Hm, but that's just your own type of "definition".
Nah, the underlying mechanism is not "realtime" for sure.
By realtime, it means when I press something, if I'm not in animation of doing another, it starts right away. If I moved out of attacking range while enemy attack starts, I shouldn't be hit. If I saw a long casting spell, I should be able to react and evade or counter. In IE based game you can't do any of these. That's the main reason Diablo got popular in the first place, because it only roll dice when you hit to check for miss/resist/critical, and of course drops.
Yeah, that's your definition of "real-time" but not mine. Diablo got popular because it was very fast-paced and you didn't have to use many tactics or things like that which you have to use in a party based game. Sure, the IE games are no hack'n'slay games but imo not every rea time combat game is a hack'n'slay game. Rolling dice/probability systems and the use of some "time unit" are nothing which can't be used in a real time combat game. But I will come back to that below.
Cool-down ablities and stacking of spells/attacks is not a basic requirement of real time combat games, these elements are only attemps to minimize the micromanagement while pausing.
If you try to stack another spell before all parties in the turn finished, it should either fail or only come out when next turn starts and it's your turn to action.(It's being so long, and I think BG1 should be the former, and BG2 latter.)
And no, cool-down is there for balance and to prevent you stacking, thus increase the requirement for micromanagement to keep you on your toes. If you can stack spell in say Diablo 3, kiting would be so boring you fell asleep for endless click back and forth, and only spam spell key if it runs out. And by realtime, if you stack, it should come out right after your character becomes idle or only moving, which is not the case in IE games.
Don't mix up party based games and games in which you only play with one character (like BG2 and Diablo). It's something completely different to manage a whole party with different skills/classes/types and to fight with only one character. In a party based game stacking of spells/skills is made to reduce micromanagment (to "casulize" it) by reducing the time you need to give your party members new orders each time they performed something. That would be for sure boring as hell in a hack'n'slay game like Diablo, no question. Cool-down can be used for balancing, right, but it's also a system which fits more to the wishes of the "new generation" of players who are not used to resting systems (like in BG2) which has its own problems.
And what's the point of your first sentence? Sure the actions of a stacked order will performed one after the other and not simultanously but that's not the point or at least I don't know where I had neglected that....
In real time party games you could choose yourself which of your characters you want to give which order in the sequence you like. And in the end everyone will perform the orders simultanously and not "turn-by-turn".
Which IE games do none of these, it buffers the order, and only perform it when it comes to that character's turn. There is no simultaneous action happen in any given time of IE games, it's a given fact that all actions are based on rolls, except movement with its special condition.
The simultaneous feeling of warrior's strike and wizard spell hitting almost at the same time is an well crafted illusion. (ie. if I gave a stealth theif's attack last, or pause after I saw rolls of first attack, then issue order, it will be rolled faster then my wizard's spell. ) If you also remember that all try and true synchronized attack orders gets interrupted when you encounter fast enemies, it brought you back to the turn-based nature of IE.
And the matter you can auto pause on your turn or each round is further proof that it's more turn-based than you would like to believe.
Well, if the game gives me the illusion that all my team members perform their orders simultanously there is in fact no difference for me to a "real" real time combat system.
You cannot neglect that the feeling of playing BG2 differs from playing a real turn-based game like Fallout or XCOM. If it's just an illusion, fine, I'm fine with that. Games are all about illusions and in the end the feeling and while playing matters the most to me (and not the systems/coding on which the games is based). I know that the IE games are based on the turn-based P&P DnD rules and I also know that they adapted these rules to a certain extend to make the game a RTwP game. Sure, the time units are stil turns/rounds but every game, even a hack'n'slay type of game needs some unit in which ingame time is measures. IMO it doesn't matter if this time units are turns/rounds or real-time seconds, that's just the coding and doesn't have anything to do with my gameplay experience.
But I think that's the difference between us two: you seem to define a game by its underlining systems but I define it by its actual gameplay. But tbh, the IE games are somewhere in the middle between a pure hack'n'slay game (which is not suited for a party based game) and a real turn-based game. So if you want to decide on a combat system for a party-based RPG you have to choose either RTwP (like the IE games) or turn-based (like XCOM). Now you can say "Hey, but both of them are some kind of turn-based system!", but it doesn't simplify it by any means. It's just a different wording of two things which are quite different while playing.
