Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Fights with large numbers of enemies are no fun

In the early 90s there where many strategy games with many units and they where fine to play. Allot of them where "you move all your units then the enemy moves all its units" and yeah, you could wait quite some time. Like the old Warsong/Langrisser and Daisenryaku games where especially like that.

That is why when games like Shining Force, Tactics Ogre came around, which added a system where every unit has a "speed" and thus gets its turn based on that, where more fun and engaging. The PS1 had many games that where like that, Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts come to mind.

Baldurs Gate 3 uses a D4 +bonus for Initiative, not a D20 + Dexterity. They did that for the sake that the player can move more then one unit at a time. But to be honest, in many fights it would be allot better if you not move 4 characters at once and then can go on a restroom break. Being able to have 6 characters instead of 4 would also help the issue.

Whereas relying on real-time is just catering to the crowd who'd rather play the latest action blockbuster fad, which suspiciously all RPG developers were forced to do as soon as consoles then dominated by action games as well as Diablo entered the markets.

(I enjoy real-time too, but what you posted is just nonsense. Unless, of course, you have a big bias over either of the two in which case your loss. You're losing out on a lot of decent games no matter if you hate on either RT or TB, as both allow for very distinct and different kinds of combat.)

Generally I agree with your observation. If you do large scale battles, there needs to be a limit, and the encounter and system and animation design needs to suit. Also the focus with TB should generally be on smaller battles, and less copy&paste trash combat (quality over quantity encounters). However, the same as TB and larg scale battles need to be treated with cautious, I also think that real-time in tendency doesn't necessarily suit more complex systems as well as simpler ones. I've just re-installed BG1, and it immediately struck me how much more fluid its combat plays compared to Pillars Of Eternity or Pathfinder.

It's because BG is based on AD&D 2e, and that has much less complexity and micro-management of abilities going on (let alone MMO-inspired cooldown abilities to monitor and re-activate across the entire party as in Obsidian's Tyranny). Fighters are basically fighters. You click and they fight. Only mages eventually get some complexity. All of this goes for enemies es also. In combanation combat in BG plays much closer to an RTS like Warcraft (where Bioware got the inspiration from). And you don't pause near as much. In theory, D&E5e should suit real-time better than anything 3rd editionish also though. At some point, if things are this complex that you are pausing your real-time combat constantly, it's the worst of two worlds. Still, there's a huge RTvsTB thread, and I don't want to drag it there.