Excerpts : (...)
Group movement: So I know combat is ahead, but my comrades keep following me when I try to setup a good position. I can not block a certain position with my melee fighters, because my mage trails in behind totally not in cover. I can only clunkily remove one, or select sneak individually to move them one by one. This system is cumbersome, unintuitive and hurtful in combat. You can also initiate combat by yourself beforehand and to setup, but this is also just explained as a sidenote and not shown as a tactical tool.
A perfect example of everything is a fight in the ruins that starts as soon as you unlock a door. So my main is a rogue, he opens the gate. My melee fighters are behind him and behind them is my mage. The enemies are mostly ranged. My rogue starts, unsneaked so I figure, best get a shot off and let them come to me. It only occured to me tonight before sleep that I could have lighted the candles left and right of the door, lighted my arrow and hit the oil barrel in the middle of the room, the stuff just never lighted up and I was never told. Next in line are three ranged dudes of them, they approach get in range to hit my mage and let loose, that is three arrows hit and the mage goes down. So reload and try to get my group into position, but I can not really, because of the movement system. So I do the best I can, start the fight in sneak, and manage to kill one guy right away. My plan is to cast a fog so I can move up my melee fighters, however initiative makes it so that I should have done that last turn, so my fighters can move up this turn, so it is delayed. Meanwhile one enemy just throws an oil barrel into the doorway and all bets are off again and the plan fails, as anyone moving through fire or acid will take a lot of damage. So I sit there until the fire is out and otherwise can only pop out and shoot arrows. Once it is out, I move, but the ash is hindering my movement, never knew that, so my fighters take a beating while not approaching as far as possible. My mage misses his fire bolt and the sleeping enemy is out of my shortbow range. The fight was not particularly hard, but it was long and not particularly fun, because my options were limited and I limited myself, because the endless possibilities were not known to me.
Responding to the group movement issue (which is tedious and hampers my fun) :
- Enter turn-based mode (before combat) : this is the most precise way of getting ready / in position.
- Other method : drag portraits out of the "chain", so they each do not auto-follow. When portraits (bottom left) are side by side, they follow. When there is a space between them, they do separate paths. This is NOT at all obvious and I would never have known had I not learnt it in DOS1.
Your point about no information or no way of learning the basics is quite true. I presume they will work on that during the year. Larian's early version is developing the core systems, so the helpful tips are not really there yet.
