The Steel Foundry is another one where I like the idea but I agree the execution is annoying. Especially downstairs. I’m all for the Gondians taking on their own fight, and for freedom to come at a cost for some of them, but while I think their AI might be a bit better than it was it’s still pretty poor, and the fact that some of them start off so outnumbered in groups of enemies shows they planned their uprising very poorly. And in my last playthrough, one of the guards dropped a detonator after all my party had used their turns so I could do nothing but wait while all the Gondians pointlessly fired off ineffective spells while their doom approached (does the game say they can’t touch the detonators with their collars on? You’d have thought such talented engineers would be able to disarm the detonators themselves).
It feels like encounters like these could have been so much fun if they were designed to allow different approaches than straight up combat. My instinct on my first run was to do it covertly and I tried so many different combinations of spells and items thinking that there must be another way to do this than simply attacking the banites.
