In Baldur's Gate, you use the number keys (1-6) to select individual members of your party. But you can also use keys 5-9, 0, "-" and "=" to select some or all of your party. That can be useful for times when you want to select half your party to do one thing and the other half to do another.

A very important key to know is "F3" or "stop" (works when you have more then one character selected, or the entire party). When moving your party around, even if you have "pause on enemy sighted" selected, I suggest that you immediately issue a stop command as your first action. That way, if you forget to give everyone orders before you un-pause the game, that overlooked character won't go rushing forward into their doom.

Formations are also one of those tricky things to figure out. Basically, you select all or some of your party, then right-click on the ground somewhere. By default, if you just right-click and release, the game does a "best guess" of which way to face the party based on your old location vs new location. And that guess can be horribly wrong.

However, if you right-click and hold the right mouse button down, you can then drag the cursor around and rotate the direction that the party will end up facing when they reach their positions. For most formations, this means that you should right-click and then move the mouse towards the enemy / threat axis / destination. Even if you spin the mouse around wildly, you can still simply move the mouse away from the green markers in the direction that you want the party to end up facing. So the basic movement is then to right-click about half a screen ahead of your party, and drag the mouse towards their new destination before releasing the mouse button. Repeat as needed to carefully move your party across the map.

In Baldur's Gate 2 (or BG1 with the Tutu mod installed), I suggest pressing your [Tab] key periodically to highlight any interactive areas (chests, loot piles, doors, etc). You can only see what your party can see, so a chest that is initially out of sight with not light up in blue until you can see it.

Note that individual positions within the party are control by the portraits along the right side. The only "special" slot is slot #1. Whatever character is placed in that slot will be the one who, by default, goes and talks to NPCs or merchants. In general, this should be your highest charisma character. You can drag-n-drop portraits along the left side to change the order of party members. I usually put Imoen (with her 16 CHA) in slot #1, with two tanks in slots #2/#3, then the ranged characters in slots #4-#6. The 5-point star formation works well for this as the silver dot (the leader dot) ends up protected in the middle with the primary tank out in front.

Lastly, you can right-click on a formation and select a different pre-built formation from the list if you don't like the default selections. A lot of the formations, however, work best if you put your best fighter in slot #1. Still, there are a few that will put your leader farther back in the formation, protected from the evils that lie in your path.



Some things are more easily explained in video form. The above is a video tutorial on movement/formations with annotations.

(The UI is EasyTutu 800x600, a.k.a. "svga". Recorded with FRAPS, encoded into x264 at CRF20, before uploading to YouTube.)