For one char and all enemies time stands still in combat. The other chars have all the time in the world to sneak past vision cones and do another alpha strike.
I think this could be avoided if they had made pause work on the entire world. You can move everyone into position for the ambush attack then initiative should immediately start for everyone. Even if you leave party members back until later in the combat then they should still get only one attack before being added to initiative.
Well, this could have worked, of course, but the thing is that they don't want to do it because the mutliplayer-focused design demands that the other player away from the fight may be able to keep moving in real time...
Which is relatively fine on its own (not a fan, but I understand the design decision, at least). The real issue is that at very least in the immediate surroundings of the fight even characters in stealth should be mandatorily pushed into the turn-based initiative queue.
The fact that you can keep chaining alpha strikes at will is abysmal.
But the worst thing is that if you tell that to the Larian leadership their answer will be that "they know and they aren't changing how it works on purpose, because the player feels clever doing these tricks and they want you to feel rewarded".
