Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Stealth combat engagement

Hello !
Like many of you, I am preparing to the release. I want to play an assassin build on release so I try to figure out the best way to enter a combat from stealth.
At the moment my conclusion after experimentations on EA is that it is disadvantageous to start a combat sneaking, I was wondering what I was missing.
If you sneak all party member and decide to engage one by one in combat :
-The one whom engage the combat will receive all enemies attack until its turn (Why do the enemies not have a surprised round by the way ? the game the enemies are "surprised" ) which can be very bad if you have a bad initiative
-When the combat is waiting for your character to play its turn and you decide to make your other character enter combat by attacking or not they will not take part of this turn of combat (so you can't double attack at level 5 on engagement for example).

Am I missing something ? Because from what I understand an assassin has to engage with a surprise attack but it seems to be more a disadvantage at the moment ?

Thanks for your help

If you attack enemies with your assassin before combat starts, it counts as surprise. In EA the enemies first round is lost and the word surprised floats over their head. That clears their surprise though. So if you want your other characters to benefit from surprise, you need them to join as soon as the combat starts.

I suggest taking some time to practice with the turn based toggle before leading into combat. If you do it right you can get your attacks off quickly.

Thanks for your answer
But I tried to switch to turn based before the combat on and it doesn't seem to change anything

Are you not seeing the surprised text?

A good way to see if this is working is the very first fight with the imps. If you sneak up and fire on them, you should see them getting surprised for the first round. It is weird how the turn based setting only works on your characters and not the NPCs though, I've always found that annoying.