Its no longer turn based because if those things manage to get into combat... its a wipe and reload. So you HAVE to kill them first, BEFORE COMBAT STARTS. I wouldn't need to ask for a pause to aim if this was handled differently. But I've listed several issues where pausing is required to overcome existing game mechanics.
I'm certainly not asking what you described. I'm asking for consistency. If the game is turn based, then let me have a turn before you kill me.
This is an encounter that you feel is excessively challenging. Your solution is cheap when you consider the spirit of how the combat is designed. You're exploiting non-combat mode to get a free shot at the enemy even though the combat is explicitly designed to give you a turn depending on initiative.
I've done the same thing in both Divinity: Original Sin and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. In both cases, I'm telling you this isn't fun.
In both games, there are other problems with the transition to combat mode. You have to guess the enemy field of view and try to sneak up on the enemies without entering combat. Another thread has also complained about the problem of trying to position your party tactically for combat.
These things are easier to do with pause -- eg XCOM, which is fully turn-based. The best strategy in XCOM is to provoke enemies with the first movement of your turn so that you can take a shot at them with your whole squad before they can react.
XCOM explicitly had to design the game to nerf this game-breaking tactic. They gave the aliens a free move when provoked, in order to give the aliens a chance to protect themselves so they aren't immediately wiped out by your squad. But the tactic still existed and it was still pretty cheap.
I am 100% sure that adding the pause mode -- as you're asking for it -- would only make this worse. It would turn a cheap (but fiddly) tactic into the game-breaking tactic it would have been in XCOM if the aliens weren't given a free move. The well-designed turn-based combat would become irrelevant because anyone with common sense will just be exploiting the unbalanced non-combat mode.
The solution being explored in XCOM 2 is to explicitly design a transition (ambush) phase that allows for a smooth and balanced transition into combat. I'm not sure how to design this in the context of D:OS2. This would require more thought.
