defeated by a group of foes once already, next time, prepare defenses (including sequencers and contingencies) that will reduce the effectiveness of its attacks. You can return to the pocket plane after every major battle, if necessary, to rest and rememorize spells.

Situational Awareness

There are better ways to discover what's in store for you than dying and reloading, however. Consistently turn a thief invisible and let him search the entire level to remove any traps and scout to discover the nature of your opponents. There are plenty of invisibility potions lying around that you should use to let that thief become invisible again after opening doors or backstabbing an opportunistic target.

Some mages and high-level monsters can see invisible characters, so an even safer way of searching ahead is by casting wizard eye or farsight.

Peek-a-boo. This almost invisible wizard's eye is a great spell for finding out what opponents are lurking on your level. Even if you alert enemies and allow them to raise defenses, you can hold your party out of range until most of the defenses expire.

Use High-level Spells and Skills Effectively

Now that your party will finally have consistent access to ninth-level mage spells, use them effectively. Time stop is one of your best available spells, but only if you use the time it affords you to follow up with a formidable array of spells. Improved alacrity combined with time stop will let your mage string together an almost constant string of magic missiles, capable of taking out any other mage vulnerable to spells. Death spell may not be effective at taking out most of the opponents you'll face, but it automatically gets rid of summoned creatures and animals.

Area of effect spells have gotten progressively less useful in the Baldur's Gate games, since opponents no longer haplessly stand around waiting to get bombarded, and without having sufficient distance from your opponents, it's typically dangerous to cast these spells because of friendly fire. No longer. The new high-level spells let you rain destruction on groups of opponents that are already engaging your party members in melee combat without hurting your allies. Both comet and dragon's breath can be very effective at clearing a battlefield. You can also use stinking cloud, web and entangle spells to keep opponents in place for other damaging area of effect spells, such as death fog.

Caught and cooked. Web, stinking cloud and entangle are low-level spells, but they can still be useful to immobilize opponents to set them up for damaging area of effect spells and ranged attacks.

The skills available to fighters have the additional benefit of always being available, although they all have a very limited duration. Still, very few opponents can withstand one or two fighters engaging them with greater whirlwind or critical strike abilities activated. Hardiness is also a useful ability with a somewhat longer duration. Use it when you think a fighter will be surrounded by enemies. One of the best abilities for paladins is summon deva.

One of the high-level abilities that players frequently forget to use is the ability of clerics and paladins to turn undead. A high-level cleric can immediately take out any of the undead in the game, with only a few exceptions (such as the demi-lich).

Ranged Weapons

Ranged weapons have always been overpowered in the Baldur's Gate series, but that's no longer the case, since the maximum damage these weapons can inflict hasn't significantly changed (and has actually been reduced from the original Baldur's Gate), and your opponents now have significantly more hit points. Still, all your characters should have ranged weapons available, since you'll often want to hold your ground for strategic reasons (or to avoid stumbling into traps). No ranged weapon compares to the sling of seeking +2, which you can carry over from the original game, since it lets you add your strength bonus to damage inflicted. Since fighters by this point in the game have the strength of giants, that not-so-intimidating sling can heavily damage most opponents.
 

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