About Enter Turn-based mode:
3. When combat happens, all NPC and all player's adventuring party members in the area should be forced to go into Turn-based mode. Just like how player actively enters Turn-based Mode.
The current combat engagement is terrible: I can use a companion to sneak attack a group of foe, this will surprise them. then control other characters one by one, to sneak around the area for as long as I want and as far as I want, if the map allows me, I could have my Tav move all the way from Druid's Cove to Baldur's Gate and double back while Shadowheart and some enemies got time stopped in combat for the whole time. Or, since the group of enemy was been surprised by Shadowheart's sneak attack, their detection area got freezed as well, so I can move my worst sneaker who wears the loudest armor to easily infiltrate in between these enemies' position and get to the weakest target. This is a bad design.
Yes.
When combat start, all my party members in the vicinity should be drawn in.
Otherwise, it becomes very difficult to perform ambushes that turn out half as well as what I meant to do. (And ambushes have been advertised by Larian as a feature of the game, it's not as if I'm trying to do something the game isn't meant to allow. But that wouldn't the first thing Larian advertised on which they under-deliver.)
The fact that we can currently abuse the dual timelines is probably a bit of a lost cause. For Larian, this is a
cool system. Personally, I am wholly unbothered by the fact that some players may abuse the system. But I am really bothered by the fact that the current system can turn out to be penalising, when I did not try to abuse it at all.
One example is if I cast pre-combat buffs. When not all my characters are drawn in combat at the start of it, by the time I manage to get everyone in, some people have 9 rounds of Bless left while some others have already gone through their 10 rounds of Bless.
(As for the super-stealthy noisy-armoured, 8-Dex Barbarian, that's an independent issue. The current Stealth system is a bit of a joke, and that's in part because the game basically has little concept of sounds.)
