You forgot the most important things which is that AI is way more intelligent on tactician mode and that is why I will only play on tactician.
I am undecided. I think I'll leave it at balanced for my first playthrough. Just so I can 'let myself be ambushed' and so forth. Then again, I am rather adamant at playing no-reload in CRPGS. So Game Over, is back to the Main Menu. It makes it *so* much more exciting, especially when playing blind.
If this ends up being like a 200 hour game and it probably will since the average for early access was 70 hours to complete and that wasn't even the entirety of the full game Act 1 which is less than a quarter of the game, I definitely wouldn't self impose restarts because replaying the first 100+ hours over again instead of seeing the end of the game and starting a new playthrough after is far better. There are going to be a ton of endings and a ton of ways to go about the story and from what Swen said a lot of the consequences to our actions won't become apparent until Act 3 near the end of the game so you could die 100+ hours in and not even seen the consequences of your actions so you don't even have the benefit of exploring other branches because you don't know what would have happened as a consequence of the stuff you did the first time.
As for tactician mode, I don't particularly like it because the way they described it, it doesn't really sound like the AI is smarter as much as it has different priorities...but you can still play around those priorities and manipulate them to the point the AI will still walk into a meat-grinder all the same as on normal. The problem I have with it is that at least in the example they displayed the goblins were mainly a threat because they were given explosives...which comes across more as a cheap way to increase difficulty. And that's in the early game alone...if the rest of tactician is like that I don't really care for it. It is a super tough challenge if you want basically an unfair mode though I have no doubt players will find ways to destroy it and make the AI look dumber than a brick in the process.
