I am going to go out on a limb and assume unfamiliarity with the mechanics made things harder for you than they should have been.
Undoubtedly. At the time, though, it didn't seem worth the effort to check for options that could help. Nothing in particular about the other gameplay elements at the start of the demo was that appealing, so I didn't give the combat another shot.
For the fight in question, entering a largish area I sent 2 party member off to the right to fight a few bats, and the rest started left for another weak-ish opponent or two, when a bear came in from the front, so 2 (maybe just 1) of the left group went straight and had a tough time until the 1 (possibly 2) on the left was done and could join in attacking the bear. When that hectic fight (even with pause) was done, I realized I hadn't checked on the two that went right for awhile, and (wondering if they were still alive) found them standing around doing nothing, with barely any damage. Obviously it was my fault for not paying attention to everyone, or checking if there were any notifications or automatic settings for when a character was done doing what he was told to do, but at the time, even if there were such settings it seemed like there would still be too much babysitting required.
Shame on you for not playing BG 2. How can you call yourself a true RPG fan without having played BG 2?
There is one simple way to make the game less "hectic": just enable the auto-pausing option in the setting when you spot enemies. Then you can sort the whole thing without the need of giving fast orders and take your time for considering a strategy. And after that just leave one finger constantly over the pause button to be able to interrupt the gameplay in the second something happens which requires your micromanagement skills (low health, death, spell casted, change of position, new enemy spotted, change of weapons,.....)
It is faster than a turn-based game, no question, but you will get used to it and you really have to use the pause funcion VERY often, especially in high difficulty. But when you get arranged to that the game offers a much more fluid and immersive gameplay than most of the turn-based games which suffer from a "too mechanical" and slowed-down gameplay, especially if they use melee tactics (it's not that prominent in games which are based on ranged combat like XCOM).
So I will see how D:OS turns out. I think that it will be a great game, but I haven't seen that much of the actual combat systems and the balancing (since these kind of things are not really finished in pre-alpha). So lets see if it can come even close to my all-time favorite combat system of BG 2 (or Icewind Dale 2 which even improved on that a bit)....
Sidenote: one of the benefits of BG 2 was the adjustable AI settings of your characters/party members. You can for example forbid your ranger to automatically attack enemies. Or you can order your healer to always heal party members if their health is below a certain percentage (if the healer has a spell left)....:)
