Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Let's make combat faster

Waiting for an enemy to end their turn is frustrating. I think slow combat is one of the main issues of current EA. So let's make combat faster.
My suggestion is this - as in multiplayer you can do your turn simultaneously with your frined's, if your turns are next to each other, so why our enemies can't? And in addition, all enemy minions might do their turn simultaneously too
Let's look at two fighting encounters:

1. You ally with goblins to destroy the grove. This fight right now is so painfully long, that it made me drop that playthrough. But if a bunch of regular 8-10 hit points goblins gone together, it would help a lot, it would make it a lot funnier and quicker.
2. Fight with phase spiders and its queen. Phase spider queen has like 7 babies with each has a separate turn. Why? They're just teleporting to you to poison and get killed. So you wait while their turn is over for like two minutes and then kill them all with one AOE spell(in my case it was thunderwave). That just painful. If spider queen minions went at the same time, it would benefit the dynamic of the fight so so much


3.* At some point scholl of necromancy will be added to wizard's subclasses. I can't imagine doing a sperate turn for each of 20 zombies i've created, it would just straight away lock me out of picking this subclass.

what do you think

It’s been suggested before - Wasteland3 does something like that. I think it could be beneficial for pacing, especially for smaller enemies with less abilities like baby spiders. That’s said, it is not high on my list of priorities - I personally don’t find battles to be that slow.

I don't find the combats that slow either. I wonder if your computer is running slow? The baby phase spiders don't take two minutes to get through their turns in my experience.

Personally I take my time and think about the best strategy and tactics that I could employ to outsmart / outmanoeuvre the AI. I enjoy winning fights with minimal, or better yet zero, casualties and resources spent. I take pride in this.

Then again, my wife hates me for taking so much time to think and plan, and refuses to play any turn-based coop with me. Oh well.

Answering your question - no, I don't think combat is too slow. Even the temple courtyard's battle runs at acceptable speed for me. Especially after Larian somewhat sped up the combat AI a patch or two ago.

I hate waiting for my turn, not the turn-based combat speed overall

If Larian were to implement reactions more faithully then enemy turns could become more interactive.

Personally I always found enemy turns to be a more satisfying aspect of turn based combat, but maybe that's because of my long time experience with nail-biting UFO enemy turns.

Personally, I would be interested to see someone implement a quasi-turn-based system. Something that is between RTWP and turn-based. So, if you've ever played the X-Wing miniatures game, it would be similar to that.

Here's the idea:

Combat is initiated. Initiative order is set just like it is currently. However, the player selects their characters one at a time and issues orders. They select their fighter and choose the ranged weapon and select a Target. Selects their rogue and select the ranged weapon and select a Target. They select their wizard, pick a spell, choose a target, and pick a spot where they want the wizard to move after the spell is cast. They choose their cleric, select the bless spell, And give the order to have the cleric charge forward after the spell is cast. After issuing orders, the player clicks the ready button, and unpauses combat.

Well the player was issuing orders, the AI was also issuing orders for all NPCs. So when the player indicates that they are ready, all characters act at the same time. So they move and act at one time, simultaneously, but their attacks occur in initiative order split seconds from one another.

In this way, the player still has control over each character in the party in can strategically plan out the round. However, combat occurs all at once, playing 6 seconds out simultaneously so that you could see how it would literally play out in real life. This would dramatically speed up combat while still making it turn based. It is different from rtwp because after the 6 second round is done the game pauses again and allows you to issue new orders. Action allowances are still maintained because it is all transpiring in one round.

But what if my fighter has two actions per turn and she kills her Target with one action? There could be a simple programming setup where if this kind of scenario occurs your character automatically selects the closest, weakest enemy and a text that one. This has been done in other games like Pathfinder.

Again, the difference between rtwp and this is that it is more controlled. You wouldn't have scenarios where your party members are just standing around doing nothing because you didn't realize that they just finished an enemy and the AI didn't direct them to attack the next one. You wouldn't have characters just running off randomly after enemies were wandering into traps because you would have more control over all your characters. By forcing a stop after every 6 seconds, the game would control how many actions occur in that 6 seconds.. what I'm trying to say is it wouldn't be so chaotic like rtwp is. It could also still manage the 5e rule set without requiring a bunch of extra work.

I honestly have no idea how hard it would be to implement that, but it sure would be fun to see someone try it. As the round is initiated, all characters move and as they are moving they are shooting or taking swings at each other and initiative order. Reactions would be triggered as enemies past one another and so forth. I think the biggest problem I see with it is the reactions. Like BG3 right now, it would be hard to implement certain things like smite. But anyway, I still think it would be cool to see something like this.

I almost forgot one very important part about this concept. If you tell your character to use their melee weapon, but they can't get close enough, they would have to be something set up so that the game would allow that character to switch to ranged automatically and use it instead so you wouldn't waste a turn.

In other words, let's say you told your fighter to run up and attack a goblin who is 30 ft from you. However, the computer gives orders to that Goblin to retreat 10 ft and shoot. As the round is playing out, the computer determines that the fighter is not going to reach the Goblin. Therefore, it has the fighter pull out her bow and shoot the Goblin instead. If attacked by enemies in initiative order prior to the fighters turn, she still has her shield and sword out. But once she has acted in initiative order, all enemies that attack her after that would do so without her having a shield.

This might require some sort of primary and secondary action cue. Your primary action for the fighter is run forward and attack with sword and shield. The secondary action is to switch to bow and shoot. The second action is only triggered if the first action cannot be done. In this way, you would tell the computer to either have her pull out her bow and shoot or have her use the dash command to reach the Goblin by the end of her turn.

I think something at least can be done at this direction, or like Owlcat managed with pathfinder wrath of the righteous, you can switch between real time and turn based, but they are pretty similar

I was also suggesting simmilar approach in the past, so it pains me a little to admit it was not too well idea.

Reactions are the reasoun and its a good point ...
I mean IF they would be done simmilar to Solasta ... pause the game, show you all the options at once, let you pick ... that potentialy could work, but im affraid it would be quite chaotic, especialy on higher levels.

I wonder about compromise ...
How about let enemies that are next to each other in initiative MOVE at once ... and then attack one-by-one?

Fighting against 36 goblins at the same time is absolutely a pain in a TB game.
But I don't really find most combats particularly slow anymore. God bless patch 5 !

I know it's probably semantics, but I hope people realize that RTWP does not exclude the game being turn-based. It's just that the turns play out 'in real time'. It baffles me that not more effort has been put in by dev's to make an advanced auto-pause which feels like turnbased but can be modified for different types of flow (e.g. autopause after action, or only start of turn). As someone who grew up on RTS and RtwP games I simply can't understand how people prefer the artificiality and static feeling of TB, not that bothered by TB but simply preferring the flow of RtwP and good auto-pause.

Having something to do while waiting for all the 36 goblins to take their turn - reactions, possibility to counter/interupt actions of enemies, ... would be an improvement. Or implement mob behavior per group of enemy NPC's where it makes sense (e.g. 3 goblin archers doing sim stuf)