Yep, it seems we very much do.
Kingmakers timers are indeed mostly irrelevant but that’s information that is not available for the first time players.
Both statements are questionable at best.
They aren't "irrelevant" because it's still entirely possible to be too wasteful and fail them (especially since kingdom management becomes a factor or when travelling heavy and moving slowly) losing the chance to do something.
They simply aren't too punishing. And that brings us to the second point: the information not being available. Usually when something is time-sensitive you are more than explicitly told so, even if admittedly the game could be a bit more transparent on expiration dates.
So we have timers that serve little to no purpose except for stressing out new players by pretending they matter.
When the premise is incorrect, so is the conclusion you draw from it.
Also, what's even more questionable here is the implied assumption that "stressing" (meaning "pressuring to any degree") the player is inherently a bad thing. This is the dreadful school of design that thinks that anything INCONVENIENT for the player is inherently a bad part of the experience.
But sometimes overcoming or preventing inconveniences through good planning and good habits is precisely part of the sense of being part of a bigger adventure with some stakes in it.
On top of that they don’t prevent spamming rests - most of Kingmakers consists of small, barren maps with a single encounter.
False. In fact, most of these are relegated to road encounters. For the rest there's a certain number of small maps, sure (which personally beats the diorama-like "bonsai world" in BG3 where everything is five meters away from the previous point of interest), but also a lot of wider areas or even proper dungeons.
Travelling at snails pace over the world map and quests forcing players to travel all over the place pretty much means that player will rest more times throughout the campaign then fight.
Which is not even remotely a problem, if the game is tuned around it. Not to mention that if someone is travelling at "a snail pace" it usually means they are over-encumbered, since travelling light comes with a SIGNIFICANT change of pace in travelling speed.
And when you engage in combat you will learn you don’t have the very specific protection spell that game demands that you have, so you reload, swap companions, re-rest to change spells and do the encounter again.
That's:
- hyperbole
- more tied to the fine tuning and the Pathfinder ruleset than to the travel/rest system-
- ...and consequently not really pertinent to this specific topic
The only time Kingmaker limited rests is in dungeons and its camp supply system is single works implementation I have experience in a cRPG.
No idea what you are even trying to say here.
If that "work" was supposed to be a "worst" as I'm guessing, then yeah, once again we STRONGLY disagree.
In fact, I feel pretty much the opposite. They have arguably the BEST rest system I experienced in CRPG since the '90s. One that makes sense in context, it's mechanically meaningful, it maintains the immersion, but it's rarely (if ever) particularly punishing, if not as consequence of genuinely poor planning.
