Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Fights takes forever!

This Is probably already said somewhere but omg I get into some fights and It takes ages to finish because the NPC enemies are so slow, or something like that.

It's okay with this turnbased. But me I like the way the previous games was alot better. Being able to paus and set up things you want to do that way.

There are a few reasons :

1) There are bugs. The AI takes forever to choose what to do, sometimes the ennemies are frozen or stuck etc... They'll work on that.

2) We don't have enough action/round. 1 more character in our party mean 1 more action + 1 more bonus action (+1 reaction) / round.
Too much time watching instead of playing.

3) There are way too many creatures in some combats. Fighting the goblin camp (inside but especially outside) and/or the druids and tieffelin is a pain.

4) The balance of the game is really bad and every encounters are designed arround this terrible balance.
- Goblins have more HP than they should
- Minotaurs or gnolls have more attack/round than they should leading to the die/help/die/help loop
- If you don't use dipping with a candle you'll loose lots of additionnal damages to kill ennemie's faster (+1D4/weapon + burning damages)
- If you don't use shove/thunderwave you have nothing to easy kill any creatures
- If you don't use...
- ...

Combats can be a bit faster with all cheeses and you can avoid many misses but they become easy and not interresting (using the same "tactics" at every combats whatever your party composition).

5) Ennemies never use dash

6) The concentration mechanic is broken and ennemies have too much surfaces potions, meaning you'll waste lots of turns casting and re-casting the same spells over and over.

7) All combats are designed to be "challenging" and none is designed for you to feel a bit powerfull (i.e trash combats against wolfs in the forest)

8) The ennemy can't deal with verticality, meaning they'll often attack you with disadvantage, wasting their turns (and our time). They should tone down those bonuses so it's not happening "nothing" anymore.

9) Reactions are broken, meaning you'll use hellish rebuke to kill a goblin with 2HP instead of OS another full life one.

I probably forget some reasons.

Cheers for the information. Yeah. I notice alot of things all the time. Sure Is aloot of things that could be alot better with mechanics and also world content etc.

In another turn based D&D crpg from 1988, Pool of Radiance on C64, enemies act instantly on their turn. 33 years later on modern supercomputers, they *snarl* for 5 seconds and do nothing.

Point 7 is a really important one that I think is overlooked by most game designers these days but it overlooks a critical aspect of game design. I made a whole topic just about this a while back. But every one of your points is excellent. It's also succinct enough that it should be easy enough for Larian to address it. I really hope they do.

This is my biggest issue, the 7-10 seconds of doing nothing per enemy turn, you get to your turn, and then use a single action that hits like a wet fart assuming it even lands with a 60-75% hit chance. Unless you play a melee with backstab bonus or a Moonbeam druid so you don't care about the RNG casino miss marathon because Moonbeam is mostly guaranteed damage.

Everything else but backstab melee and moonbeam feels awful, and wizard's magic missile only feels decent with the necklace and you have limited casts of those.

I don't know how anyone can be excited for this awful "bounded accuracy", single action per turn DnD system.

OMG. That made me laugh. I still have Pool of Radiance Myth Drannor somewhere in a box. Yeah. You right. They would act instantly. No pause. No wait.

But they certainly didn't look this good, and we are in early access.

Normally, I like turn-based combat, but I really shared this sentiment the other day with the goblins. It's not fun when the combat becomes tedious instead of challenging.

If they could add an option for quick AI turns (I'm thinking of how they do it in Armello), that would really help. Maybe the animations could go double or triple speed on AI turns (if the player chooses that setting). Or real-time with pause as others have suggested would work too. Just something to reduce the tedium in larger combat scenarios.

I would suggest that all the enemies with the same spot in the initiative order go simultaneously (like they allow the player to do with their party members), but I'm not sure that's feasible in terms of how the AI decides what actions to take. It probably isn't.

Its bugs. Im sure it'll get better. For example, initiative is broken still. Keeps skipping characters and then jumping back to ones that were skipped.

I bet the issue is that they are trying to make it so enemies are smart so that the game is more challenging. In the old games, like Pool of Radiance, they naturally went faster because all they did was go after the closest character.

In BG3, they seem to analyze your actions more. It's broken, so it doesn't really work, but they do think. Well, at least, seems that way to me.

I bet when they're finished it'll be awesome.

I believe someone posted here that in another of their games the enemies moved faster once the game was released. Hopefully this will be the case with this game as well.

Definitely hoping they add this smartness when it comes to stealth.

Hah. Lol. Agreed

Yeah how is stealth so broken?

I started soloing the game with an Eldritch Knight in Scale Mail who definitely isn't any kind of stealth character at those levels. You can stealth-murder most encounters without even actually rolling a Stealth check. Enemies don't even get to fight. I killed all of the undead in the first temple by just staying out of their vision cones and ending every turn in stealth. They never attacked me.

Then if you try being sneaky with terrain, it easily results in the enemy not knowing what to do and just sitting there waiting to die. Like the 3 ogres. I went on the roof and all they could do was throw chairs at the ceiling while I was slowly killing them with arrows and Fire Bolts.

Agreed. Stealth is totally broken. There should be vision cones AND hearing rings. If you enter within a certain hearing ring a Stealth roll is also required. I was developing this concept when I was trying to create my own RPG rule system once upon a time. You could set like a hearing ring around your character that is like maybe a person's Perception score in meters, or something like that. Walls might stop the ring from passing beyond them, so if a creature is in a room they might not detect you outside the room. That sort of thing.

I'm not saying it has to be Perception score in meters or whatever. I'm just using that as an example of something they could do, because yeah... my fighter who is wearing heavy armor and carrying a two handed sword with Disadvantage on Stealth checks shouldn't be able to sneak around murdering everyone in the game. This broken stealth mechanic plus everyone's ability to lockpick and/or just smash open anything that you can't lockpick makes the Rogue class virtually pointless.

To hell with sound cones, if you sneak past vision cones, you should get a stealth attack. The problem is being able to use stealth while in combat completely breaks combat, and you can activate turn-based mode to easily get backstab stealth attacks without dealing with moving vision cones.

You absolutely need to account for sound while sneaking. Being behind someone doesn't require any skill but moving silently does, and should be greatly affected by what you're wearing. You should never be able to sneak up on anyone in a plate armor because every step makes a sound. But a disadvantage will have to do in 5e.

Then there's peripheral vision and head movement which means the "vision cone" should be a much wider 180 degrees. Right now you can basically sit in someone's field of vision without any cover but they don't even get to roll to see you.

I think you should have to roll stealth check every 4m in a 360 degree view of the character with a range of 10m plus perception modifier unless blocked by an object or wall. Measured distance includes your movement and enemy movement. Vision cone should reduce distance required for the check to every 1m and the checker has advantage. Dim and dark gives advantage to sneaker. Stealth attack rolls an automatic stealth check with disadvantage and the dc is the damage dealt. Last known location with be advanced on with high chance of enemy dash.

Thats how I would very roughly do it. Make them work for it.

Also, the whole asynchronous world makes combat non-deterministic to the AI. If you have a game where every NPC is locked into turns, then the AI can calculate all combat moves, for NPCs, in sequence blocks, between player turns. Portions of such a process could even be parallelized. So there might be a pause at the beginning of a sequence of NPC turns, but the AI wouldn't have to wait for the animations of one NPC to finish before calculating the moves of the next one. When actions, made by players and NPCs, which are not in combat(at least at the beginning of the round), can effect the state of combat at any point, you can't rely on a maintained predictability between player turns to speed up the process.

That's how turn based works. People actually wanted this from BG, apparently.

Even after 2 years looks like bg 3 is still one of the slowest TB games around. Not sure what happend to swarm AI thing but i didn't really see it this patch at all... And AI still goes MHhh all the time. Gobos are just dashing and dashingsome more, happens all the time on mutiple heights, with a super hero animation that wastes time all the time and sounds weird.

Combat is spread out or fragmented all over the place leading to all sorts of time sink, clean up combats. Where smaller groups form and do not pose any threat at all and are just busywork. Like goblins that have 7 hp basically the whole fights boils down to wating for dash animation and then they die before they can even do anything if you are unlucky you have to waste more actions on them because you rolled a 1 on damage dies. IF you are lucky enemies have jump or misty step and that speeds up things tiny bit, IF they don't go loco and tp somewhere weird like way off and then they dash back in wasting the whole turn lol.

Ah, necro.

I disagree - few major encounters last longer, but most of the encounters go by quickly. Maybe computing speed depends on the rig, but I personally struggle to see what's going on with enemies doing their moves before camera manages to centre on them.