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

Pretty much what the title says. There's a few fights that have 20+ enemies involved, and pretty much all of them feel bad to play, to me.
The best example of this I can think of is the big fight you can get into in the resolution of Shadowheart's questline in Act 3.
I actually took a stopwatch and timed it, and there was a full two and a half minutes between ending my last character's turn and getting to do anything again, and that's with several enemies acting before that, and several pairs dashing together to use their turn.
Fights with this many enemies just don't work well in a turn-based game when I only have 4 characters I can control. Any of these huge fights would have been much better with 4-6 challenging enemies instead of a swarm of what are basically just fodder, in my opinion.
I applaud you trying to add variety to battles, but this is one thing that just doesn't work well at all.

I disagree. It's fun. Crowd Control spell fun.

There are definitely a few fights that come to mind for this, mainly in Acts II and III. On my first playthrough, I was able to cheese that Shadowheart quest, but I think they patched that over now.

Shar fight is fun/frustrating.

Well Best Way is to Bring 2 Spell Casters with a Lot of Mass targets.( bring a Bunch of Fireball with up lvl spell slots and use a bunch of invisibillity and misty step too, have another spells that works for mass target well too. but fireball yu can Upcast with high slots making even stronger.)
but indeed this game with just 4 man Party kinda Feels overwhelming in some fights in high difficulty even if yu go full illithid and knows how the mechanics works.
(already talked about this in the Suggestion for Party Size.. there are a Few times in the game that yu in deed can have a 5 party man and the game dosent Brake that Hard..)

Although I have a soft spot for turn-based games going back to the X-COM games from the 90's, et al, this is the single single biggest argument for real-time-with-pause there is in my opinion. You basically CAN'T have large battles in turn-based, it just doesn't work.

I strongly disagree. The more combatants, the better.

I wish PCs could handle full on wars with thousands of combatants on the battlefield.

And then you'd wait for 4 hours between turns?

Just speed up animations of low lv mobs

Thousands of combattants, no.

But a 6-8 peeps party and some of the finer details of previous D&D systems would have been great.

Cast Darkness.

Cast Sleet Storm.

Cast Fireballs.

Cast Turn Undead.

I *love* massive battles.

Its not fun because it's not hard enough.
Those dark justiciars are really booringly easy.
They are at the same difficulty lvl then goblins but you are already lvl 6-7-8 or even 9.
If it would be a horror movie and you would need to use everything what you have just to survive. The fight whould be intresting.

You can. It's a matter of implementation (encounter / campaign design, plus speed of animations, etc.).



Though naturally, a TB game FULL of large scale battles is another matter. I wouldn't want to play through Wrath Of The Righteous TB exclusively (there's way too much combat for TB anyway), though individually, playing the tavern siege in the early game felt kind of "epic" in TB, in PARTS because it wasn't over then in a blink of the eye (to exaggerate). Speaking about which, Wrath allows you to speed up combat/movement animations by pressing a key.

^ PIllars of Eternity 2 allows you to do that too and with a lot less trash battles.

Play Pillars of Eternity 2 (it's the RPG of the last decade!)

Thanks, but I don't listen to podcasts on 2x speed and don't want my d&d simulations to have run on 20x speed either.

Edit: also, a lot more goes into painstakingly creating animations for a 4k AAA game, so expecting them to just speed things up to fix things? Simplistic and doesn't really resolve all the problems created by a turn-based game design. Ultimately relying on turn based is just lazy game design and evading the complexities of designing a real-time game.

Tried it, wasn't into it, so no thanks.

I actually enjoy large battles.

In fact, I miss more battles with Dragons, Giants, or larger armies.

Larian could remove some time off extra animations like the die roll..no need to take forever.

but large battles are cool.

You actually have to look at the big picture and plan ahead. I enjoy planning and using spells and effects such as

wall of stone
blade barrier
wall of ice or fire
guardian of faith
web
grease
cloudkill (and then move it to another region)
smokepowder barrel

There was a large battle, against some undead at ancient ruins, a horizontal blade barrier was amazing.

but the most unusual solution was in another tough fight, I think at Shar´s temple, where I used a longitudinal blade barrier..rather than horizontal.
The corridor was narrow, but the opponents could jump over my previous attempt at horizontal wall of ice.
So this time I tried the blade barrier along the corridor.. it worked better than expected! I just retreated and waited for the giant Mixer to do its job.

the large battle close to the Netherbrain... right after gathering all the allies...that was somewhat difficult and cool too.

the enemies kept coming..

overall I am very satisfied with Baldur´s Gate 3.. I am sure Larian is very proud of this game!

Combat in general is a painful chore in BG3. All combat sucks in the game. But yes, encounters with anything more than 5-6 enemies is completely ridiculous. Hopefully someone will make a mod through which these encounters can be resolved with the press of a keyboard key. Afterall, most of the game needs to be modded out anyway.

But a Bunch of Encounters yu can actually do in only speech check try it out act 2 is notorious for this.. yu can take the 3 boss Easy only by talk another battles too during the game yu can resolve only by speech check thats why Charisma Based Chars in this game are actually the Trueeee Chads..
its Like Playing Easy mode.. not Joking.. Just Give a Try especially if yu go the Dark way.. just intimidate the hell out of evrybody and persuade yu will lought a lot..
Most of times yu make the Fight easy or will just Brake the dude just with your Speech kinda boss like.
(almost all the times as Durge I was the Boss in the Roon Sorry kethric..haha)

I love big battles!