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

These combats ARE SLOW, even for a turn based game...

This is because Larian focus on "epic" fight and not on immersive fights inside the story.
This game looks like XCOM in which the focus is combats but with a story, a few quests and a little bit of exploration...
Definitely not like a Baldur's Gate with TB combats or even a Wasteland 2 (which is exactly what BG3 should looks like talking about combats flow).

The flow of combats is bad and boring because nearly every encounter is designed to be an extraordinarily special moment...
One time you have reinforcement, one time you have OP creatures, you have tons of spellcasters, tons of surfaces effects, verticality everywhere, creatures have more HP than needed,...

They totally forgot to design "trash" combats and this is exactly why nothing looks like an epic combat and why everything is so slow.

I can think of two additional ideas, first: do not have trash mob fights in the game. I don't get why they exist in RTwP games, but in turn base games they are extra annoying. DOS:1 and DOS:2, or other games like XCOM, do not have this problem, because every fight is pretty much unique, regarding the setup, the enemies, and special mechanics like timers and such. Fighting 5 groups of 4 to 6 goblins in a cathedral ruin is getting old fast. Then there are some setups that are probably just not polished, because: EA. For example the Redcaps in the Swamp started out two kilometers away from me. I was skipping rounds and picking them off one after another with ranged attacks.

And, secondly, let me configure and activate AI for my party, if there have to be random mobs and easy encounters. The game could play itself while I drink coffee and watch youtube.

The problem with these threads is that it is basically impossible for them to actually do it with their current engine. You are, in essence, asking them to make a completely new game. It's not useful feedback at all.

Useful feedback would be in the vein of-lower enemy health, remove combatants and increase rewards to compensate, speed up enemy thought and, if necessary, simplify enemy behaviors to do this, etc.

But the RTWP threads have never really had a chance of getting the game to change-it's just not plausible.

Am I the only one that enjoys the long fights?

Any battle in BG3 that involves using lots of oil barrels and fire effects as the standard way to get through it (even if one could use some other more sophisticated approach to win it) is a battle that Larian should take a cold, hard second look at. I will never use the oil barrels cheese, and as such if not doing it that way results in a battle that drags on for many rounds I would get very aggravated with it.

I'm fine with them, but a quicker thinking AI (I'm confident that will be in game by release) and a sped up speed toggle is appreciated.

I’m not that worried about battle length as long as they make sense in how it’s disrupted. Like at the goblin town and any divinity game, provoking a fight might cause the whole city to be against you. That a little bit silly.

The battle pace is somehow better than DOS2, where you are more under a strength contest rushing to overwhelm your foes with stunlock before they stunlock you. Maybe that fast forward option that many strategy games have will be enough?

What knowledge do you have of their engine that makes you say it's basically impossible?

Pillars of eternity was RTwP and they added TB cause the community asked for it.
In the case of Pathfinder: Kingmaker it was the exact opposite I think but not sure about it. They have both in the end.
Baldur's Gate I & II was RTwP.... by accident. Mostly due to budget issues. They did the game on an RTS engine.

Ultimately yes, BG3 could have both to appeal to it's public. It's not a question of who's right cause you're both right. It's a question of does Larian wants to invest in it and it seems their CEO is against it so...there's that.

After me, it's a question of how many people play this game solo VS how many people play it in MP. Cause TB is way better for MP after me. If a high % of players play solo then why not try to think about them and add RTwP for them. If it happens it will be a post-release feature anyway since it's a huge element that wasn't on their initial roadmap. But....we'll see.

KingTigi,

what's up to you is to assume I won't be satisfied cause I can't deal with it (turn-based gameplay)".
No really matter if I consider myself as a part of the "RTwP crowd".
The point is this statement seems a little rude from my point of view.

By the way, no one ever explained me what is fun in the long fight !

I don't get what you try to explain about the wizard shattering half the ennemies in one round... Really don't understand it. :-/

TimVanBeek
You said "And, secondly, let me configure and activate AI for my party, if there have to be random mobs and easy encounters. The game could play itself while I drink coffee and watch youtube."
I found it funny cause this is exactly the problem for me playing BG3, somes fights are so broing you would like to just drink coffee waiting for your computer to deal with it. It's as funny as sad because a game shouldn't give the gamer this kind of desire.
It's, from my point of view, the perfect unvoluntary evidence that the actual gameplay failed. ^^
(But I find your proposal interesting anyway !)

Eddiar, so can you tell me what there is to enjoy in the long and meaningless fights (not talking about the challenging fights, just the trashy one) ?

Kanishata, this is one of the thing who disturbed me after hearing Larian talked about the "way more strategic aspect of turn-based". In fact, sometimes the fights looks like a "rush to the hills" to the point it's more like a puzzle-game than an actual "strategy-game".
I mean if there is one or two strong strategy... this is no more strategy, this is pattern.
That and the barrels. Barrels are dumb.
I never used it during my first game (well... once to be honest, against the minotaur) but today I began a new game, I decided to fight the goblins at the mill. After having reload 3 or 4 times I just put 3 barrels of oil and made them explode. I didn't feel like Zhuge Liang nor I did feel like Lu Bu. I just feel like a sneaky gamer. Not a hero of an amazing adventure, more like a pathetic gamer using the imbalanced system of the game. Still I choose to feel pathetic than reloading for the xx times my saves. Not because I thougth I couldn't win this fight without barrels. Just because failing a fight take soooo long.

By the way, talking about how slow the game feels. I think everything is slow. Selecting skills si slow, transferring stuff is slow. Half of the time I have to re-click cause the first click was to fast for the game... i guess it participates to give this really bad feeling of slowness...

Virion
you are so right. Thx you for your clear explanation.
We should have the choice between the two options.

Zefhyr I have to agree with the fact the game currently is basically slow AF. t's slow for the wrong reasons I have to say. But it should be slow for the correct reasons. See the below.

The thing about slow fights is it's one way to add some weight and importance to them. It's a silly way gotta say, but it's one way. If I fight against two minotaurs and I execute them AND no one dies than I feel it was too easy.
Same for goblins: There's 18 of them outside, they all take their turn and they will hit you sooner or later. If you approach the fight right you will survive, if you just rush in you will die.

I ignore AI performance issues and how much time they take to make their actions etc. -> This should be fixed. I feel you are right about animations and enemies taking too much time to perform their actions.


But if I end a fight with nearly 20 enemies in less than at least 10 minutes then I won't feel the fight was an important one. I won't understand why the druids wanted to bunker themselves using a powerful ancient spell.

If on release Larian will make a hardmode with x2 HP for all enemies then I will be playing it. To force me to use the spells. To force me to struggle. Maybe to force me to use barrels cause currently I ignored their existence and blew up the druid grove before ending my adventure. If you don't struggle than there's no reward in building your character to become an OP badass after me ^^.

Archers already make most of the encounters too easy. LV2 Spells are just so OP in the current version I use max 1 per encounter otherwise i will just shread to pieces everything(the AOE from a cleric with up to 20 dmg in aoe, 3d6 AOE x3 as lv 2 spell).

In conclusion:
The fights need improvements. They need to feel smoother, cleaner and the situation need to change WAY faster. But the end length of fights should stay at the current length after me for those who want to enjoy them. For those who want to take a lot of time to kill everyone despite dealing up to 12 DMG per hit without spells.

Battles are not too long at all. They feel very fun and almost lightning fast. You either Hit or Miss.

Yes exactly. And for me none of those options (using cheese strategies and tactics versus reloading again and again versus painfully wading through many rounds of combat) is acceptable. They are all extremely aggravating. That's why I have essentially given up on the combat in this game being any fun for me, and am focused only on whether the non-combat parts of the game are good enough to make the game worth my time. Or to put it another way, can playing the game in some form of 'story mode' be good enough for me?

This seems like a polarizing topic - gonna try to take the middle road. The BATTLES themselves are not too long, but the AI's decision-making logic and animations really take a LONG time. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this might be a performance issue and some players might experience quick, snappy gameplay while others have to wait through NPC turns that take as long as (or longer than) PC turns, strangely resembling the worst parts of pen and paper DnD.

The AI spends so much time stalling and idling on turns, sometimes just to do absolutely nothing or a completely pointless move. I don't think the AI has been upgraded by Larian or fixed, like they did later with DOS 2 "Dangerous AI."

I love large-scale battles and lots of enemies, instead of even numbers, but the time the AI takes to think or their turns is ridiculous.

Speeding up the AI would be great. Dnd is all about the dice rolls, hit and miss. Even with 80+% chance to hit I miss alot . Every miss means a longer fight

They broke the game because they artificially increased the %hit.
They decrease the AC so you hit more often, but they increase the HP so you have to hit more to kill.

This also completely break the combats and their flow (especially for spellcaster).

There are several tutorials, I encourage you to research it yourself rather than relying on my paraphrase. But, in essence, the entire game occurs during turns, which are defined by second intervals outside of combat. Because the AI is, from the ground up, built around these turns. I looked it up and apparently some modders have managed to get the engine to allow real time combat, so I wasn't as informed as I wanted. However my impression of watching this is that the combat only works with basically auto-attacking when the engine is pushed like this and it's extremely glitchy-basically, targeting falls apart, particularly targeting of anything more complicated than the basic weapons.

It is promising that the AI was upgraded in another game. It is too idiotic here. If the enemy is to do nothing on their turn then it should quickly change to the player's turn. If they actually moved tactically then large battles for me would be more interesting, not tab out and do other things online, or do house chores while waiting for my turn. Sometimes I forget I am waiting for my turn since whatever rl thing I am doing becomes more interesting than this snooze combat.

Most of what I see here is to make battles faster by speeding up AI turns or balance of the game rather than making it realtime