The way I am seeing it is that, if one character attacks from Surprise, then all player characters AND enemies are brought into the combat TB mode, and enemies have to make a Perception check or be Surprised = lose their first turn. This way, it doesn't require a huge amount of coordination from the players. The other 3 characters just have to be relatively close by.
I don't think I am explaining what I mean clearly enough. What I want to happen would be the tabletop equivalent of the party using hand signals or a countdown to ensure all their attacks go off at the same time. The enemies would not be making any perception check during the second or less that this would be occurring, if the party has made it up to this point successfully without being seen by the enemy then the ambush happens. Pretty sure multiplayer can do this already. Since we do not have ready attacks and a proper pause, in singleplayer we have to micromanage this one character at a time and our attacks do not go off at the same time due to the system.
How I am interpreting what you are saying, and there is a good chance I am misunderstanding, is the tabletop equivalent of having the party set up the ambush, but one person attacks before they are supposed to, which definitely would cause the enemy to make a perception check or be surprised, before any of the rest of the party gets to go. If there was a way to bring everyone into the combat once the first character has attacked, but guarantee the rest of our party got to attack first (to simulate all of us attacking at once) then I would be ok with that. I just feel like Larian would muck this up somehow and the rest of our characters would get stuck in initiative order wherever the dice puts them, forfeiting the ambush attack they would have had in multiplayer and tabletop.
