Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Large battles are nothing but a chore

I know this has been said before but id say this is the single biggest issue with the ea right now so it's worth repeating. Big battles of 10+ enemies consist of nothing but tabbing out between your turns, using an ability and then tabbing out again.

Sadly I dont think this is an issue that will be fixed by making the enemies turns faster. Rather, since the game is designed around smaller fights and works very well with them, that is the only type of fight the game should give you.

I had that yesterday when I went to see if the guys at the goblin camp were still my friends after an earlier altercation. They weren't. With something like 20 participants the rounds were extremely time-consuming, and though I made good progress, after nearly half an hour, a couple of rounds of all my characters missing (as 75% or less seems to be pretty much "guaranteed miss") saw a rather annoying end to it. My approach in other games would've been to draw small groups away and deal with them that way, but it seems either impossible or impractical to do that with BG3. But not being from a D&D background I have no idea if that's intentional.

thats what the barrels are for!
Huge encounter in one attack

Beaut

I like the big fights too ...chance to test your metal & work out strategies to deal with large scale enemy combat situations..
Not every thing has to be a Diablo game

Yes, they are.
Then again they are optional content and frankly the AI hanging up to "think" is a big part of what is slowing the pace down, but that's an improvement/optimization that will necessarily come way late in production.

The AI thinks too much. And sometimes it thinks only to deliver a line and do nothing. I think they know by now it's buggy and needs to be addressed.

Yeah, that seems to be the main problem.

Looking at it as a programmer it seems like the AI routine is caught in a loop that couldn't find a solution and after the n-th try they simply return from the AI routine with doing nothing. Larian will surely fix this in some way but I am glad they at least have a break condition otherwise the game would crash in every such a loop.

Ironically, simplifying the combats to more closely follow the rules of 5e would (presumably) greatly speed up combat for the AI. Rather than having to cycle through multiple possible uses of their Action/BA (Shove, random scroll in their inventory, grenades, some special homebrew attack, etc.) the overwhelming majority of 'large fights' would involve low CR creatures that just have 1 or 2 possible Actions to choose from (usually 1 melee attack or 1 ranged attack). One of the beautiful aspects of the 5e system is how much each little part (monster abilities, player abilities, etc.) combine together to create something amazing. The whole is greater than the parts, etc.

Just go look at a 'large' fights in the BG 1 and BG 2 series. RTwP vs Turn-based aside, the overwhelming majority of large fights involved very simple enemies. It gives the player a chance to show off and feel character growth when 20 enemies burst through a door, only to have the formerly frail Wizard launch a Fireball in their faces and abruptly end combat. That sense of character growth and moments to reflect on how much stronger you are now than you used to be is lost in BG 3 right now. Not every fight has to be unique with new spells or abilities. Sometimes enemies are just there because it makes RP sense for them to be there, not just to show off some flashy new gimmick.

I think your are right about that one but another big AI issue is pathfinding and you would have that either way. They won't reduce verticality of the game which adds a huge amount of possibilities in terms of pathfinding but maybe reducing the amount of surfaces in the game might speed up the process.

Consecutive enemy turns should be all merged into 1 turn. There fixed!

Absolutely correct. One major recommendation I've provided is to please, please tighten up the underlying grid in the game.

Or rather, loosen it up. As is, the underlying game grid is hyper small, meaning there are tons of points of data. Just que up a Burning hands and see how janky it looks. Then go boot up PKM, Wasteland 3, etc. and see how much better the games play when there is a more discernable grid system. Even if Larian doesn't want to display the actual grid lines, the grid squares should be 5ft by 5ft, not like 1 inch by 1 inch.

You would only gain something from that if the calculations they make are the same for each enemy in the same turn. Once they are individual for each character you gain nothing because they would still have to do it. And on top of that you would add further complexity because the AI has to decide in which order to move the enemies or maybe even to move one enemy then another then spend an action with the first enemy and so on.

What drags these large scale fights it the AI sometimes taking ages for the turn (there could also be an option to speed up animations, btw). Having no larger scale battle/s whatsoever would take some of the epicness, in particular if some of the more epic battle tunes are playing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMXiYs-wi3A

Spoiler, you can also save during a fight.

+5 to this, not every enemy needs some new homebrew ability, special arrows, grenades, triple attacks, etc. Making the enemies closer to their actual 5e counterparts with only 1 or 2 actions/bonus actions available to them would be fine, and I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do that without even making the enemies feel weaker. For instance, the gnolls. Currently in the game, gnolls have some stupidly insane triple attack action (I'm sure everyone has seen my hate rants for them by now lol), and the higher CR variants of them have even more abilities it seems. Simply moving them closer to their 5e stats would make it less taxing on the AI because they would have 3 attacks to choose from: melee weapon, ranged weapon, or bite. Replace the ability to move and bite attack if you drop a creature to 0 hp with a simple bonus attack bite so they can make 2 attacks a turn (action and bonus action bite), remove the triple attack, and remove some of the random homebrew abilities and special arrows they all seem to have.

Fights don't need to have a million different things going on and contain tons of new abilities and flashy explosions to be exciting and fun. Just let me fireball some goblins and have a feeling of being stronger than them without having to worry that 3 of them are gonna shoot acid arrows or start casting cleric spells out of nowhere. If every enemy encounter in the game has some kind of caster, every archer has special arrows, and every other enemy has a grenade of some kind, it feels less fun and just gets bogged down.

The reason goblins and gnolls are low level early game enemies is because they're supposed to be relatively easy to fight enemies that aren't terribly OP compared to a new party, and are a good way to get used to combat. If introducing low level enemies with triple attacks is supposed to be getting me used to the way combat works in this game, I'm quitting now before I discover a Lich who can make 5 attacks per turn or some crazy BS.

I don't think the expanded ability list is slowing down combat, at least in the Goblin camp.

There you just wait for the AI to figure out a way to get you for ages (particularly if you have the high ground) and then make basic attacks. That is slow regardless if you revert to basic 5e rules.

Optimizing the AI decision making will speed up the game significantly and I think that is really the only solution here.

How that is done is up to the devs.

"All" may be asking too much, but it wouldn't be half bad to have units of the same type that are queuing closely in terms of initiative acting concurrently in their turn. At least in terms of visualization, even if their actions are still calculated one at the time in terms of AI.

Pupito's last sentence actually raises another fantastic point.

If every fight and every enemy is 'special', then no fights and no enemies are special. Each time you add something new to a monster that isn't in the rules, you have to be aware that you're taking something else away. If every enemy is throwing around magical arrows, bombs, and spells in every fight, then the impact of those formerly special events is diminished. That is something DoS 1 and 2 really suffered from, the endless arms race for newer and flashier effects. But again, that's where Larian's job should be so easy, because 5e already accounts for that. Encounter balance is baked into CR calculations for the monsters involved. Yes tweaks will need to be made for going digital, but Larian only needs to make those tweaks when a computer simply isn't capable of understanding the rules.

Please, please, trust in the rules of 5e Larian.

Good point, that was one of the things about DOS2 that got really old really fast. First time someone shot a special arrow at me I was amazed, thinking that it was awesome and I couldn't wait to get my hands on some of those. Then after about an hour or so, every single enemy with a bow was firing special arrows at me or tossing grenades of some kind and I had an entire armory of the things in my inventory. Suddenly the "special" arrows didn't feel so special anymore.

If just about every combat encounter in the game has a special arrow, throwable, scroll, or even surface effect, they stop being special. Suddenly that cool acid arrow is just acid arrow #50 to toss into my bag, that awesome mechanic where blood freezes and the ground catches fire is just another room full of fire pits and lakes of frozen blood that happens every single time I have a fight.