I know this has been said before but id say this is the single biggest issue with the ea right now so it's worth repeating. Big battles of 10+ enemies consist of nothing but tabbing out between your turns, using an ability and then tabbing out again.

Sadly I dont think this is an issue that will be fixed by making the enemies turns faster. Rather, since the game is designed around smaller fights and works very well with them, that is the only type of fight the game should give you.

I had that yesterday when I went to see if the guys at the goblin camp were still my friends after an earlier altercation. They weren't. With something like 20 participants the rounds were extremely time-consuming, and though I made good progress, after nearly half an hour, a couple of rounds of all my characters missing (as 75% or less seems to be pretty much "guaranteed miss") saw a rather annoying end to it. My approach in other games would've been to draw small groups away and deal with them that way, but it seems either impossible or impractical to do that with BG3. But not being from a D&D background I have no idea if that's intentional.

thats what the barrels are for!
Huge encounter in one attack

Beaut

I like the big fights too ...chance to test your metal & work out strategies to deal with large scale enemy combat situations..
Not every thing has to be a Diablo game

Yes, they are.
Then again they are optional content and frankly the AI hanging up to "think" is a big part of what is slowing the pace down, but that's an improvement/optimization that will necessarily come way late in production.

The AI thinks too much. And sometimes it thinks only to deliver a line and do nothing. I think they know by now it's buggy and needs to be addressed.

Yeah, that seems to be the main problem.

Looking at it as a programmer it seems like the AI routine is caught in a loop that couldn't find a solution and after the n-th try they simply return from the AI routine with doing nothing. Larian will surely fix this in some way but I am glad they at least have a break condition otherwise the game would crash in every such a loop.

Ironically, simplifying the combats to more closely follow the rules of 5e would (presumably) greatly speed up combat for the AI. Rather than having to cycle through multiple possible uses of their Action/BA (Shove, random scroll in their inventory, grenades, some special homebrew attack, etc.) the overwhelming majority of 'large fights' would involve low CR creatures that just have 1 or 2 possible Actions to choose from (usually 1 melee attack or 1 ranged attack). One of the beautiful aspects of the 5e system is how much each little part (monster abilities, player abilities, etc.) combine together to create something amazing. The whole is greater than the parts, etc.

Just go look at a 'large' fights in the BG 1 and BG 2 series. RTwP vs Turn-based aside, the overwhelming majority of large fights involved very simple enemies. It gives the player a chance to show off and feel character growth when 20 enemies burst through a door, only to have the formerly frail Wizard launch a Fireball in their faces and abruptly end combat. That sense of character growth and moments to reflect on how much stronger you are now than you used to be is lost in BG 3 right now. Not every fight has to be unique with new spells or abilities. Sometimes enemies are just there because it makes RP sense for them to be there, not just to show off some flashy new gimmick.

I think your are right about that one but another big AI issue is pathfinding and you would have that either way. They won't reduce verticality of the game which adds a huge amount of possibilities in terms of pathfinding but maybe reducing the amount of surfaces in the game might speed up the process.

Consecutive enemy turns should be all merged into 1 turn. There fixed!

Absolutely correct. One major recommendation I've provided is to please, please tighten up the underlying grid in the game.

Or rather, loosen it up. As is, the underlying game grid is hyper small, meaning there are tons of points of data. Just que up a Burning hands and see how janky it looks. Then go boot up PKM, Wasteland 3, etc. and see how much better the games play when there is a more discernable grid system. Even if Larian doesn't want to display the actual grid lines, the grid squares should be 5ft by 5ft, not like 1 inch by 1 inch.

You would only gain something from that if the calculations they make are the same for each enemy in the same turn. Once they are individual for each character you gain nothing because they would still have to do it. And on top of that you would add further complexity because the AI has to decide in which order to move the enemies or maybe even to move one enemy then another then spend an action with the first enemy and so on.

What drags these large scale fights it the AI sometimes taking ages for the turn (there could also be an option to speed up animations, btw). Having no larger scale battle/s whatsoever would take some of the epicness, in particular if some of the more epic battle tunes are playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMXiYs-wi3A

Spoiler, you can also save during a fight.

+5 to this, not every enemy needs some new homebrew ability, special arrows, grenades, triple attacks, etc. Making the enemies closer to their actual 5e counterparts with only 1 or 2 actions/bonus actions available to them would be fine, and I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do that without even making the enemies feel weaker. For instance, the gnolls. Currently in the game, gnolls have some stupidly insane triple attack action (I'm sure everyone has seen my hate rants for them by now lol), and the higher CR variants of them have even more abilities it seems. Simply moving them closer to their 5e stats would make it less taxing on the AI because they would have 3 attacks to choose from: melee weapon, ranged weapon, or bite. Replace the ability to move and bite attack if you drop a creature to 0 hp with a simple bonus attack bite so they can make 2 attacks a turn (action and bonus action bite), remove the triple attack, and remove some of the random homebrew abilities and special arrows they all seem to have.

Fights don't need to have a million different things going on and contain tons of new abilities and flashy explosions to be exciting and fun. Just let me fireball some goblins and have a feeling of being stronger than them without having to worry that 3 of them are gonna shoot acid arrows or start casting cleric spells out of nowhere. If every enemy encounter in the game has some kind of caster, every archer has special arrows, and every other enemy has a grenade of some kind, it feels less fun and just gets bogged down.

The reason goblins and gnolls are low level early game enemies is because they're supposed to be relatively easy to fight enemies that aren't terribly OP compared to a new party, and are a good way to get used to combat. If introducing low level enemies with triple attacks is supposed to be getting me used to the way combat works in this game, I'm quitting now before I discover a Lich who can make 5 attacks per turn or some crazy BS.

I don't think the expanded ability list is slowing down combat, at least in the Goblin camp.

There you just wait for the AI to figure out a way to get you for ages (particularly if you have the high ground) and then make basic attacks. That is slow regardless if you revert to basic 5e rules.

Optimizing the AI decision making will speed up the game significantly and I think that is really the only solution here.

How that is done is up to the devs.

"All" may be asking too much, but it wouldn't be half bad to have units of the same type that are queuing closely in terms of initiative acting concurrently in their turn. At least in terms of visualization, even if their actions are still calculated one at the time in terms of AI.

Pupito's last sentence actually raises another fantastic point.

If every fight and every enemy is 'special', then no fights and no enemies are special. Each time you add something new to a monster that isn't in the rules, you have to be aware that you're taking something else away. If every enemy is throwing around magical arrows, bombs, and spells in every fight, then the impact of those formerly special events is diminished. That is something DoS 1 and 2 really suffered from, the endless arms race for newer and flashier effects. But again, that's where Larian's job should be so easy, because 5e already accounts for that. Encounter balance is baked into CR calculations for the monsters involved. Yes tweaks will need to be made for going digital, but Larian only needs to make those tweaks when a computer simply isn't capable of understanding the rules.

Please, please, trust in the rules of 5e Larian.

Good point, that was one of the things about DOS2 that got really old really fast. First time someone shot a special arrow at me I was amazed, thinking that it was awesome and I couldn't wait to get my hands on some of those. Then after about an hour or so, every single enemy with a bow was firing special arrows at me or tossing grenades of some kind and I had an entire armory of the things in my inventory. Suddenly the "special" arrows didn't feel so special anymore.

If just about every combat encounter in the game has a special arrow, throwable, scroll, or even surface effect, they stop being special. Suddenly that cool acid arrow is just acid arrow #50 to toss into my bag, that awesome mechanic where blood freezes and the ground catches fire is just another room full of fire pits and lakes of frozen blood that happens every single time I have a fight.

Totally agree. what are the best fights in the EA? the minotaurs and the spider queen. not million of enemies just a couple of interesting ones.

Another way to make larger combats less of a slog and more snappy and fun, would be to make things like Goblins easier to kill. I don't know if the game has level scaling (though I imagine it probably does), but goblins shouldn't level with me to be on par or just barely weaker than me when I'm level 8 or whatever. They should already be decently weak enemies that my PC's can take out without too many issues, and as I level up and get more powerful they should become trivial monsters based on the fact that they're goblins, not based on the area I find them in. If a bunch of goblins try to jump 4 level 8 adventurers, they should get absolutely slaughtered, not put up a decent fight.

Anyway, got a bit sidetracked but the point I'm going for is to make weaker monsters like goblins actually feel weak. It shouldn't take my fighter 3 or 4 hits to kill a goblin when in PnP 5e my fighter or barbarian should be decapitating goblins left and right with no problem. Flinging a horde of 20 goblins at my party wouldn't be a slog if my characters could easily kill 1 or 2 each per round, or even 4 to 5 goblins with a decent AoE spell from the wizard. Just make combat faster and more lethal against weak monsters like goblins, and you can fling a whole army of the buggers at us in later levels.

Eeeee. I think "fights against swarms of weak enemies" have their own merits and can be an excellent diversion. But you need to be sure to tune them properly, giving them a quick pace and giving to the player the tools to reduce the numbers in a swift and effective manner.


To be fair, some of the biggest fights in this EA build are challenges you aren't even supposed to to take ahead on, but work your way around.

I don't usually mind slow paced tactical combat...but seems to me Larian for now is more focused on making this a slogfest D&D simulator rather than a fun game.

One notable example on waste of time is the Warlock's Hex spell which is pretty much cast every round. Why oh why include the useless ability check debuff that more than doubles the time it takes to cast the spell? Either REMOVE this component or make it so that the spell debuffs ALL ability checks AUTOMATICALLY.

I would like to comment and say personally myself I know its not everyones cup of tea. But personally I enjoy some of those long drawn out larger encounters. Some times those heavier numbers encounters are better and more challenging than smaller numbers. There are times both are enjoyable. Also pre-planning for those encounters can be very impactful more so than a single enemy encounter. While there are alot of really large scale encounters in the goblin camp there are a lot of ways you can take 5 -10 minutes setup for the fight before it starts and make the encounter a 10 minute large scale encounter instead of a 1 hour large scale encounter. 1-2 of those fights you can horde barrels of explosives and alcohol/oil and just clear it in 1 maybe 2 rounds of combat. It just requires thought and it makes the game more enjoyable especially if the sheer numbers prove to be challenging. They are trying to have those options for people who like it and I really do enjoy those large scale battle fights even if they do drag out sometimes. Some of us find them fun.

Using oil barrels and the like to get through a big fight is plain cheese and should not be the game's expectation for how a player would deal with that encounter. Fighting anything more than 8 enemies in a battle is a tedious and boring chore.

That would make it impossible to follow enemy movements and attacks, which are important for your own plans.

+1

I hope so, because I plainly refuse to use that type of strategy.
Not just because it's immersion-breaking crap, but because I find exceedingly tedious to use that kind of meticulous accumulation of stuff to "set up the battle".

Entire different argument for proper environmental elements that can be exploited to turn the tide of a battle (i.e. the hanging marble block above these bandit's heads at the beginning).
I love that shit and I'd like to see more of it later in the game.
I love even more than using it is not without consequences (i.e. If you make it fall you'll alert all the henchmen roaming on the lower floor), which makes for an interesting trade-off of benefits and compromises.

AI just needs to be optimized so they aren't standing there computing their move. I am certain it can and will be fixed. Never found it to be boring or a chore (except when a friend aggroed everyone in Arx is DOS2 and it took forever for them all to go).

my post was supposed to be sarcastic. i hope that came through.
i was so hoping for all that 5e tactic fun, because there a lot of possibilities with tactics and the right builds.
but the route that larian decided to go is really concerning...

To me, this is a real issue with the combat system right now when facing high number of ennemies.
The higher the number, the longer you wait. It can reach an absurd amount of time.
Time that you don't do anything, you don't play anymore.
And i think that should not happen.

Yep, that's the saving grace, as it were. I was surprised to see it, since not many games allow saves within the combat rounds. If it gets to be too much of a slog, I can come back later and finish it.

The AI delay might be better optimized by the time the game is released. I don't remember it being an issue with DOS2.

Big battles are awful. Even if they get rid of "plotting next move" and enemies that don't do anything, waiting for all those turns sucks.

I cant remember any fight in DOS2 having the same amount of combatants as the druid grove fights. Thats one thing from DOS they should keep.

Exactly my thought. The game should do the calculation on the background at the start of the enemy turn and then do all the animations at once. I mean, surely it's not the computational power to manage 5 goblins at one the problem.

This shouldn't always happen, but we should have the option to skip consecutive enemy turns by pressing space or something. I just fought the whole goblin camp where I positioned my characters on the upper levels so almost none of the goblins could actually attack me. Yet I still had to watch each of the 20+ goblins run in some random direction and then do nothing, sometimes even using their Action Surges to do an additional nothing. Then I'd attack. Then repeat. It took over an hour...

But, consecutive enemy turns should not be automatically skipped. This would make it way too confusing for the majority of the (smaller, with more important enemies) fights.

I have had no problem with the battles as they are. Aside from the irritating bug where you have characters in a block and ending one character's turn skips the remaining character in that block's turn.

Big battles are rough and I hope they aren't the norm. 4 v 4 should be the norm. 4 PCs vs 8 makes it WAY too easy for your squishy wizard to get taken down in the first round of combat since the jerk AI seems to target low AC opponents rather than using line of effect or something). The number of ranged attackers and the frequency of everyone having special ammo and alchemical weapons is a pain.

How would a gnoll get hold of an acid arrow anyway? Using a bow and arrow is probably at the limits of their intelligence already. This annoyed me to no end on my playthrough.

I wondered about this myself. I imagine it'll be dealt with later; though feedback obviously helps. Overall the encounter was weird: I expected them to be much more bitey and much less... well, human.

I think barrels of explosives/oil/wine are ok when they are intended part of the encounter/environment. Problem arises when you can just collect all the bajillion of them all over the map and then do barrelmancy up the wazoo everywhere.

I really think they should weight much more so you can relocate them in the encounter area with STR character, but can't carry them in bags at all. Yes it might allow to still drag barrels across the map to other area, but at that point it's probably too much effort that is not worth it, as opposed to just yeeting a barrel out of your inventory.

It was less of an issue in D:OS2 despite there certainly being a lot of barrel BS too if you so desired, because your characters and abilities were massively more powerful as is. Here in BG3 though? Our power will be pretty tame even in Act 3 by D:OS2 standards and I certainly don't want barrelmancy to be a thing because it's so strong in comparison.

---

As for topic - I definitely think they need to do a lot of work speeding up these 20+ actors encounters. I can clearly see all failings of AI from D:OS2 here, where if an actor can't act it will just stand there burning 10 seconds of your time with some silly verbal threat nobody cares about after 3rd time you see it. I don't need to be given these 10 seconds to read it, I don't care really.

People try to blame homebrew Larian does for all the failures in the world, but reality is that these are good ol' D:OS2 quirks - you could give to each just basic attack and you'd still have all these issues, because the problem really is the pathing - inability by actor to act due to no path/stealth/bugs in many cases and Larian insistence to make sure we read that curse/threat NPC subsequently throws at us. This is THE no.1 time burner in these encounters as I see it.

I'm going to start by saying that I don't know how this works under the hood - all I can do is speculate based on how things appear. Based on the existence of this thread, we can stipulate that enemies spend way too much time making up their minds about what to do. This is especially painful in large battles. It would probably help if there were a fast way to narrow the decision space for each enemy.

What if, at the beginning of each combat round, every non-player-controlled creature in the fight chooses one enemy to focus on: probably whoever is closest to them, but possibly whoever they were focusing on from the previous round or an alarm that they want to trigger or whoever is the biggest threat to them. What kinds of things a specific character cares about could be set by Larian in advance, (e.g. if I'm the queen's elite guard, I only care about enemies that get within 60' of her, but if I'm a big hulking brute, I'm going to look for another brute to square off with). Whatever the method for this choice is, it should be simple and fast. Then, when it comes time for each creature's turn, all it does is consider the ways to attack whatever they chose to focus on (instead of considering every way to get at each potential target).

This method certainly isn't flawless. It will potentially create other issues, e.g. "What do I do if the target I chose at the beginning of the round is dead or out of reach when my turn comes up?" But I would think, in combination with some other fixes, that it could speed things up quite a bit.

I feel like it's getting lost, so here is a summary of how to drastically speed up combat in order of (assumed) causes of delay:

1. Use an actual 5ft x 5ft grid pattern once in combat. This will make movement SO SO much easier because there will be a metric (ironic) ton less data for the AI to calculate. Use the same system Wasteland 3 used where a grid only appeared in combat, or don't put down a visible grid but still make each 'block' a fixed size.

2. Trust in the rules of 5e, including monster design. The overwhelming average amount of enemies should *only* have the Actions available in their D&D stat block. Less options = less work for the AI.

3. Fix the AI to prioritize proximity to the NPC rather than having magically perfect knowledge about which character has the lowest AC. This helps with #1 and #2 because less pathing will be needed, especially once they get in melee.

4. <insert list of 100 other small changes to more closely follow the rules of 5e, because each small change is truly a butterfly flapping its wings. Each small change adds up to a much smoother experience>

Yeah the environment effects while in combat are just over the top. There is too much stuff going on while in battle. Larian ought to keep environment effects in DOS, and leave them out of BG3. Large battles are ridiculous. I literally fell asleep in the middle of a battle while waiting for enemy actions. This turn-based business and AI is quite frankly atrocious. Like someone said earlier, small battles are okay in this but as soon as you start to have 7+ enemies the battles just become way too long. If you have the ability and sometimes necessity to save in the middle of battle, you know your battles are too long. Simple.

I totally agree with all this...
Larian try to make only special things but if everything is special... Nothing is really special...

That's exactly the feeling I have in every encounters.
The difficulty is totally linear and the adventure/the world/the bestiary is totally inconsistent because of this (among other things).

This reminds me a small problem I have sometimes with these sorts of games. The fact that even when the AI is rather good, there's no active effort to make you feel the clear distinction between smart and stupid enemies.
You should be able to perceive the clear difference between fighting a party of enemy adventurers or, say, a pack of stupid beasts.
Back to the gnoll example, I noticed how they kept focus firing my weak caster on the back line instead of dealing with what was in front of them.

This would be a great, but simple, change to enemy AI. "If Intelligence<10, attack whoever is nearest. If greater than 10, attack the squishiest enemy." Maybe add a couple more conditions so that smarter enemies try to avoid AoOs and/or focus more on getting high ground.

Well, it's a possible example among many, but yeah, that's the sort of nuance I'm talking about.

Another one could be that really stupid enemies don't worry as much about triggering attacks of opportunity.
Or that really smart enemies can make better use of the the environment around them (i.e. "breakables") instead of just attacking.

It would do wonders for our immersion in the game, and its closer to what I think an actual DM would do.

Made a post about that but its seems your explained it better. I totally agree , the goblin fight was so long. Its take three minutes of ennemy turn for you being able to play with your character. I was reading a book while playing. Merely moving to a hight ground took me 4 turn, so that 80+ enemy turn of waiting just to have a good position in the fight. Then its took something like 10 more turn to finish the fight.

The worst was, I completed it once before, and the fight was almost one hour long but the game crashed just before I kill the last couple of enemy . *take a breather and go walk outside*.

I did take it literally. If you were being sarcastic, then I join in your sarcasm.

And I also agree with you here, @Tuco.

I agree with this.

@peoples

I'm boggled by one of the posts how does a gnoll get it's hands on an acid arrow. that just using an arrow should be the limit of it's intellegence.... that boggles me

1. Gnolls are not anymore or less stupid then a normal int 10 person. Some are but most aren't
2. Gnolls raid as a lifestyle, which means they learn about their weapons, and how to raid. It's their life, and how they get food, materials, etc.
3. Even a child can be taught how to use a bow, and many can shoot better then most adults. Especially when their life revolves around using that bow, or other weapon. The hardest part about using a bow for gnolls, is claws. Yet different ethnic groups in the past have used other ways of holding the bow string so, claws are feasible. Not the greatest but still doable.

Some of the naunces about stupid enemies, vs smart enemies. Alot of the enemies in game the common ones goblins, ogres, gnolls, bugbears, orcs etc, etc etc, live by fighting, by raiding again this is their life blood. Furthermore even animals know when someone is moving away they can attack easier (attack of oppurtunity), they also know who is causing the most damage (basic survival sense). You see someone murder three of your friends with one go. Yeah attack him! or Run!.

Much like a pack of wolves will go after the weak animals, the elderly, the young, while avoiding mommy. They don't have to fight mommy to get what they want which is food. If they had to they'd do the reverse and go after mommy, and say screw the children and elderly. So again they sense who is the strongest, and who is the weakest.

It's not about stupid, vs. smart it's far more complex then that, and it makes sense.

Why is everything boiled down to such a blah thing stupid vs. smart... just wow. Stupid evil, stupid goblin, stupid penis eating minnows, stupid AI...realistically, and from experience I'd much rather fight a smart person then a dumb one. Dumb ones don't realize their not spose to be able to do what they do. Supposed smart ones are limited by their supposed smarts, for the most part.

Unless your Sherlock Holmes then that dude was kinda scary, in the pit.

I'm sorry but you're 100% wrong about that. https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/gnoll Gnolls have 6 int, 4 less than a normal int 10 person. And sure, they raid as a lifestyle. But they're also described as feral. The combination of instantly knowing which party member has the lowest AC, exploiting acid arrow to reduce our ACs, and ignoring attacking us to get a high ground advantage is just too much.

Ummm, did I mention anything about lowest AC, or acid arrow? No I don't think I did. But I'm going to humor you, even though you read more into my post then I put.

Taking advantage of High Ground is not something based upon intellegience which is the score that covers book smarts, reading, writing, arithmetic, and other in D&D terms Scholarly persuits. Which is how it pertains to wizards being that they are focused upon book learning, and scholarly persuits. So the fact you wish to bring the wrong score into it means your wrong.

Wisdom on the other hand would be the better score in D&D terms to describe this knowledge based upon experiences, how well you note things, and then put them together. So as for your AC comment yes they would know by seeing the fact that your wizard isn't wearing any shiny hardshell that they can do damage to him, easier then your fighter in that shiny suit of armor. The same thing would apply to knowing that acid arrow hurts that shiny thing, making it easier to get through to the soft squishy bits. (Even though they really don't know why it is doing that)

Then there is learned behavior which is based solely upon ones experiences. So a young gnoll raiding with a Veteran is told to go stand there and shoot. Does so later on he is on level ground, and notices he's having to adjust his aim differently then what he did when he was on the hill. He's learning albiet slowly do to mental processes, but he has an advantage no google, or wiki. or anything pertaining to book learning. Instead he has first hand knowledge, because his very life depends upon it. So he has to learn these things in order to survive and he does. Then there is fact that not all gnolls have an int of 6, just like all humans dont' have an int of 10.

The intelligence and other attributes is for a normal gnoll, not the more elite, but the ones that make up a majority of community. They who learn from the smarter ones. Such as the shaman, and warlord. Who are in many ways mimicking the smart ones, and following the smarter ones orders.

If not even Homo sapiens would of long been wiped out, as by your standards anything with an int of 6 doesn't know shit, and can't make tactical choices, or formulate plans
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Wolf#content

intellegence of four, 2 lower then Gnolls, are not even feral, but animals. Yet they form tactics, they learn by doing have no opposable thumbs, or fingers unlike gnolls. Yet many of their tactics are used by hunters, and have been used by hunters since the dawn of man.

Much I could add, but will wait.

Well, he just proved you wrong on the actual int score of gnoll. So now you can say all you want that int score doesn't matter, but that means that your first argument was wrong in the first place. Then why would this new argument be any more accurate?

Please don't attack me for quoting you. I don't necessarily disagree with you that a creature with int of 6 should be able to use an acid arrow, but claiming you "never mentioned anything about...acid arrow" is disingenuous.

And true, you didn't explicitly mention AC, but others in this post have. The enemy AI prioritizing our squishies, often completely ignoring the fighter with the sword in front of their face, is very relevant to this topic on battles. On the one hand, it is interesting to fight against a smart enemy. On the other, we want our fighter/tank to be able to pull aggro and do their job protecting our mages. I was suggesting a balance, where some encounters are against enemies that allow our fighter to shine, while others are against smarter enemies that are more difficult.


Somewhat fair point. Gnoll Pack Lords have ints of 8 and gnoll fang of yeenoghus have ints of 10. Plus there is spread for individuals. But most gnolls DO have intelligence under 10 whereas most (or the average) humans have intelligences of 10 in this world.

Now, you also have a lot of points about using Intelligence vs Wisdom to determine tactics and how smart the enemy is in combat, which are good points. There is a lot of overlap between those 2 stats and this discussion can apply generally, and not just to gnolls. So sure, I'd be fine if the average of wisdom and intelligence determined how smart the enemy AI was. I just want the game to be in a state where not every single enemy knows exactly which of my party members has the lowest AC and focuses entirely on them.

As for the attack it wasn't really, it was me being my mix of sarcasm, and odd humor. Much like someone rubbing their hands together irl, in anticipation of percieved bout for whatever reason. I try to rein it in, but sadly as you can tell I fail at times. Case in point telling my kids i'll kick the white out of them. 'despite what others may think I wouldn't kick them, let alone try to kick the white out of them. One it's impossible to kick the color out of anything. Then there is the one that went horribly wrong, but truelly epic. I told my then five year old "if you feel froggy, just jump' she responded by ribbiting and hoping around the entire house. So you see it's my nature to say things like this, and in your place I'd of put. 'Stop being an ass, Clavis.' then moved on as you did. Now then lets put on the gloves. (j/k should prolly add this to most of what I say, and text, and everything else, just a bother.)

I honestly didn't read through the whole thing and was only commenting about their ability to use arrows, bows, and have basic tactics. Nothing else. True about the ignoring things, I to would like to be able to be able to pull aggro. yet currently do to level cap there is not many ways to do so. Shield expert is one, also sentinel?? I think it's called is a feat that allows you to stop enemy movement if you hit them. Unsure if it's in EA or not, I find that some of the feats should be subclass features (there are some subclasses that do, just not the ones in EA. I believe not 100% sure) at times it sucks to have to build your fighter around such things, but it's part of D&D and 5e.

Next point I actually agree with... your making it hard for me to be a dick btw with your logic!! This usually is up to the DM and I"ve had a couple that would always go for my parties squishies. Though in the game, it is a valid tactic to go for them rather then your heavily armored person. It's honestly what I would do, from standard that it's going to be harder to take down shiny man, versus soft man.

correction shield expert is wierdly worded to me for some reason. It implies disadvantage if your near an enemy who attacks an ally? or is it if your near an ally enemies get disadvantage if they attack they ally. My brain isn't wrapping around that one again.

Your poor kids! o.O Don't kick them!!!


I don't think sentinel is in EA yet. There's a Xanathar's Guide to Everything fighter subclass called Cavalier, and their 10th level ability is basically the Sentinel feat. I'm skeptical that they'll put it in the game though, as they'd also have to deal with horses and mounted combat


Muahahahaha


Are you referring to the Protection Fighting Style that fighters get, or the Shield Master feat? If the former, then you protect an ally who is within 5 feet of you, imposing disadvantage on an enemy attacking them (putting your shield in harm's way)

Agreed with OP, big battles are boring work, just like DOS.

A single player game is bad if I'm on Twitter waiting for my turn.

Fortunately the rest of them game is good, if flawed.

sorry my quotesse is complete garbage.

Well you know old war injury, causes my leg to shoot out for no reason at all. Bloody wars and all that. besides spanking them is frowned upon, or so I've been told.

Yeah, I've not tried a Cavalier in any campaign, ones we've been doing are either warehouse, sewer or other hard to get to places. Which also rules out my playing centuar.... so their goes the idea of centuar ranger, with halfling archer on her back... I almost cried, but realized I lost my feeling again, blasted thing keeps running off.

Yeah the one you mentioned is it. I myself prefer the okay it's OP combo of tunnel fighter, polearm master, and sentinel. to keep my squishy companions safe from harm. Especially in tight places.

POOR KIDS!!! did you not read what my youngest did to me!! made a mockery of me, and there were witnesses as well. Luckily they knew I had to drive them to the hospital to get their ribs looked at so they refrained from mentioning it.

Anyway back to OP. Currently I think again not sure if I posted this in this one about Large battles or the other one...ones? Alot of my issue with large battles from non cheese. See my thread about battle with Guts. if you don't wanna look shoot me a pm and I'll put it up. for now also playing. Is the scripting really which slows things down immensely one person do to something in their script causes them to just stand there master debating, before most times simply repeating what they did previously. Which can make it a pain, and time consuming books are forums are a good thing at that point. or a nap.. was it this OP that decided they needed a cat nap? Then there is just the sheer amount of aoe, and actions they can preform.

On the other hand, the relevant question isn't whether a gnoll could make use of an acid arrow, the question is where would he obtain it? Unless we are positing that they order them through Acme-Coyote Mercantile, they have to obtain the acid, manufacture the glass container that contains said acid, as well as some means by which to attach said glass container to an arrow in a manner that doesn't interfere with firing the arrow. Not sure that gnoll society has actually provided for the development of these crafting skills and techniques. While there may be a shaman here or there that has learned how to work with acid and glass - they would be in short supply, as would such arrows. While they might trade with more advanced societies such as goblins or orcs, again they would only have limited amounts of such arrows - not enough to arm every gnoll, dick and harry archer with them. I think the use of such things needs to be toned down in certain situations - a bunch of drow would have all they need, as would a group of bandits, a small pack of gnolls should have maybe one arrow they looted from an earlier victim, but not an armory.

There is relevant data in the goblin camp that covers this. For those not caring for spoilers I'll mark it as such.

There should simply be a way to speed up the AI and have them take their turns faster. If we cannot interrupt them (which we currently cannot) then there's no reason not to allow a speed up option. As it is, the camera in large areas, makes it impossible to even know what just happened since the camera won't follow the attack, necessitating the combat log which is just annoying on top of it all.

+1 Speed up AI aspect of combat.

This is basically why I've stopped playing, I really just can't face doing the Goblin camp again. Big complex battles are fun from time to time. When every time I sit down to play I do about two encounters it's gone a bit far.

Edit: Also entirely agree about speeding up the AI. Also from a DM perspective, secretly rigging initiative to favour the player speeds combat up a lot.

a good part of it as I mentioned somewhere is scripting going into a panic. Which causes enemies to simply stand there for a little while. Watch the meter at the top to see what I mean. When it is working properly it's not nearly as bad. though it can get really bad 12 enemies and 4 of them standing there for minutes at a time.... it was horrible. need to go see my therapist again do to it.

The worst part of these mega-encounters is when enemies who are further away/ have a poor chance of hitting you just hang back and "plot their move" without actually doing anything at all. I mean, it makes combat easier (so I'm not complaining about that) but it also makes it fairly tedious. As somebody was saying, 2-3 encounters is about all I can manage in one sitting.

thats what I was talking about.

A lot depends on how you see their culture. Do they trade? Do they have organization in terms of gathering OR manufacturing OR bartering/bribing for equipment.

There is an awesome guild to gnolls as seen "through the eyes" of the DnD franchises here:

http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com/2017/12/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-gnolls.html

Depending on the source/timeperiod, there is some thought that gnolls intelligence (average) is around 8; which (again, depending on how you compare) might be comperable to an IQ in the 80s. There is a really interesting discussion of behaviors and descriptions of abilities and activities related via intelligence.

The link is here:

https://paulcooijmans.com/intelligence/iq_ranges.html

But the relavant discussion of an IQ in the 80s is as follows:

"80-89 — Below average

Above the threshold for normal independent functioning. Can perform explicit routinized hands-on tasks without supervision as long as there are no moments of choice and it is always clear what has to be done. Assembler, food service.

This is also the I.Q. range most associated with violence. Most violent crime is committed by males from this range. This does not imply that all males in this range are violent, nor that all violent males are in this range. But when the modal I.Q. of a group is in this range, one may expect trouble with with many male members of that group. When the modal I.Q. of a society or population is raised upward of this range, violence decreases as fewer males fall in this range then, given the shape of an even remotely normal distribution. When the modal I.Q. of a society is below this range to begin with though, raising it may increase violence. The causal mechanism behind the (statistical) relation between crime and below-average I.Q. is likely that lower I.Q. levels inherently tend to go with having less impulse control, being less able to delay gratification, being less able to comprehend moral principles like the Golden Rule, and being overstrained by the cognitive demands of society.

And, this is the range into which men of average or just above average intelligence sink when under the influence of alcohol; alcohol reduces I.Q. by up to about 25 points while drunk (own data), which explains why many drunk men are violent and aggressive (own hypothesis)."

As there are known to be exceptional specimens of Gnoll-hood (Flinds are depicted as having an average intelligence of 13) I think there is plenty of range, and potential support for the idea that they could do some crafting/trading and so on.



In another thread I head that Larian warned people playing in multiplayer NOT to skip quickly through dialogue as it made the game more likely to be glitchy (I'm severely paraphrasing). I would worry that the same might apply to combat. I'd rather go a little slow than crash.



This comment kind of squinked me out because it reminds me of how a bully would think "I don't want THEM to be able to hurt ME"; and hopefully that's not how it was meant; but hey, there is a reason that the University of Minnesota used RPGs (D&D specifically) as part of personality testing.

Anyone tried the multiplayer version ?

When splitting the team in 2 (each player control 2 characters), the combat flow become faster when their turn are right after the other.
That's because each player can do their action at the same time.

Applying this to ennemies seems like a possible step to a solution.
Simultaneous movement by having them split in 2 groups.Each one led by 1 "virtual player"

TBH I think whenever the AI gets fixed/better this would not be a problem so much anymore. When you are bored by what happens to the battleground you are currently in as long as you cannot do anything this game may just not be for you. Also I would recommend never to try the tabletop, as that takes way more time. Sometimes even an encounter vs just one powerful enemy can take an hour.

I agree. When the ridiculous amount of time the AI plans its next move and sometimes does literally nothing is fixed, big battles will be as good as small encounters.

Honestly I read the pupito quote like this "I want to be OP, not challenged or have to think. I want the unoriginal boring troped out of this realm enemy, so I can just waltz through the game." or maybe it's because I'm an ass, but I would not play any game, that involved walk cast, walk cast. Okay I did but even Skyrim made you think at times. Thats what 5e is about and what some are missing. Your spose to think, plot, plan, strategize think of new ways.

the rest of you post I enjoyed, glad you looked that stuff up, my google is often times like my quotefu utter trash.