Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback This game is far too easy to cheese

Honestly, this change needs to happen for purely non-cheese reasons. For example, if I have a character that is actively hiding, and the rest of my party gets spotted, my hiding character does not get to roll initiative. Instead, they are out of combat. If the enemy team is going first, this can be devastating because the enemy can all go before my party. The entire party, if in the same area, needs to get initiative together.

I also don't want the best way to play the game be some cheesy stealth exploit.

And the surprise alpha strikes.. the initial attack should be the "surprise" round. It's ridiculous you get another full round and then if you win initiative you get a THIRD round before the enemy can react to anything. How many attacks would an 11th level Fighter get in before the enemy gets to do anything in this "system"? 7 attacks. And that's before Action Surge and Haste. And don't forget the fire dip in a candle either. A dual wielding Thief Rogue with some " extra bonus action" build would probably get 25 attacks including sneak attack and poison damage in this skillful homebrew. And then you get the time stop effect the OP mentioned on top for other stealthed party members.

Is there? This late in development, where would the resources come from to redesign offending areas?

The harm would come from repetitivity. For all its flaws, the current system ensures you can defeat the goblins without killing them all. Including more characters in combat might trigger a chain reaction where attacking Spike creates a massive battle with every enemy in the temple every time.

A fix for this might be to include NPCs in initiative order but keep them neutral if they’re unaware of the party’s misdeeds. (Neutral characters would share initiative, like how the environment gets a turn in non-combat turn based mode). This would let combat bubbles be bigger without always merging closeby encounters.

Edit: this is precisely OP’s solution, so +1 to them. Grouping neutrals’ initiative should speed combat up, though, perhaps with help from a version of swarm AI.

This is a good point. I hadn't thought about that. This scenario has happened a number of times as well, actually. All the enemies go first and kill the single character while I'm trying to get even 1 more character into combat range to join. It sucks in reverse when the enemies all act before that 1 character and because no others are engaged in combat, they all gang up on the one.

As someone who plays this game a lot through each of the patches, I sometimes suspect that some of the complaints come from earlier patches and limited experiences with the "glitchy" areas.

The problem you describe--attacking a frozen enemy while not being drawn into combat--isn't the norm. There are certain areas where it definitely happens, but that's not a systemic thing throughout every area of the game. In fact, how certain areas respond to that sort of thing has changed throughout patches.

The normal way things work in combat is that you're drawn into the initiative order when you make an attack.

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Another issue where the stealth approach can bite you, by the way: when you attack and hide, and then the enemies just go out of combat because they can't find you and heal themselves, meaning you wasted your resources.

As long as you can find a way to attack from far enough away, usually by throwing something, it won't enter combat - it is, indeed, systemic and replicatable (and remains so as of the latest patch).

Rather than fix the issue in their base engine, Larian performed a cludge fix, as they more or less always do; all enemies all have an unlimited self-heal skill now (compete with animation), which they spam out of combat as long as they're not at full hp.

I suspect the same, as I have mentioned in another thread - what I think BG3 would need is to make "turn based bubble" and "awerness of the combat enouncter" two seperate systems. They do have unaware AI pathing implemented when using player initiated turn based mode - so it shouldn't be impossible to do. Combine it with swarm AI, for neutral parties so it doesn't take time (could be even done off screen as a generic "neutral turn").

Good find. There’s another one I discovered way back where you can send a familiar over to the Spectator and use it to kill all the drow statues without awakening the thing. I mentioned it on Steam suggestions, so no idea if they fixed in later patches – I can’t bring myself to play through this game again until release.

Yeah, I wouldn’t actively try to cheese the system, but playing the Spectator fight the fair way didn’t seem to be adding up. So I took the party way outside the fight range and called up the crow familiar to see if I could use it to trigger the Spectator to surface. This was months back, and the last time I played, so I can’t remember why his buried condition was causing so much hassle.

But then accidentally I discovered the crow doesn’t trigger anything and can/could just kill every statue unimpeded.

It doesn’t feel ‘strategic’ to trick an unthinking AI. If you’ve found another exploit, I’d say you should use the official reporting mechanism to let them know, because now that you’ve mentioned it, I personally can’t forget it. Hence there’s always the temptation, if a fight is going nowhere for too long, to just quick-win with a known cheese tactic to move things along. Much more interesting if the AI surprises you with some kind of intelligent adjustment to your attempted slyness.

No it's not.
Having OP mechanic in the game makes dying A LOT less important. As a result you don't have to strategize at all because you can mostly ALWAYS cheese the game at some point to win.

Playing "legit" until you die or cheesing when the situation become a bit too hard...? Being able to break games makes their core systems a lot less appealing because they are NEVER the best choice.

The better tactic is always to cheese and it's not hard to find how to considering how broken so many things still are (shove, throwing potion, stealth, consummables,...).
At this point cheesing looks like a core system more than an option.

This may seem like a stupid question ...

But imagining it will be reworked as OP (and some other people) wants ...
And once any of your characters enter combat, your whole party rolls initiative and enter turn-based mode ...

What would be the point of sneaking in that situation? O_o
All i can figure is to incerase chance your character will not be attacked first. O_o

But any other curent benefit seems to be gone ... doubt Larian would like that. :-/

//Edit:
Alibism in practice ...
Of course it is ... you being unable to resist something is not fault of that thing, its yours. :-/

How do you define "core system"?
Especialy "core system" that can be easily avoiding by simply ignoring his existence ... core of what exactly it is?

You get advantage on attack rolls if you're hidden from an enemy. Which, importantly, allows the rogue(s) to enact sneak attack.

Not exactly what i had in mind when i asked ...
But you got me there.

I was thinking about positioning ...
Yes, i realize that restricting unlimited movement across battlefield while enemies are frozen in time is exactly the point of this suggestion.
But quite honestly ... puting "how it should be by tabletop rules" aside for a second ... i like this option, even tho i agree its seriously OP as it is right now ... but i still think that Larian wasnt exactly wrong by allowing this ... if would just require some tuning, rather than straignt elimination ...

For example, i would like if character that rolls initiative while in stealth would get some extra movement for that first round ... so we still can position a little more effectively ... just not run anywhere like Flash.

This "fix" would absolutely awful for me and probably others who do not enjoy the "standard" party setup and combat style. Stealth definitely needs some serious work but not to the point of making it impossible to set up ambushes.

Once a character has made a surprise attack, they should be added to the initiative order. This should apply separately to each character, since we are stuck moving one at a time a group surprise attack is impossible. Definitely shouldn't apply to the whole party as this would completely ruin some playstyles. If the out of combat characters haven't been spotted, they should still get to move into position and make their opening attack before being pulled into the combat. Maybe they could be forced into TB mode, but definitely not into the combat itself.

If there was a way to maneuver everyone into position at the same time then click one button to make everyone attack, it would be much better but unfortunately we don't have this ability. Multiplayer with communication can probably do this, but I don't think it can be added for single player, since entering TB mode out of combat doesn't properly pause the world.

It occurred to me after one of the previous posts, Nebuul's, that we do have the ability to maneuver each character into ambush positions simultaneously via Turn-based mode. If you want to set up an ambush by sneaking 4 characters into positions, you can maneuver them in turn based mode as if they are already in combat without initiative order. Then, if 1 gets spotted, it makes sense that all are pulled into combat. All characters may not have been spotted, but they all act in initiative order.

The issue is still with multiplayer. If one player triggers combat, everyone is sucked in. This, however, could be fixed by making it so they are only pulled in if within a certain radius. If outside that radius, they aren't. If within, they are. End of story.

After Nebuul's post, I do think that is a major issue with not sucking everyone in. You, the player, have no ability to react in time to 1 character getting sucked in. The 1 character gets ganged up on before you can get the rest into any kind of position to attack. I can tell you from experience, that sucks. It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does, it's not fun.

Also, I've had numerous times when I didn't realize until after several rounds that a certain character wasn't pulled into battle. That also sucks. You wind up wondering where Astarion is in the combat order only to discover he's just picking his nose at the edge of the battle. I actually just had that happen with 3 characters during the harpy fight and the goblins in the secret tunnels. I assumed they were all pulled in, but they weren't.

Just let the encounters merge.

It seems ridiculous to me that I can kill Dror Ragzlin and his large group of minions without alerting Minthara in the next room. The sounds of battle would echo through the entire fort. And if they didn't, the goblins should run off to alert the rest.

Worth pointing out if you really want to rule lawyer that if you cast the Thunderwave spell (which you are probably using if you have Gale with you or you're a Bard/Wizard/Druid/Sorcerer being attacked in melee by multiple enemies), then it should DEFINITELY alert the entire fort, since the spell is supposed to emit a boom that can be heard from up to 300 feet away.

Though it's probably a game balance thing most of all. Most major encounters in BG3 involve the party being heavily outnumbered. Two boss-level enemies with their mooks in the same fight? I'd be hard pressed to find anyone here that can reasonably beat that without resorting to extreme cheese.

I, wholeheartedly, 100% agree with this. Well put!

Edit :
It is sometimes an issue, yes. This is something that could be made more clear in term of UI.

This isn't ideal because the enemies are still moving around while we are in TB mode and it takes ages with the stupid movement system to do anything, meaning one character can be spotted while we are still moving the others. If everything could be properly paused then I would have no issue with this particular part.

I haven't played multiplayer, is it possible to have everyone coordinate their ambush attacks so they all hit at the same time? It would be rather stupid if the game didn't allow for that.

I have had this happen and I quickly switch to my other characters who aren't yet in combat, does this not pause the combat anymore? I feel like it used to do this, or maybe I just lucked out avoiding issues with the spotted character.

If this doesn't work then I would still rather not have everyone pulled into combat, that is more akin to having one character spotted and the rest of them standing up and screaming "over here" at the enemy like a bunch of idiots. Being a stealth player in pretty much every game I play, this just makes me cringe and would be completely not fun.

I don’t *think* it pauses until it gets to one of your characters, which if you’re unlucky with initiative might be a while. If your enemy have been surprised and can’t do anything, then that’s probably okay. But if they spotted your character and can attack them, it’s not so great!

What about it? You are stealthed, if you want to sneak all the way to the backline you still might be able to do it with favourable terrain and high stealth - you might not able to reach backline in one turn, but that's good - the very point of backline and formation is to make reaching certain units a bit more challenging. Stealth is to avoid being scene, not to be granted extra mobility.