Couldn’t agree more. RT feels good when you’re plowing through mobs, but I find TB much more satisfying for challenging fights when the balance can hang on specific rolls. Crits feel better in TB too, you can actually revel in them. It’s definitely great to be able to switch back and forth at will.
I play turn-based 99% of the time (core difficulty) but there are moments where switching in real time actually makes some difficult fights significantly more manageable. For instance every time there are a lot of (or few but dangerous) casters/snipers on the enemy side playing in real-time makes a lot easier to interrupt their casting/punish them with AOO.
Practical example experienced just the last time I played a couple of days ago: When I crossed the Baphomet's prophet with his insanely high initiative rolls three reloads were not enough to spare me his bullshit AOE spell that drained 30-40 permanent DEX points to my entire party in a single cast. When I finally approached the same fight in RT I closed the gap immediately and exploded the annoying fucker.
That's interesting but probably also inevitable, given how different both modes are in concept.
Another bonus from TB (I've seen this brought up by some): It makes it particular for beginnerse much easier to grasp how the mechanics work (as not everybody is acting simultaneously rather than turn by turn, and the combat log also only fills turn by turn).
Hopefully I haven't initiated another of those RT vs TB debates though, that was not my intention. I can enjoy both (played Deadfire exclusively in RT also). However, for Pathfinder, having that option officially now seems a definite plus so far, though the encounters will hugely likely be tuned with RT in mind.
Kingmaker already was a rather combat and enemy heavy game in general. Unfortunately, they still don't collect charater and save stats. But I'd reckon by the end of Kingmaker I had killed hugely much more enemies than on say Deadfire, which you can finish with killing far less than thousand. On my last Deadfire playthrough, I finished level 18 of 20 and we had killed 866 enemies (but then Obsidian had listened to the trash mob criticisms they received for PoE1 pretty strongly, it seems). The last sections in Kingmaker alone were practically filled with enemy mobs (and most dungeons likewise, even on "normal").
