Sensuki

People are complaining in this thread that combat feels nothing like the Infinity Engine games. One of those reasons is due to Melee Engagement. RPGs borrow mechanics from other genres, not the other way around. What's unique to RPGs is usually character advancement. We are not talking about character advancement here we are talking about systems. I came to Baldur's Gate from games like Warcraft 2 and Age of Empires 2 and I felt right at home. Units in the IE games control exactly like an RTS game, moving units around in Icewind Dale feels not too dissimilar from playing the Warcraft 3 single player campaign except that the IE games are a left-click game, not a right-click game. AoO's might be an RPG-thing, but it's a turn-based RPG thing and most people (although no doubt not you because you prefer the NWN games) think that AoOs are bad in real-time. No, you need to make a tactical retreat when your units are in melee and have taken damage. The moment you move at all in melee combat, you suffer an instant disengagement attack that has no animation. Therefore it's usually a bad tactical decision to move at all, once in melee.

You hit your own Fighter with AoE cripple at the start, shoulda aimed it so he was in the foe-only AoE How does your BB Priest have those extra spells in the action bar?

I did specifically request Cubiq to help me demonstrate the mod as he seems interested in having Melee Engagement removed too. I plan to do some myself eventually.

That's a load of bull. Give me a situation or encounter where you think it didn't work - and I'll make you videos showing that it does. I have an entire Icewind Dale playthrough that showcases me completely manipulating the Icewind Dale AI in every encounter. I'm quite happy to play BG1 as that's pretty easy to get through and I've got a ToB install with a save in Saradush - so I can do anything in the Sendai Enclave or Abazigal's Lair easily enough. The Infinity Engine IS an RTS engine, and BioWare were devloping an RTS called Battleground Infinity before Feargus Urquhart suggested they use the engine for Baldur's Gate 1. The combat plays like RTS combat. The RPG parts are the to-hit systems and the character advancement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Engine Pillars of Eternity is supposed to play like an Infinity Engine game, I am not promoting that it does any differently. IIRC you prefer the NWN games to the IE games Captain Shrek.

This would make me dabble in mixed skills: If the game design had an even number of unique options for mixed skills (such as "The PC must have 4 in Mechanics AND 4 in Lore to unlock this option") then I would do it ... but I haven't seen anything to encourage me doing this yet and I highly doubt there are many situations that require the PC (or NPC) to have two different skills. Players are used to maxing something because the other option is almost never rewarded at all, or often enough to worth considering. THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH THE SKILL DESIGN - THE RPG OPTIONS. IT'S NOT THE SYSTEM.

AoOs remove/trivialize tactical movement and positioning in real-time combat. Once you enter melee, it's usually a bad idea to exit from it until there are no more melee opponents. It's not too bad in D&D 4E because of all the different push clauses in unit powers. I played in a 4E game this year and I regularly used some Druid powers to push enemies away from my friends so that they could use potions, or retreat without suffering AoOs. That kind of gameplay is not "IE-style" though, and PE clearly has not been designed with pushes/slides etc in mind. It's also not turn-based. Tactical movement in combat in any RTS-style game (and thus IE style game) is stuff like retreating low health units to the back for a heal, changing targets in the middle of combat, moving your characters to intercept an enemy chasing one of your characters. You can't really perform this kind of stuff in Pillars of Eternity at the moment if that character is engaged in combat by multiple enemies, you will die from disengagement attacks. The most important thing is the enemy AI targeting clauses. Players need ways for their melee characters to snag enemies in combat. The IE games already had this pretty much perfect. We don't need disengagement attacks.

No it doesn't. AoO is a mechanic that was ported over from turn-based. It exists to prevent trap situations where the person who moves first loses - essentially, if you spend all your movement points on a turn to move up to an enemy, you then have to wait until the next turn to make an attack. However if that unit acted after you, they can simply just move away and the character that moved first loses. I'm not really sure why turn-based designers didn't just split AP into action points and movement points to fix this (something which Underrail FINALLY did), but anyway. In Real-time with pause (or just real time), if you move up to an enemy, they can attack you as soon as you do it, because units act simultaneously in real time. You can still do that in the normal game, it's because the Enemy AI doesn't change targets when a unit moves away. If the enemy intelligently changes targets then kiting is way harder. Cubiq has an odd play style I haven't recorded any videos with Engagement off yet, but I plan to.

I'm also finding it's generally better to ignore the Boar Companion and attack the Ranger himself. The Boar is way harder to deal damage to, so I've started just making the boar attack my Fighter at the start, and then changing targets. No point attacking it really.

There should be no AoO's they are unnecessary. If you want to attack someone moving next to you - target them yourself.

He does more damage than the others even without Wounds. Him and Medreth have the highest DPS (Medreth has Deep Wounds, which is still pretty OP).

Oh yep - that's fair enough. I actually think it's better off without green and red because Armor is a trade off for speed anyway (and so are weapons).

I and others requested the feature because it's handy for comparing items on the fly. The IE game mouse over scroll only showed the item name. The stock PE one showed some basic stats of the item. May as well go all the way and compare them to equipped as well like most ARPG games do these days. You can still right click inspect.

Bits like this in the back of the scene stand out to me (you have to view the picture full size). It's not a big deal, but I do notice it. Don't think they have the art time to touch stuff like that up though.

And the save menu also did it, although the screen stayed mostly black Had to crash the game to exit.

This has also happened to me with the Options menu. I selected Quit from the options menu and the options menu persisted into the Main Menu.

By 'sharpness' I think he means that you can blatantly tell that it's rendered from a 3D scene, as the detail gets worse in the distance. The Ruins in the Dyrford picture look particularly bad at a distance.

There's two parts to the Melee Engagement system. 1 - There's an AI clause that forces your units, and enemy units to attack eachother when engaged, and cancel their current actions 2 - If you move (at all), you suffer a disengagement attack from the units you are engaged by Enemies will not disengage you unless you force them to with a spell of some sort (I haven't tried to yet). Disengagement attacks are only really something that the player has to deal with. This prevents you from retreating units from the front line, most of the time if you try and re-position in melee at all, your character will just die. It removes the option of any sort of tactical positioning in combat whatsoever. The only positioning you get to do is the pre-determined positioning before melee happens. What the important thing is for players is that the enemies attack their front line characters. This already happened in the IE games most of the time, and if it didn't, you could manipulate the enemy AI to make them attack you through unit movement and micromanagement. I want to be able to move my characters around in combat, I want to be able to move them back from the front line for a heal. That is how it should be IMO and that's one of the things I think is sorely missing from the game at the moment. I have modded Engagement out of the game and tested it (and so has Cubiq), if you don't try and run from combat it plays out exactly the same, but it gives you the option to retreat units back safely if you wish ... well ... the Enemy AI targeting clauses are still fairly primitive and they don't act like the IE games. Enemies only change targets when engaged, there's no other clause that forces them to re-evaluate who they are attacking AFAIK. Most of the clauses are related to who to attack at the start of combat. If enemies had the same AI targeting as the IE games, then it would be sweet. Because that's one of the things that makes it real, real easy to kite - when enemies do not re-evaluate their targeting.

Kiting single enemies is something that occurs in every RTS ever, and kiting always occurs in RTS style games when one side has more units than the other. That is how you minimize damage to your units. However, in the Infinity Engine games most fights (not all) start out as group versus group and depending on which game you are playing (play style varies A LOT depending on whether you're playing BG1/IWD1 and BG2/IWD2 IMO). In most fights, you send your Fighters/Rangers/Paladins etc in first to tank the damage, and then drop Cleric and Wizard spells on top of them. Sometimes you assign different units to attack different enemies in 1 vs 1 situations and sometimes you dogpile the same unit to take it down as quick as possible. Most of the time when I play I usually spread my front line out a bit so that damage is being spread evenly across the party and is a bit more manageable. In the IE games characters can use potions to heal themselves, which gives them some independence in combat. In Pillars of Eternity, characters might have a self-healing ability, but if that character is taking too much damage, and you haven't set your Priest aside to solely drop healing spells only then you can't micro your character away from the front line because they will die from multiple disengagement attacks - that's stupid. It removes the option to tactically retreat so that you can safely heal that character. This was an integral part of the gameplay in all of the Infinity Engine games. The IE games already provided the means to control unit aggro, through straight up positioning and movement. If you want enemies to attack your Fighter, move your Fighter forward and the enemies will attack him - use pre-positioning so that the Fighter is the forward-most character in the formation or move him to intercept the oncoming enemies and snag them. Most of the time due to the way the Infinity Engine games AI clauses worked, the enemies would stop and engage the Fighter, if they didn't, you could move the Fighter and block their path which would usually cause them to give up on their desired target and attack the Fighter. It baffles me that some people (perhaps even the devs themselves?) thought that this was an issue, because the AI clauses in the IE games were perfectly serviceable for the purposes of player units snagging enemy units. If you failed to stop enemies from reaching your backline then that was your own fault. You shouldn't need a Melee Engagement system to do it for you. Melee Engagement doesn't prevent kiting, you can still kite enemies around in Pillars of Eternity - nothing will prevent that. When you have more party members than enemy units remaining, you will be able to kite units around with or without the Melee Engagement system. What you won't successfully be able to do is retreat units from the front line to safely heal them like you could in the IE games - I think this is an integral part of the IE games gameplay and I used it frequently in my recent IWD playthrough, the link I have provided previously in the thread. The Melee Engagement system is not needed to make enemy units attack your front line, it's not the Melee Engagement system that forces them to do that - it's the Enemy AI targeting clauses. That's all that's necessary.

Have you beaten it on PotD ? Every character would probably just get one shotted by the Monk guy.

Yeah you've got to be careful with that guy, if you assign the wrong party member to tank his attacks, or even make the wrong type of PC (like a backline character), they'll just destroy your melee characters. Gonna say that monks are a bit OP atm ... lols

Spell FX are way too over the top. Chanter invocations even turn the screen dark ... whoever thought that was a cool idea needs a slap in the face tbh I'm destroying Medreth as long as I have multiple melee characters.

Yes.

By the way just incase everyone hasn't noticed yet You only get one class ability every second level now, so as a level 5 character you only have three class abilities instead of 5.

Here is the first episode of a new series of youtube videos I will be doing - Sensuki vs Medreth. In this episode I play a Hearth Orlan Monk and use the starting BB Party on Hard. I make an incorrect statement in the video about Accuracy and Defense when trying to explain why I chose 20 Perception. I forgot that the ACC-DEF range between -10 and +5 depends on the score of the other attribute as per the paper that Matt516 and myself did. So just ignore the first part of the statement I made in the video. Hope you enjoy the video, I will be making more of these with different classes over the course of the patch. Music in the video is from the Isis - Oceanic album