I think a bit of randomness spices thing up which of course contradicts the article...
Not at all. Virtue #4 above only says that if there is randomness involved, the player should get the strategic tools to overcome bad luck. A bit of randomness is good and spices things up, as you said.
(..) Am I right in thinking it goes in order of initiative and each character uses all their action points and then it goes to the next character?
Yes. The initiative for the first round is also dependent on whether it was a surprise attack, or not, so if you initiate combat without the opponent(s) seeing you, you go first (and vise versa).
Is it possible to "
wait"? In King's Bounty you could wait once per round for other units to make their move first. After every unit had a chance to spend action points, the units that waited would resume control until all waiting characters had their turn in reversed order.
Example 1: Character with highest initiative moves first, decides to wait. He will be the last one this round to spend any remaining action points.
Example 2: Character with lowest initiative moves last, decides to wait, but will have to move now.
This works really well. A ranger for example, could fire a cheap shot at his target, wait for others to take their turn, and after that move somewhere else with his remaining action points.
