Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Again, Battles are TOO long

Well, anyone played D&D? You remember these sessions in which 3/4 of the time is spent in one battle? This is actually very accurate with the source material.

"turn animation speed: ultra fast" option would be great to have

That doesn't mean fights should be longer than they could be. There are clearly ways they could speed it up. The speed of a battle should mostly depend on how fast the players make their moves, but right now you often spend more time looking at AI goofing around rather than you actually playing the game.

Also, video games are expected to be a faster paced medium than board games / tabletop RPGs.

Six character party would definitely up the pace in combat (yes, it would - you would be killing faster, thus making up for whatever time you spent managing those extra two people)

I see what you mean, but 6 character party is so much stronger than 4 and you would need more enemies to keep the game challenging so it more or less evens out. 6 characters probably also often mean that there are more cases where one character's impact is smaller. It tends to get a little crowded as it is, and if jump is nerfed you'll get characters stuck in the back for sure.

Of course, if they improve AI speed, maybe adjust pathing and party control, 6 character party could work just fine as well but that's another discussion

And BG3 is already faster than most of the tables I played at, even WITH the AI bugging out. Whenever a fight goes smooth (no time out for the AI), it is fast enough. It's just not RTwP, never will be and that is fine. But the RTwP crowd will complain about slow combat forever, because they can't deal with it.

I don't believe in larger parties to speed up fight. Frankly to massively speed-up fights I often go solo just with my main buffed character (STR 18, CON 18, AC 20). The other party members just cast on him Bless, Armor of Faith, Longstrider and Jump and stay a way out of combat to easily maintain concentration. Being solo means enemies will not spread out to catch other (and much weaker) party members. I am something like fire or hot light bulb for a moths. But this strategy really works only if you have min-maxed you main character.

That's not very hard to achieve, and that also doesn't mean they shouldn't do anything to improve it. Slower combat isn't inherently better or more D&D like. We should look into what aspects slow it down. Planning and strategizing? Carefully executing turns? That's what turn based combat is about. Looking at 10 goblins stand still for 5 seconds, then move a little, one at a time? No one wants that.

I get that some people want to see enemy turns one by one, but the AI just freezing is not good for anything and should be fixed. And if by any means possible, add an option for simultanous AI or a button to fast forward their turns for example, so those who want it can speed things up a bit and spend more time doing their own turns instead. This will be particularly helpful when your attacks are missing to get another opportunity quicker especially if they revert the AC changes like many people want.

Well, but once again, what do you think it should be the take away from all that?
"AI should think and act quicker"? That's as redundant as it gets as far as advices go. It almost calls for the proverbial "No shit, Sherlock".
There's very little doubt that they will obviously make it as fast as can, as soon as they figure out how to achieve that.

Then maybe don't just quote half the post ^^
Obviously no one wants the AI to be slow or buggy in the finished game. Whenever the AI is not slow and buggy the turns are fast enough. Ideally the AI should be doing all their stuff "instantly" like taking 1sec to calculate. This means the code probably needs a little optimization or perhaps another deciding algorithm. A problem I see with concurrent turns is that it makes it harder for an algorithm to decide what to do as it has to weigh more options at the same time (like not locking in on one target that another AI just downed -> so who goes first).

Also I think that you need to revert the unbalancing of the monsters. Right now the action economy advantage can't be achieved as fast as with normal 5e rules.

I don't know about D:OS2 but in D:OS1 the AI does the same thing, although less frequently. They might spend 10s just stuck, not doing anything until they pass the turn. If we weren't bringing it up, they might just think it works well enough and leave it as is

Whereas I agree with this sentiment at least in part, it does not address the issue of NEEDLESS timesinks. For instance the Warlock Hex spell where you choose an ability to curse in a submenu/inventory as a secondary effect that has no or little effect on actual gameplay. Larian should abstract complex abilities/spells more to save time, for instance making Hex either automatically disadvantage ALL ability checks, or simply give a flat modifier penalty (ie -4).

DOS2 got considerably faster across the EA and through subsequent updates.
For DOS1 I can't really say I remember this ever being a problem to begin with.

But of course if you are expecting it to become instantaneous that's NOT going to happen no matter the amount of optimization. Flexible AI is always going to use a certain amount of computational power.

They had issues like this in their previous games in EA but they were all cleared up on release. I'm confident the AI lulls won't be there and yes to an option to speed up combat movement/animation speed, this is a common TB feature.

Aside from the current and occasional, and very likely temporary, AI delays, the battles are fine IMO.

-1

Agree on battles dragging on for too long. It becomes especially boring when all you can do is one attack and then wait, wait, wait. I often found myself alt+tab to read internet while enemies do their turns.
I guaranty it will exhausted a lot of players in long run, in same way as it did with DOS 2, when only few reach the end titles of the game, while most become bored and leave, in hopes to come back some day and finish, which they never do. And all thanks to long, dragging battles.

+1 for allowing enemies to act simultaneously. This could even be an option people could turn on or off, so those that wanted to follow each enemy's turn individually could do that too!

Also, yes, please less NPCs in combats going forward. Aside from the time lost watching NPCs doing things, more friendly NPCs means more enemies to face for a balanced encounter, which means a longer combat. 1 NPC is fine. 3+ NPCs is tedious.

My personal experience is I remember those campaigns dying and ones which actively streamlined combat so that didn't happen lasting.

KingTiki you said "But the RTwP crowd will complain about slow combat forever, because they can't deal with it."
I can't stand it cause it's voluntarily rude and pretentious.

I played lot of turn-based games, not only DOS1 and 2 but also Homm 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6, 7, King's Bounty, Viking's something, etc etc.
So I'm used and I am able to appreciate turn-based game.

Your..... well... I guess I have to call it an "argument" about people who "complain about slow combat forever because they can't deal with it", this argument is just a joke at least, to not say an offense.

So, really I would like that YOU explain me what is fun in a long fight against weak ennemies you know you're going to kill anyway ?
Again, my best exemple. After having killed the leader of the goblins and killed everybody inside the building, I tp outside to end the job.
So I appear close to a ladder, I go up and then begun a reaaly long, stupid, useless and uninteresting combat. And yeah, you know what ? I didn't enjoy it and I didn't appreciate to loose time on a so stupid game-time.

But please, explain me what joy do you find in this kind of encounter ? Explain what joy and fun you have when looking at tons of weaklings coming to the death as slowly as they can ?

Even with optimisation, it will be long and boring. And if I'm wrong, please, explain me how can I enjoy this moment of pure cerebral-death ?

Really I have nothing against turn-based, I can enjoy it with intense and hard fights.
But the fact is, in this game, there are and there will be encounters easy to deal with.
For this encounters, we need more than just "AI optimisation".
RTwP would be, for my point fo view, the obvious and better option (some games did it, it worked) but why not, at least, the all AI moving at the same time, I don't care !

But don't talk like taht, trashing people who disagree with you.

See, I don't agree with you but am I mean ? No ? Did I say something like "the Turn-based crowd willc omplain about fast and real time combat forever, because they can't deal with it."

No, because it's as wrong as disrepectfull.

Well it seems you did not get what I was saying. I said a subset of people here, the "RTwP crowd" I called them, will NEVER be satisfied. If you belong to that subset or not is not up to me.

As for optimization beyond AI, I think it is rather simple. They need to revert the rebalancing they did regarding AC, HP and spell effects. The fight will be pretty fast and easy when you can just shatter half the enemies with 1 turn as a wizard. As it stands now this is pretty hard because of the HP bloat.