Sensuki

Most of the abilities related to Engagement are optional, it's either a class ability or a talent or a spell related to them. Those are all strategical resources and spending a character advancement point on one of those just so you can have the possibility of maybe doing some in melee movement in combat is a complete joke, not to mention most of the abilities are laughably bad - Wild Sprint gives you -20 to Deflection HAHAHA, "yes I want to suffer a critical hit when I get disengaged!" . It is always better to not invest in those trap choices and just use option 2 - clutch heal melee characters when they get low. The only ability kinda worth using is the Rogue Escape, because it's level 1, per-encounter and it's handy. However it's either bugged or undergone a bit of a nerf because you only seem to go like 2 metres in game now, so I don't cast it anymore in v333. Did you just seriously accuse me of this? Because this is all you and Shevek have been doing. The situations I have described are real in-game examples and they happen all the time. I have even made videos of some of them. Neither of you have played without Engagement. Shevek has been stating fear of enemies not attacking his desired party members. You have been using similar analogies, as if the AI is a human player. The AI doesn't play like that. A Human player might, but the AI doesn't. The Fighter won't use Knockdown to break Engagement because he is almost always engaged by more than one unit. If a player does that, he's an idiot. All you have been doing the whole time is quoting one thing I say, and then going on and on about your point, and then making an unnecessary analogy for it. I think Engagement is flawed at the conceptual level and no implementation of it will be good enough for me. I fight for it's removal because I will not put up with the stale combat that it promotes. It is a turn-based mechanic implemented in real-time combat. I will not waste advancement points just to possibly enable me to facilitate movement in melee, because the optimal choice is always not to do that. You guys probably don't move in combat in other games (even the IE games), and if your play style is just stand still and twiddle your thumbs, then yeah the current situation probably favors you. Shevek cowers in fear of pausing and micromanagement, about actually having to do something other than move his unit to engage an enemy to manipulate enemy AI targeting. More importantly, for every single change they make to the system - there will be exploits (because of the conceptual and design flaw) and I look forward to finding them and using them to my advantage.

You're wrong. I have messed with the controls because I tried to bind cancel to RMB. In v278 it broke Formation Rotate and right click move. In v301 it broke Formation Rotate, and this build it won't let me bind both keys to RMB. If you unbind Formation Rotate from RMB, the RMB move is still there.

You can feel free to do that, but I will oppose anyone who mentions the idea on the forums and I'm 99.99% positive that they won't change how the mouse buttons are currently set up, even to implement my proposed suggestions to improve them.

v333 was the buggiest patch since v257 IMO. That's why. I reported 65 bugs/issues this patch alone - they probably knew about a lot of or most of them, but the majority were new to v333 bugs. The double click bug was annoying, I had to delete it from the game code just to play properly.

Nope. I've never said that. I've said that it would be fine in the middle or on the left. I don't care as long as it's not on the right. Due to the fact that the portrait area in this game is pretty large horizontally, the middle doesn't seem like a valid option. You can argue against the control scheme all you like but they aren't going to change it. Because that's how the IE games did it. That is the main reason for many things on this project. Whether they were implemented with the understanding of why the IE games did it is another matter entirely.

Yes I can, because I have been playing games with left click move since 1998. It's not my fault that you haven't been playing them as much as I have. You will have the same difficulty reading the combat log on the fly as I do, but you might not care as much as I do.

Nope. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I've played heaps of games that split them, but for party based RPGs I honestly prefer left click move and select.

The control scheme has nothing to do with skeuomorphism. It is the way it is because that's how it was in the IE games. There's a couple of minor differences with the RMB that need to be changed - move needs to auto-rotate formation like LMB and it should be a cancel+move. Both mouse buttons have an inbuilt command. Left click is move and select. Left click hold is marquee select. Right click is move with no select, and right click hold is formation rotate. I do not think either of these should be changed at all, and that RMB should also include a cancel+move no select. I can understand if people want to swap the functions of RMB and LMB over, but I don't think it will be possible (or at least very tricky) to code it so that you can split the functions without breaking 'how it works' - and breaking how it works would not be okay by me.

Be nice to get some proper patch notes for a change too

Last time probably could have used an extra day or two to fix some silly bugs. No need to make the same mistake this time either.

Both mouse buttons have an inbuilt command. Left click is move and select. Left click hold is marquee select. Right click is move with no select, and right click hold is formation rotate. I do not think either of these should be changed at all, and that RMB should also include a cancel+move no select. I can understand if people want to swap the functions of RMB and LMB over, but not remove components of them - that would not be okay by me.

No. You (as in you personally) don't move your characters away, you're happy with them dropping right? That won't change if Engagement was gone. Not a bit. But it will allow me to move a character back, intercede with another character and heal the wounded character, and then shuffle their positions in melee like I do in the Infinity Engine games. You are not forced to move. You (plural, not personally) do not have to weigh your options. There is no decision to be made - you might think there is, and you (personally) demonstrated in a recent video how the choice is heal, stand there and die, or move there and die when you have a character with low endurance. And it would make the game more tactical, it's just that you have the opinion that moving is abusive, and you just stand there and don't even control your characters in combat. I don't believe that you believe that movement should cost something, but it's probably an argument that you're going to use for convenience sake. What did you say about the removal of recovery time? Nothing. You probably didn't even notice a difference. Not if there was an incentive to save them, currently there isn't. The best decision is pretty much always to open with per-encounters for everybody except classes that have none. The AI follows a pre-programmed script. Currently enemies that have per encounters are scripted to open with them, if there is a better option for the player, the AI can be adjusted to follow different rules with different weighted actions Probably not IMO, because at the moment, PE is all about the opening. That's unlikely to change at all really, unless something is done to the ability and spell systems to promote more of a reaction from the player, rather than just piling on more dps and status effects. Depends on how the AI targeting clauses are changed to reflect the removal of Engagement. The AI targeting clause used for engagement could be changed from "first enemy engaged by" to "first melee attacker attacked by" and it would be the same for enemies. However the current system is underdeveloped. I want some target reacquisition, and so do others, because the current AI is laughably bad. You can kite enemies currently with the Engagement system, you can stick your nose up in the air at my videos all you like but I have recorded videos where I kite enemies around in circles and kill all of them with a single unit. Engagement does not prevent kiting, this has been established. This game is going to have target reacquisition eventually. If there are more melee enemies than your Fighter and other melee units can engage, those units may end up changing targets during battle, and if your units are engaging, it is also likely that they are being engaged as well. You will not be able to move those units to respond to the other melee units moving, you will have to use disables and slows that your backline units may have (Rogue Crippling Strike, Wizard Slow, Cipher confusion/charm etc). The only difference in that situation will be that you can use your melee units to cut them off if you like. Enemies *do not move* to do anything except get in range to perform actions. If a melee unit is performing melee actions, they will not move because they are currently in range of their target. If ranged units and casters are in range of their target, they will not move. If enemies responded to the first melee unit they were attacked by - problem solved, they would turn to attack you like they currently do. I have stated multiple times over multiple threads that it is the targeting clause of the Engagement system that you like. It can still exist without the disengagement attacks.

Yes that's exactly how the IE games had it. Some people have a foggy memory I guess? It's their fault for doing a silly design with spaces between the portraits. And you can re-bind the controls, you know.

Give me a sec (in a dota 2 game) and i'll pm you

Yeah it's all about how the AI targeting clauses work. The enemy in PE is simple and deterministic, they don't just randomly move around and they don't do it with engagement disabled. When it is disabled, it boils down to the two targeting clauses that I repeatedly explained in other threads - enemy that last attacked, and first closest enemy. If the game used the very nice Icewind Dale Heart of Winter targeting AI then it would be great (but not the very simple/crappy Baldur's Gate targeting system).

To be honest man that's a retarded assumption because you have no understanding of how the AI in Pillars of Eternity works. I have a mod that removes engagement, if you want to actually try PE without engagement then you can. Instead of making some ridiculous claim because you played Bioware's latest not-even-anything-like-the-infinity-engine game and enemies don't attack you because you're attacking them.

I would also like to add, that people's opinions on targeting in the IE games depends which game you are playing. The Baldur's Gate series has very simple distance based AI targeting, where it's really easy to kite enemies around (bad), but Icewind Dale Heart of Winter has very good AI targeting that is a bit more complicated. Since that's the game I played recently, that's where I've been drawing most of my examples from.

If you're still struggling, perhaps I need to highlight the important points for you? Let me try that. My reason first and foremost for that I have already stated many times - Engagement prevents tactical retreating, and it makes movement in melee combat a trap choice aka don't do it. If you have actually been reading my posts properly then I'm not sure how hard that can be to understand. Josh was telling Jesse Cox not to move in melee combat in the twitch stream. The current idea is that you have to spend a resource to move - for melee that resource could be endurance and health or investing in a talent or ability, for ranged it's recovery time (and it also used to be recovery time for melee too). This makes moving in combat NOT WORTH IT, why would you do it, when you can simply just clutch heal your tank instead, and just deal raw dps to kill the enemy as fast as possible ? It's a trap choice. I will not spend a resource just for the possibility of moving in real-time combat. I have not seen a single person in their streams using these abilities to move in melee. Everyone just stands there and stays in the same spot because that's what the game design wants you to do. However you can still kite the enemy into oblivion. One of the things the Melee Engagement system was trying to remove. Melee Engagement makes moving in combat a binary trap choice, and it leads to boring gameplay which is less tactical, because it reduces the amount of options that you have to solve the problems that you are faced with in combat. These options were present in the Infinity Engine, and often the design promoted it, and many of the mods for the IE games (such as the Harder Yxunomei and Harder Belhifet mods I used in my IWD Let's Play) almost make it a requirement to keep all of your characters alive in combat. I really enjoy that gameplay. Stickiness through abilities is already in the game - Rogues have Crippling Strike, Fighter has Knock Down, Cipher has a stack of disables, Wizard has a slow spell. It's not really the player that needs these abilities because all the player needs to do to manipulate enemy positioning is understand the targeting clauses and position and move their units relative to those. Enemy AI can be programmed to make use of these to stop the player moving, players that aren't so good can use them as a fail safe, and they can also be used for things other than facilitating your own movement, or stopping enemy movement as well, and can play into certain combos. Are you seriously advocating cooldowns????? Because cooldowns are specifically being avoided because the backers at large did not want them. MMO Aggro mechanics are also something that the backers at large specifically didn't want - however they've been tricked into suffering a similar version of them in the Melee Engagement system. Many people here have complained about not being able to stop enemies in the Infinity Engine games, and that was simply because they did not understand how the targeting clauses worked. I believe that is the main reason why people want Melee Engagement - because it gives them a way to very easily control the combat situation with pretty much no effort. I have stated that this can easily be achieved through the targeting clauses alone, and does not require a discrete system to facilitate it. For me, Melee Engagement = dumbing down the gameplay, and the 'disengagement attack' mechanic is hurtful to the feel and flow of combat. I was receptive to the idea at first, but after having given it a go, and then playing Icewind Dale to get a 'feel' for the differences I have decided that it really needs to go. I have tested it's removal, so has Cubiq and so has Captain Shrek - we all think combat feels more Infinity Engine without it, even though some large improvements to AI targeting and maybe a small tweak to attack animation interaction with moving targets need to be made to fully make it work. For people that really want to nail down unit movement in combat on top of taking advantage of the AI targeting clauses, there are and could be more abilities in the game to facilitate that. I don't think it's worth saving, because it will likely take a lot of programming time and probably some problem solving time for Josh to be able to improve to a reasonable level, which will eat too much into more important things. In fact, I think the system is conceptually flawed, and if the concept is flawed, then the implementation will also be flawed. Personally I don't think that's a very difficult viewpoint to understand, and I don't think I can explain it (again) any more clearly than that.

Yep, go to graphics options and you'll find a checkbox for Solid HUD. But it hasn't been created yet so the art isn't there.

There is going to be a solid hud option apparently

When a character of mine drops in the IE games, I reload. I do the same in PE too, unless I'm doing testing.

I cross-post most of the important posts in the RPGCodex thread, you could always check that if you feel like you're missing out.

In some of my videos I have summoned clothing for characters, but not all.

That problem is because they haven't designed the UI properly (solid HUD). In the IE games (yep, I'm using it again) if you misclicked on the UI, you just clicked on the UI and nothing happened, it didn't move your characters in the game world. PE still has hotspots on the UI where the mouse interacts with the game world, and many of the keyboard shortcuts do as well. You can change your key bindings to right click move instead, but both buttons are needed to facilitate move/select and formation rotate.

Nothing to do with balance though, which you stated was the reason for suggesting it