Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Problems with non-simultaneous turn-based mode start. PH2 “cool system”

No it does, the unchained group was and example for not being in the group and wanting specific tactical location instead. You would get you location while out of battle and join late. end of story. If you want everyone to join at the same time you keep everyone in the same group.

I really don't care if you like the idea or not, but, it is a solution at stopping the gimmick additional attacks at the beginning.

The surprise quote was directed at Drath for the surprise questions. It was also to clear that up just encase it wasn't clear how surprise worked for anyone else. Cause right now the additional attack shooting into combat is not a surprise round.

Whats your point? I don't think I've had problems getting the additional attacks from characters in the back not in the combat. If npcs run around and Gale gets thrown into combat so what, that would be your mess up.

Do you really think Larian will radically change the game so everything goes into combat, especially in a co-op scenario? No

I'm not talking about being on the othe side of the map. Lets look at example: Ogre trio. You saw them, positioned your characters in different parts of that building (you can't do it without unchaining). And sent one charcter in to talk. Now when fight starts only the talker gets in combat, and rolls low initiative. Ogrs reposition and pull in Astarion who was behind the corner. Astarion don't get his turn in the first round. If he had rolled initiative wis everybode, he would get his turn, he would be notised as befor but he still would be able to act.

Being noticed isn't the problem. Having events play out differently depending on your real life speed is wrong for a tactical turn-based game.

I wasn't trying to invalidate your post about surprise. It just isn't the only way for the system to break. OP had an example with a patrolling guard. The route that should take 2 minutes happens in a span of 1 round, speeding it up 20 fold.

My opinion on this is irrelevant.
The point of early access is to test different aproches. Larian staited multiple times that they are not afraid of redoing things.

I figured you wasn't talking about the whole map (but it took it at face value just encase), would be pretty extreme...but still in the first scenario it would still apply. I went in game and tested this, dialog is bugged but still works. So basically you talk to the orges with La'zel put Will in the corner unstealthed. My two custom characters one sits behind the flipped desks and the other on the northern exit outside the building. Swapped back to La'zel (dialog missing but I can still hit the attack button), hit attack. Ogres, La'zel, and Will roll initative. The two stealths stay out of combat.

The two stealths should be pulled into combat being close quarters but are not, so ya that is a problem. I can see what your talking about from a reply earlier. There is also the problem where if you have someone in combat and you swap toons to setup a ambush the additional characters continuously roll stealth checks vs perception every second. This can be fixed by turning on turn based mode. So I setup the scenario in the same spots and they still was out of combat with Celcie being spotted so she lost stealth and was thrown into combat.

Next test I put La'zel into dialog again (found out the dialog shows up if I actually stay on the character and npcs start talking, if you start dialog and instantly swap to another toon, it bugs), move both my customs Celcie and Francis into areas where they can be seen by the orges and started turn based mode on. Applied stealth to both characters Celcie failed and Francis succeeded, started combat and Francis stayed out of combat and turn based mode got kicked off for him. As soon as turn based mode shut off, he started rolling stealth checks every second again.

They could go tweak the turn based feature so that stealth toons actually start in the scenario.

Quote 3: I've never seen anything like that and the only thing my original reply was about is additional attacks into combat. Trying to make it clear that the additional attacks into combat isn't a surprise round.

Quote 4: True, what you said was a radical change and was taken at face value though. Making the whole world into turn based mode is extreme and dumb. For example in co-op combat can be started accidently walking into hostile npcs while another player could be selling crap in another town.

I'll join your conversation for this moment... my original suggestion was not the whole world, but some area. For example if you're starting a fight with one character in the Chapel on the first floor, the Chapel first floor is the turn-based area now. Plus we have the retreat button now. And I'm not voting for removing it. Finally as I wrote at the end in OP they may try to give the player a moment at the start of every fight to decide if he's engaging with all characters or not.
As for how much work that all would actually need: it seems they already have half of the scripts they would need, since they created that enforced non-combat turn-based mode.
Diving into more details I'm seeing semi-perfect implementation like this:
1. We have the "combat bubble" with combat turn-based mode on inside of an area with non-combat turn-based mode on.
2. As soon as the fight starts the game drags all PCs and NPCs inside of the area in a turn-based mode ignoring any kind of circumstances (stealth, friendly, unconscious e.t.c. shouldn't matter).
3. As soon as the fight starts all PCs and NPCs in the "combat bubble" get their surprised or not state and roll for initiative ignoring such circumstances as being in stealth or friendly.
4. PCs out of the "combat bubble", but inside of the turn-based area can use the retreat button to run away from the fight and exit the mode.
5. If we have a PC miles away when we switch to him we should be asked if we are willing to enter the turn-based mode on him as well or not. That should also work for coop as "Your party-member is engaged in a fight. Turn on the turn-based mode or not? - Yes/No".

It's kinda what i was imagining. But when thinking about it I encountered a very nasty problem. How do you determine the size of the turn based area? In some smaller "dungeons" it can easily be the whole area and certain distance around entrances. But what about large areas?
We could create a bubble around combatants, then around every other creature that got in that area, and so on, until there are no new creatures. But with the density of the map as it is now, radius of that bubble can't be to high or it would turn into the whole map, just take stupid amount of time to calculate that. And if radius is too small then we don't solve the problem.
Another solution is to split the map into zones that can't interact with each other. But at this point it is no different from spliting the area in smaller locations. Which actually can help solve other problems. And to be honest I would prefer if the map would be broken in separate areas, with transitions wia the world map.

If you can think of less radical answers for that question I'm all ears.

In a single-player, is there any reason that having the bubble be the entire world is a problem? I am perfectly fine with someone who is not present for a fight not being able to participate in that fight - this is the risk you take of splitting up. It seems ludicrous to me that you should have multiple time streams so that one character can run clear across the world in six seconds.

I recognize that there is a complication in multi-player games, where if you are doing different things in different areas, forcing someone into turn-based time because of something that is happening far away could be boring for that player.

One option for multi-player: give players who aren't involved in the combat due to distance the option to join initiative or not. If they join the initiative, they're locked into turn-based mode, but could theoretically participate in the combat. If they don't join the initiative, they can continue as usual, but are unable to enter a large bubble around the combat or affect the participants in any way until the battle is concluded. So characters think they are close enough to get there in time could join initiative and try to run, and characters that are really far away could continue with whatever they're doing, but could not participate under the battle under any circumstances.

There is no such problem actually. They already have logic for such areas for enforced turn-based. The area is easily determined by fully loaded area. The game never keeps the whole map fully loaded and active, it's always some distance around your character and then there is only some lanscape loaded, but far away NPCs and interactive objects are turned off from existance.

It might work. But what if party members are scatered around the map? How about characters in combat trying to reach other areas in hopes of geting help from guards?
Without knowledge of internal engine design we are left with a guessing game.

For characters scattered around I would presume we have a few loaded areas, which may use different scripts and same scripts depending on that personal choice.
Characters in combat who's trying to reach other areas shouldn't get any problems with sane logic as for the enforced turn-based mode applied. You can literaly walk in it from one edge of the map to another, spreading turn-based around your character.

Even in the same loaded area I would prefer it the way it is. Say I am in the goblin temple killing the bosses, I have 2 in the room with the dead illithid, and 2 left over were I killed Minthara (or where I freed the guy being tortured which would be even longer if they automatically engaged from there), I do not want to spend at least 4 turns to run them all the way over to the fight when I can simply engage with the 2 in there, and then have the other 2 in the next rotation. The way it works now is just fine.

Not to having to wait for units not engaged in combat to process their turns. Turn-Based combat bubble is a good and practical design - and allowing a coop player to run to the encounter is better then reloading even if it breaks all laws of physics. The only issue I see is stealth units not getting included in the bubble. I found it odd in D:OS2 but In BG3 if felt worse and more exploitative. I don’t think that using stealth should feel like breaking the system.

I posted this in another thread and was informed that I should join this one, so I am copying my post (and also adding more to it) from there to here:
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Something that should be touched on, I think, is player characters/npcs and how they act out of combat. Currently, once combat starts, everyone involved slows down to turn-by-turn limitations, but everyone else acts normally; this leads to some rather glaring exploits (and time shenanigans on the level of Doctor Who).

For one, you can have one person go and initiate combat and just sit there and never move their turn forward, while having the other three party members go around and do several rounds worth of preparations; or avoid combat entirely to get to whatever goal they have in mind, like looting a dungeon.

Secondly, warlocks can cast find familiar for free and the familiar can get into combat without dragging the warlock along with it. Flaming Sphere also has its own initiative. Using the Warlock's find familiar ability to summon an imp, and another party member summoning a flaming sphere, (or heck, a wizard summoning a familiar too) the warlock can sit back and spam find familiar; the imp's invisibility ensures that it enters combat only when the warlock wants it to, and the flaming sphere being considered a creature ensures that the NPCs attack it and take damage every turn.
Now imagine this: The Warlock summons an imp and gets it real close and has it initiate combat, then the wizard summons a flaming sphere and does the same with it... but does not end the flaming sphere's turn (effectively halting combat). Neither the wizard nor the warlock are in combat. The Warlock's imp runs out of actions, so the warlock summons a new one and rinses/repeats until all the enemies are dead; the enemies never get their own turns, because the warlock is not in combat and keeps adding a new combatant, and the wizard never finishes the flaming sphere's turn.

Even if the wizard did finish the flaming sphere's turn, and combat progressed normally, the warlock would not have to wait for the imp's turn. He could simply summon a new imp and attack, sometimes multiple times in a single npc's turn.

A way to mitigate that would be to force turn-by-turn limitations globally, even those out of combat. As for how it would work with the initiative order, I'd say that party members out of combat would all act on the same turn as the one who started combat, until they roll initiative themselves, and non-party-non-combatants would act on the same turn as the person with the highest initiative (or would act on a predetermined, never changing, global base initiative like 10 or something).
Effectively, all npcs out of combat would act normally (no camera movement, or waiting) but would only move/act within the limitations of one round's worth of actions; so there would be no waiting for x misc npcs to bicker or patrol/etc.



TL;DR: Global turn-by-turn limitations are needed in order to mitigate spamming of spells/summons, that can act on their own initiative, by out of combat wizards/warlocks; as well as to prevent bypassing combat by gaming the system, npcs/players abusing the different timescales (yea I consider the npcs out of combat joining combat, despite their normal patrols taking several minutes, as the devs having npcs abuse the system).


PS: It is also weird to see the world around the limited characters move normally, while those in combat are all effectively frozen in time.

PPS: I greatly dislike how easy it is to "game" the system currently in place. Yes, the system should be fun and easy to use, but taking advantage of the system to complete multiple turns worth of actions is abusing the system (and it is far too easy to do), which in turn reduces the difficulty/immersion.

Its an annoying issue. Even more annoying trying to find a solution and reading everyone's drawn out examples on the matter.

How about that : No turn base combat. Real time 1 round = 6 seconds unless paused. Add a few more enemies, slightly lower HPs and VOILA! lol. Fast, dynamic, frantic, and strategic combat all in one! That would be so amazing.

Good points!

The solution is simple. This game is based on D&D, not a FPS; it isn't supposed to be fast/frantic (you cannot have a fast/frantic pace and keep strategy, strategy takes time) it is supposed to be steady/strategic.

Simple solution: "... force turn-by-turn limitations globally, even those out of combat. ..." "... party members out of combat would all act on the same turn as the one who started combat, until they roll initiative themselves, and non-party-non-combatants would act on the same turn as the person with the highest initiative (or would act on a predetermined, never changing, global base initiative like 10 or something). ..."

This has been pretty well said already but some people in this thread still weren't getting it so allow me to say this more plainly for anyone that needs it to get the point:

The turn based combat is meant to present real time events. One round of combat is 6 seconds of time, not matter how long it takes you to go through that round.

When the party does an ambush, from the real time perspective that the turns are meant to enact, all four party members attack at the EXACT same time. No pause, no delay, no turn order. The ranger fires an arrow, the rogue stabs a back, the wizard sends a fire bolt, and the fighter charges in, all in one singular instant. THEN combat starts, AFTER *ALL* those attacks. Then you roll iniative. Then round 1 begins.

Now, to be clear, the surprise round is meant to be how that is simulated. Mechanically, you can't actually do all those attacks at once, so you shoot the rangers arrow first, iniative is rolled for round *2*, and the rest of round one is the other attacks from the same instant. The surprise round is supposed to be a special round that is only an instant long, instead of the normal 6 seconds.

Except it doesn't work like it's supposed to, because a single enemy not being surprised ruins the fact that those attacks all happened at the exact same time.
The one or some non-suprised enemy causes mechanics to function as though the attacks did not happen at the same time, when they did, making only the "first" have been a succesful ambush attack, when they all where.
If they enemy didn't notice the party in time to react to the first of those attacks, then it didn't notice the party in time to react to any of the other ones, because there was not a gap between them.
Ergo it is a *requirement* that every enemy drawn into a fight without having already spotted a party member get a surprise round. Anything else breaks the translation of real time actuality into turn based mechanics. Anything else breaks the game. Anything else is wrong.

"But Soul, that's not how it works in DnD" That's because in DnD, you can say to the DM "We all do these attacks at the exact same time." DnD lets you start combat using real time with pause to enter everyone's commands at once. DnD doesn't need the absolute suprise round; turn based video games based on DnD require it.

The other aspect of this thread, about bringing the whole party into combat no matter what, is a lot more on the nose. A round is 6 seconds. You should not be able to interact with a fight by doing something that takes more than 6 seconds within that 6 seconds. We are not playing as Flash. We are not playing as Quicksilver. We are not Time Lords. The only way to prevent them interacting with the fight as such, is to put them in the 6 second rounds no matter where they are or what they're doing, or to altogether forbid them for joining the fight at all. The first option sounds better to me, but if enough players want Larian to give the latter as an option to characters that were way too far away to have any hope of reaching the fight that's fine too.

There is no debate to be had on that. "But the other player of co op wants to join the fight." Then they should have been there when the fight started, and the first player shouldn't have started it without them there. Their mistake is not rationalization for physics breaking design choices. "But they player not in the fight will be bored waiting for the turns." Their temporary boredom is entirely worth the permenant solution to this design failure. Plus there's always that option someone else brought up and I added above about letting them keep their seperate real time as long as they are forbidden from joining the fight they couldn't have reached.

Lastly, the aspect of the present design failure about breaking time by being the Flash applies to npcs just as much as it does players. Same as how the rogue should not be able to spend 2 minutes sneaking around the enemies being ambused within a 6 second round, the enemy guard that's been doing a two minute patrol route should not suddently do that whole route in under 6 seconds.

Super minor spoiler from very early: Just after the goblin fight to get in the druid grove there is a bugbear assassin that murders a tiefling lady if you don't get on top of the hill fast enough. Once you're close enough to the hill the game activates those npcs, and the bugbear goes to attack her. In real time, while you aren't there. In order to save her, you have to run up the hill fast enough to get into the bugbears line of sight and be detected fast enough to start combat before it reaches her. If you try to sneak up it doesn't stop and will kill her before you do your attack.

Imagine for me, that when you reach the bottom of that hill, something unrelated attacks you. Maybe that squirrel, maybe some remaining goblin, it doesn't matter, you end up in turn based combat with it. And the bubble for that combat doesn't reach the top of hill. Or maybe it does but the bugpear is in stealth anyway so it doesn't join. You the player are only seeing it throught the sky camera after all, not your character's eyes. So now you, desperately trying to save this tiefling woman but trapped in the turn based combat flow, watch this bugbear walk over and kill her while you aren't allowed to move. That's how all the enemies feel while you move around your out-of-combat characters while everything in combat is frozen in time. Both problems are solved by making world time flow consistent by bringing everything into the 6 second turn based round, instead of letting things outside of the fight stay real time.

I agree with a very large fraction of what is a large post. So, yeah, agree++, The Old Soul. The only technical detail I would raise is : strictly speaking, there is no surprise round. It's just round 1, where all enemies are surprised ... which in terms of effects and output is the same.

I complained about the same things in my initial feedback on this. But I'm increasingly realising that my fundamental problems with this "in-combat vs out-of-combat timelines" are not what I described.

Some grounds for complaint about the current system is that it allows exploits and utterly ridiculous scenes. Some examples :

• Some party members, who are very far from the fight, have all the time in the world to come and help their friend, who got in the fight on their own.
• A Rogue who, really, should have been drawn in the fight due to where she is, has the time to do 3 rounds worth of movement to get in the perfect position and activate buffs before getting in the fight.
• The out-of-fight Warlock spamming Imps (see JaceEthaniel's post above)

But those are just exploits. Larian loves them. And I can refrain from using them.

So then, what is, to me, the real problem with in-combat vs out-of-combat timelines ?

In short, this system occasionally penalises players and it routinely prevents them from accomplishing simple things they should very much be able to do.

* Ambush (see The Old Soul's post as well). It's a very simple thing. You are in Turn-Based Mode, you want to play all you team's turn before The World or The Combat interrupts you. Currently, The Combat interrupts you and you can rarely finish your ambush properly.
Now, one may argue, "why should players have their ambushes work with 100% success ? After all, this is DnD. Swinging a sword doesn't result in a hit all the time". In my view, when a player has managed to place their team in the right spots, has activated Turn-Based Mode, and is ready to strike, they have already succeeded at the ambush. The "does Ambush succeed ?" question is encapsulated in the Stealth vs Perception checks. If the enemies didn't spot the party, they get ambushed.

* Penalising situation. You are in combat with goblins in the Underground Passage underneath the Grove, the Guardian Statues are outside the Combat-Time-Bubble and they fire at you at an insane rate. Super nice.

* Penalising situation. You have activated Turn-Based Mode to cast Bless and avoid wasting rounds of buff effect, then you have sneaked around enemies. Combat starts, some characters are not drawn in, and by the time one of your character has their combat turn, and you can pause the combat to draw the other characters in, they have lost many rounds of buff effect. Awesome. Here my problem isn't even so much that seeing Gale with 2 rounds left of Bless effect while Shadowheart has 9 rounds left, even though it came from the same spell, is a blatant record of the ridiculous existence of multiple timelines. The problem is that I don't get the full effect for which I paid a full spell slot.

Larian, and many of their fans, like being able to do weird and wonderful things in the game, regardless of how silly those things seem. As far as I can tell, the Larian view is that you should take responsibility for playing the game the way you want so that you enjoy it; which is fine for a game that is SP and co-op MP, since there is no competitive aspect or possibility of antisocial MP behaviour.

So from the point of view of the player finding exploits when part of the game goes into TB mode, there is no actual problem to solve. If you want to look for and use exploits, do so. If you don't think exploits are the right way to play the game, then don't use them.

Of course, if the AI is using exploits in the way the game works, then there is a valid criticism.

I don't have any particular problem with the way the game currently works, because I only play SP, and I don't spread my party out very much. When combat starts without all characters present, I choose to join the absentees in combat, or do not choose to join them; simple.

Even better ( from my viewpoint ) would be to have the game play in RT, but that is not the game we have.

On the principle, I broadly agree with the view that "you should take responsibility for playing the game the way you want so that you enjoy it", which I feel is an equivalent formulation of "if you don't like this feature, don't use it". And this for the very reasons you mention : this is a SP/coop MP game. But I think it applies in some cases, and doesn't apply in other cases.

Some cases where it applies, and I'm not bothered in the slightest :

• Eating food in combat.
• Barrelmancy.

Some cases where it doesn't apply.

• High-Ground rule (even if you don't use High-Ground, you'll at least have to prevent enemies from abusing it).
• Rest anytime.
• Characters out-of-combat being on a different timeline.

For rest, it's currently a case of incomplete design and it shouldn't be up to players to finish the game design (Nick Pechenin once explained the system Larian was thinking of doing for rest, hence why I'm fairly hopeful that this is just a case of not-implemented-yet). Consider a single-player "platformer with enemies and damage". When you have taken a certain amount of damage, you die and have to retry the current stage/level. Now imagine that the game does not have a damage threshold and lets you decide dynamically when you took too much damage and should restart the level. That's bad. I'm all fine with a difficulty option where I can set the threshold higher or lower, prior to attempting the level. But the designers should provide a default setting for this threshold, where they think the game is a nice and challenging experience for most players.

As for character out-of-combat being allowed to take as much time as they want, I'm completely unbothered by the fact that this can serve as the basis for an exploit.

However, as I explained above, the problem is that the current system can be quite penalising for a player who didn't even remotely try to exploit it. As soon as you start sneaking into position to ambush your opponents, you are exposing yourself to a range of difficulties. Your characters are not guaranteed to be all drawn in combat.

• Characters who are drawn in are out-numbered, and thus more likely to not be in a good place in the initiative track, and get slaughtered before it's their turn.
• Characters who are not drawn in lose their buffs at super-fast speed.
• Characters who are then "late to join" (although they weren't realistically late and the player certainly didn't mean that) will be robbed of their turn in the round where they join.

These are the problem to solve. Not the fact that exploits are possible.

So as far as I can tell, your issues are completely avoidable by using in-game features. You know you can manually enter turn based mode at any point right? And that this does not put you straight into combat?

Scenario 1:

You get your party into position to start the fight. The guard leaves the room. You press SPACE and enter turn based mode. That guard will use his Round 1 Movement and will then stop until the game detects all your party members have ended their turn. You can literally go make dinner, come back, and he will still be where his turn's movement finished unless you ended all your party's turns.

Scenario 2:

You miss your first turn because you get a free turn when you enter the fight; as long as you don't just try to walk straight into it anyway. If you attack from range, or can sneak in avoiding detection, you get a free hit before you even roll for initiative. You do need to not stand in the middle of the battlefield, but it's very doable.

As a single example of both situations, take the adventurers at the ruined chapel. I generally have Gale and my warlock hiding behind the wall behind the archer, Astarion hiding behind the statue, and Shadowheart starting dialogue and the fight. I move my warlock up behind the archer to get a visual on the patrolling mage. When she is at the top of the ruin, across from the archer, I press Space and move my warlock back behind the wall. The mage is now fixed there until her next turn. Shadowheart starts the fight by walking up to Gimblebock. Everyone else is hidden. Hopefully she rolls good Initiative but if not she might need to tank a hit or 2. The mage will waste her first turn casting Mage Armour. My warlock will NOT cast Hex which will pull her into combat, but use Eldritch Blast with Repelling Blast to either knock the archer off his crate if he hasn't moved, or down the steps if he moved to get a shot at Shadowheart. The way is now clear for Gale to move up to the crate and Magic Missile the mage to death. Astarion then moves around the statue using Cunning Action:Dash to backstab whichever melee enemy is more threatening to Shadowheart. Shadowheart then Inflicts Wounds to finish them. Everyone in the party is now in combat, everyone in the party has made an attack action. Round 2 commences...


I haven't played DoS so won't comment on 3 & 4, but for this game just enter turn-based mode outside of combat and everyone is forced to use their movement, action and bonus action one turn at a time, whether they are in combat or not.