Sensuki

depends how well implemented they are

That was me making an assumption based on this quote http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=450779261 I am not 100% sure exactly what he meant, I was just saying that if they think that per-rest resources are the problem (they are not in my opinion) then I wouldn't be surprised if they remove them altogether, or change the resting system or something like that. They do not seem to be too interested in resource management. It's not too surprising as it can be a difficult thing to perfectly achieve and their new 'audience' does not seem to be too concerned about it either. I believe the IE games did a fair job IF you rest as you might in P&P. For them, and for many players the lack of a hard restriction is not acceptable. I have my own ideas on how to fix such problems, but I'm not going to publicly state them as some of them will likely end up manifesting in Copper Dreams. Well that's the thing. Obsidian has found a 'new' audience with this game, and this audience probably doesn't care about such things. As a prominent RPGCodex poster called Roguey often says Obsidian's outlook seems to be "grogs can take a hike" and I believe he/she is probably right.

Good luck getting many of them to do that I did an IWD playthrough during the beta and I found it a very helpful and grounding experience. Because I was looking at the gameplay with a more critical eye, it helped me understand things I previously took for granted. From what I've read Pillars of Eternity 2 will go even further down the path they've gone - I'm probably thinking that per-rest abilities might be totally eliminated in favor of per-encounter or alternate replenishing resources like the Monk, Cipher and Chanter. Strategical resource management will be out the window, though I believe there will be less system bloat, and less item bloat.

Backers gave pretty good attention to the combat system but the majority of people's opinions on it were somewhat ignored by the developers, who insisted that "we don't need people's help to get the basics right" (semi-quote/paraphrase from a Josh Sawyer interview) or that it was too late to make major changes. What I think might have helped is getting backers in earlier than the beta, such as during the alpha. In regards to what I've enjoyed from the last 5-6 years. I'll edit my post with that info soon. edit: What I've enjoyed between 2009-2015 Knights of the Chalice - GREAT OGL D&D style turn-based RPG in the style of Dark Sun Shattered Lands The Witcher 2 - horrendous action combat made serviceable with the Rise of the Sword mod. Fairly good story/plot, writing and political intrigue but not as good quest design as The Witcher 1. Have not played The Witcher 3, don't intend to at this stage. Mass Effect 2 - the best cinematic popamole RPG experience, combat was better in Mass Effect 1 though. Hated Mass Effect 3. Will not buy another BioWare game ever again. Aarklash Legacy - Good RTWP with fun setpiece encounters in enclosed spaces, can get repetitive and boring after a while though. Path of Exile - better Diablo 3 than Diablo 3. Expeditions: Conquistador - really good strategical RPG, passable turn-based combat, fun resting system, decent overland exploration mechanics, surprisingly good writing and unique companion style ... which they are dropping for Vikings in favor of traditional style companions *facepalm* Shadowrun Returns - pretty fun detective style story for first half of the game that goes full retard later on, combat has a few good encounters but it's a short game so you don't really have the chance to get too bored. I did not like what I played of Shadowrun Dragonfall (writing sucked) and I have not bothered with Hong Kong either. The Banner Saga - I actually don't like the strategical resource management side of this game, but I really like the combat system, would be super good with encounters against unique enemies but I'm not sure if that will happen for the sequel. Non-RPG DotA 2 - DotA player since 2004, best tactical combat game ever made

Just doing a drive-by. I have no confidence that PE:2 will even remotely cater to my preferences. Feel free to PM me if you want to chat though, I'll get an email.

I haven't posted here in months. Someone on the RPGCodex linked me to a thread, and then I found this discussion. I have actually moved onto new business, as I stated earlier in the thread and I'll have more information on that later in the year. For those that follow my youtube channel, keep an eye on it. The majority of my post count is from the Pillars of Eternity beta forums. I reported 600+ bugs during the beta. You're welcome. Oh yes, those you disagree with must be silenced!

Nah I didn't. Stopped in Act 3. Haven't touched the game since April. What I read about the last part of the game in this thread pretty much assures me that I definitely made the right decision: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-writing-in-this-game-is-average.98103/

Despite hating the game, I actually learned a lot from the Kickstarter, Development Updates and participating in the beta and I am using this experience in a positive fashion on another project (will have more info on that in a few months). I regret upping my pledge to the $250 tier for the physical rewards because TBH they're not that good, and I didn't like the game. The game isn't good enough or popular enough for my sealed CE and extras to be worth much money either. I think my expectations were fair enough actually, based on what the developers said. The area of the game that ended up best delivering was the Environment Art. Constantly throughout the development cycle they used the buzzword tactical combat ... except the combat isn't very tactical. It's just a buzzword they use. Josh Sawyer also explicitly mentioned reactive tactical combat a fair few times, and the game is the polar opposite. When I raised concerns about the combat in the beta, I was told that it would be different in the full game with the full range of levels and creatures. It wasn't ... it was worse tenfold. Indeed, after my experience with this game, I have not backed a single crowd-funding project since. I have lukewarm opinions about both Wasteland 2 and Divinity Original Sin. No longer do I believe that a well-known developer has the heart to produce a good game. They came to crowd-funding for their own benefits - to be able to make more money and not have to deal with meddling publisher supervising producers. The real heart lies with the smaller companies - Logic Artists, Whalenought Studios, Iron Tower, Styg (who is making Underrail). Medium sized companies like Obsidian, inXile, Larian (and now Hairbrained) care more about the success of their company than they do about the quality of their products and I believe that their games will ultimately be too lowest common denominator for my enjoyment. Actually, what's worse than the crap combat (IMO) is how terrible the story and plot of the game is. That to me was the bigger disappointment. I would actually finish the game if the story/plot was good, but my goodness it's bad for an Obsidian game. It's also telling that Chris Avellone, Obsidian's ex-best writer is very, very hesitant to even mention the game, let alone talk about it. And yeah I'm a "serial power gamer" . Pillars is pretty good for 'role playing', as you can make lots of different character concepts and stuff. Even if it is largely superficial. As I said before, for me combat feel is far more important to me than a wide array of choices at character creation and level up.

There is some incorrect information in that guide, and all other guides I've seen that speak about attack speed. They forget that the game has a global recovery multiplier that modifies the recovery frames so that it is not directly as follows I'm fairly sure from memory that the global recovery modified is 1.4, so the recovery for a fast weapon is actually 28 frames, not 20 frames. The recovery for a normal weapon is 42 frames as a base, instead of 30 and after this calculation, you then apply modifiers. I'm 99% positive I covered this in my youtube guide about UI and Controls, and there are definitely posts on the forum about it. For some reason this info seems to have slipped through the cracks.

Excuse me, you insulted Gairnulf based on what I believe to be a misconception about what he posted, and now because I said some things you don't agree with about a game that you like you're doing the same to me? Are you kidding? Oh yes, I'm the one trying to win a discussion ... I'm the one that instead of talking about game mechanics, starts criticizing the fact that someone replies to off topic points. types a lot of words, actually debates issues and defends a friend from abuse. Here Gairnulf is on the previous page talking about the game, and then you come along and go "Do you even understand English????" and accuse him of lying. That's some antagonistic posting right there. You were the one that responded to my complaint about Pillars of Eternity combat visual clarity citing the ability to read unit statistics in a unit tooltip box as an example of "being easier to read". Other than being able to see some stats, it doesn't have anything to do with the actual gameplay. You can optionally use that information to influence your decision making, but that's it. I think it's pretty clear that I have a firm grasp on what I'm interjecting into the conversation, but you're trying your hardest to break it down. Yeah, that's right. Pillars is more transparent, and thus easier by default. I won't deny that the Combat HUD is extremely useful for testing purposes though! Found quite a few bugs because of it. A lot of players simply cannot help themselves and end up abusing rest spamming in the IE games to make combat easier for themselves. I've never done it as I really enjoy strategical resource management. If you do it, you're opting out of tactical gameplay, and most likely making the game less fun. The Infinity Engine games offer you the ability to tactically respond to enemies in combat, or strategically prepare against them through pre-buffing, and you can use any combination of both. The catch is that when you pre-buff, you tend to use more spells than you would have if you just waited to see what enemies did and cast the ones you need in combat and as a result, you run out of spells faster across your adventuring day. Most players that still play today probably are using the Rest Anywhere mod as well, which makes it as simple as a button click, and you don't have to worry if you're not in an area that permits resting. I also use it, but I try and last as long as possible between rests, particularly in Icewind Dale, as it is a linear game. The Lead Designer of this game, Josh Sawyer believes that the majority of IE players used rest-spamming extensively (something I disagree with, I think that less people do it than he thinks). As a result, the game was designed FOR these people. Management of Strategical resources was largely taken away with the abundance of per-encounter abilities, meaning that players always have many active abilities to use every encounter so that no one ever gets the feeling of being low on spells or anything like that. Rest spamming was also slightly policed, with the use of camping supplies ... this approach seems to have been somewhat effective in regards to these people. But for me, and others like me, it has absolutely wrecked the combat feel ... as our gameplay style ... you know actually playing properly and not spamming rest, was not even considered - and while it's completely unnecessary in Pillars of Eternity, you always have an overabundance of resources and this overabundance largely eliminates any tactical consideration of use, it just becomes spam every per-encounter every combat. The game was designed for people who are more into strategical decision making and that's why decision making for combat mostly takes place before encounters begin. Pillars combat is probably more fun the worse you are at the combat, because if you make mistakes then at least you'll have to make tactical decisions. Good for you that you fall into the target audience for the combat, on the other hand I have shattered dreams, and I'm seriously pissed off about it.

Indeed, in BG1 you can meet your end quickly if you're not careful.

As I said before, there is a difference between needing to pause to issue commands to reduce the game-time delay of your unit actions and pausing the game to collapse UI elements to read the information. Pillars combat bores me because it is essentially over as soon as it starts, if your alpha strike is good, you will win and it's just a matter of going through the motions and spamming your per-encounters to keep your advantage. That's not fun to me. That is simply rote banality. IE combat requires you to wait and see what enemies do and respond to enemy actions. You can't just breeze through with your pre-determined set of actions, ignoring what they are doing (unless you light yourself up like a Christmas tree with pre-buffs, of course). Such as?

There is a difference between needing to pause to make decisions and needing to pause to be able to read information that is not displayed visually at a glance. How is having to pause all the time to collapse UI elements to read information a good thing? If anything all it is is a result of obtuse system design combined with a failure in the department of visual and UI design. This is also untrue I play the Infinity Engine games at 40 FPS animation speed (aka 33% faster than normal speed). See that AI Update / Frame rate slider, move that along and it speeds up the game. 30 FPS is too slow for me and the animations look laggy, I find that 40 FPS is the best combination of pace and smoothness (YMMV). At 40 FPS, per unit round timers are now 4 seconds. Here is an example of combat at that speed I know these spells have been in the game for quite a long time, but they do not remove effects. Therefore, they are not dispelling. When I played the game, I did not use a single spell to reduce the durations of any effects on my characters. I did not need to. Most non-CC afflictions are so mild that they can simply be ignored. That's right and 99% of the time, it's worthless to bother. I think I might have used one once in my playthrough, but maybe not even.

I am interested in discussion, there are no forum rules here saying that posters have to stay on topic. No it doesn't. Without the effort that we put in to compile the mechanical information about the game, the community would not be in it's current state. You're taking the word read as a literal expression implying "reading words" when I was referring to "reading the play". If you're not familiar it means to visually look at and understand what is going on in the game. IE combat is much easier to comprehend simply by looking at the screen and the combat log ... which is also in the middle bottom of the UI which is the most comfortable position on the screen for on the fly reading. In Pillars of Eternity, you have to constantly pause the game if you want to find out some information because the game is a visual cluster****, there's so much crap that pastes into the combat log and it's in an uncomfortable spot to read while the game is unpaused. Not once have I ever looked at the unit tooltips in the top of the screen. In fact, I'm fairly sure I disable them with the IE mod when I played. They tell me nothing because at least when I played, any information that I needed I could look up in the combat log. If I saw a low damage score in the log, I would just collapse the entry and read the line in there. To do that though, I had to pause the game and look that information up, whereas in the Infinity Engine games, which have great visual clarity and make excellent use of distinct animations and FX, and are not cluttered with extra UI elements, you can tell what's happening simply by looking at the screen, or glancing down at the lines in the combat log. Due to the nature of Pillars of Eternity's complicated mechanics, the game often requires you to pause the game and then further inspect a UI element to understand some problems. You did not need to display immunities in the IE games because every time a character attacked a monster, they would bark "THIS ONE IS IMMUNE" or something like that and a line would paste into the combat log (positioned in the bottom middle of the screen which is the easiest spot to read) and you would see the *this monster was immune to my damage* line. I imagine that the implementation of affliction immunities in Pillars is less graceful than that.

This type of transparency has been present in RPGs before Pillars of Eternity, in fact their implemntation is pretty much a straight copy of what Aarklash: Legacy did. Personally I prefer less information. This information also has nothing to do with the visuals of combat. It used to, but the tooltips were moved from above the units to the top left of the screen because they obscured what was happening in combat. Combat visual clarity is something that this game has always struggled with. Like what? There is no skill or ability in this game that stands out to me. What does stand out to me is the design of the Monk, Chanter and Cipher with their different class resources. , Despite being a far cry from "IE style" their wound, chant and focus mechanics are good ideas even if not excellent implementations. Even if focus is technically mana. I have already acknowledged in this thread that when it comes to character building choice that Pillars of Eternity provides a wide range of options, however I think the actual gameplay and the things that the player does in combat is much more rote, limited and boring compared to the Infinity Engine games. What the player does in combat is far more important to me than having a wide array of choice at character creation and level up. I vehemently disagree. Obsidian ... particularly Josh Sawyer have been fairly open regarding the mechanics of this game, moreso than most, if not all Kickstarter games and definitely moreso than what you would expect from a non-crowdfunded RPG. It is because of the crowdfunding and developer openness and the fact that there have been very dedicated backers following the game since the Kickstarter that have compiled every piece of information from the developers (including many of us asking questions about unknown things) before the game was even released. The game also benefitted from a closed public beta, and pre-release modding and game code reverse engineering where the community was able to figure out what we didn't already know through our own investigation. I made the *very first* guides for Pillars of Eternity the full version because I had access to the press copy of the game through the RPG Codex. I made my guides to share my knowledge with the community because the mechanics of this game are complicated and often unintuitive and I believe that without the sharing of such community knowledge, the game would not have been as well received by fans. On release, we were able to share EVERYTHING we knew about the game and through use of the wiki, internet forums and social media, this information has now become widespread and improved upon/maintained by others post-release. *THAT* is why there is such a wealth of information about the game. Developers willing to share info prior to the game's release and dedicated fans keeping track of the information and contributing their own research. When a developer is not open about game mechanics (which happens very often) it can take the community years and years to find out how things work. There are a lot of different systems in this game and a lot of them are somewhat complex, but I believe that some of these systems contribute to some of the game's core combat issues, such as the sheer amount of per-encounter abilities making combat a rote exercise of spamming them every encounter. I do like a lot of the mechanics in this game, but IMO the most fun part is making a character. Combat itself I find quite boring - it's all stacked towards encounter strategy and alpha striking. After that, it just becomes going through the motions of spamming the same things every encounter. The IE games had more reactive combat. You actually had to react to what enemies do. For 98% of Pillars of Eternity, you do not have to react to enemy actions very often. There is no counter-spelling. There is no dispelling. No quaffing potions to remove poisons. Tactical retreating and aggro switching is often a bad choice. You follow through with your sequence almost no matter what. You spend the majority of your time in combat using the same per-encounter abilities in virtually the same order every encounter.

Gairnulf is Bulgarian. English is not his first language. The way I read his post I thought that his friend may have been talking about combat being *visually* easier to read, which I find is also the case for me. The attacks per round system of the IE games means that units act at a consistent pace throughout combat and there are no UI elements like Engagement arrows or Unit Combat HUDs or flashy 3D spells that light up the screen like a Christmas tree obscuring characters in the process. Some of the rules in Pillars of Eternity are also unintuitive such as the use of percentages for pretty much everything and complicated additive multiplication maths for attack speed and damage (among other things). In contrast 1D6+1 and the like are pretty simple to understand.

I've followed this game since Day 1 of the Kickstarter and I religiously poured over every update and developer post that was made. You say that "to me, this is what the melee engagement system is supposed to simulate" and that's fair enough if you want to make up your own interpretation of what the system simulates to you, however the 'empirical evidence' that I am aware of that expresses the reasons why the developers created the system is as follows (I can't be bothered finding quotes and links, but I can on request). A while ago - in 2012 actually, Josh Sawyer posted a thread on this forum called "What moulds should be broken" and many people replied to this thread. One of the posters that replied to it was a user named Tamerlane who asked for "punishing movement in melee combat". I cannot remember his reasons but I'm fairly certain they were because he hated it when enemy units did not stop to attack his characters in the Infinity Engine games when he attacked them in melee. And so, we end up with the Melee Engagement system which is basically Attacks of Opportunity implemented a little bit differently from the NWN1&2 implementation. There was no "this is what it's supposed to simulate" consideration, it's simply an implementationof AoOs to punish movement in melee combat. I actually disagree with the very notion that movement in combat needs to be punished. And I have argued since August or September last year about the reasons why, many times - which leads me to the following where you speak of your Baldur's Gate experience: Why? Your Fighter is standing there attacking the bear. And besides, if you would like a guide on how to make enemies acquire new targets in Baldur's Gate, here you go: It seems like in your anecdote, you did not run Jaheira far enough away. Enemies in the Infinity Engine games have a loop that runs every round that checks for the 'best' target (I think Pillars of Eternity also has something similar now, I haven't played it with the new AI updates). If you moved Jaheira far enough away, and perhaps blocked the path of the bear with your Fighter to slow him down, he would lose Jaheira as a target, and re-acquire a new one. I'm not home at the moment, but I can make a video especially for you showing you how to do it against a bear in the wilderness. It's really easy The No Engagement mod for Pillars of Eternity actually keeps the AI side of the Melee Engagement system, it just removes the disengagement attacks. So if that example you gave was in Pillars of Eternity with the No Engagement mod - the bear would have started to attack your Fighter, but there would have been no disengagement attack. You can blame Obsidian and their Kickstarter campaign for that. They banked on the nostalgia of the Infinity Engine games and the 'grogs' of the world gave richly to help them make a game aimed at pleasing the 'goons'. I don't agree with your statement about invoking the IE games undermining interesting mechanics but that's just because the way you worded it - instead I would say that because Obsidian pitched this game as an Infinity Engine successor while not really liking Infinity Engine mechanics themselves (not speaking for everyone on the team but the key designers) we've ended up in this weird middle ground in a lot of cases where a mechanic is different for the sake of being different. In a GDC talk Josh Sawyer talked about how the aim for Pillars of Eternity's systems was to have a classic "system feel" and on the "character building choice" side of things I believe they somewhat succeeded there but the "gameplay feel" is definitely way off. I think in many ways they've tried to implement something that 'feels like' the IE games but is different (for the sake of it?) that just ends up being flat out worse. I believe that Pillars of Eternity better targets people like yourself that may have kinda liked the Infinity Engine games but don't really enjoy the combat (for one reason or another). It also seems to appeal more to fans of turn-based than other real-time games - I think largely because the devs themselves cannot help but be heavily influenced from their tabletop and turn-based backgrounds. I did not say that it restricts your possibilities, but it punishes moving in combat. If you are moving in combat while you are in recovery, your recovery is slowed down by a movement recovery penalty (another thing I hate about this game and also another part of the IE mod that I designed - "Movement Recovery Fix") and if you move while engaged you suffer a disengagement attack. AndreaColombo is right. Moving in combat is something that you want to minimize completely due to the penalties against it so playing optimally requires setting it up so that you only move when you need to, not when you want to. It makes tactical movements a bad option. I don't pick options that allow me to escape engagement because I am good at controlling the battlefield and I don't like having to pay character advancement points to be able to do something that I should be able to do anyway. It's the reverse of fun. Those options are for people who are bad at combat or who are doing TCS kiting builds and stuff like that. The reason that I am still fervently arguing about this issue long after the game's release, when I don't intend to play the game again is that I morally oppose the notion that movement in melee combat needs to be punished. This notion is just plain wrong, and it creates poor gameplay. The more games that do this, the worse off the industry is. Designers need to think about tactical reactivity, not punishing players for tactical movement and discouraging it as a tactical response to a situation in combat.

I don't have the time to properly reply to the posts in this thread at the moment, but quickly I believe there is no such thing as "RPG combat". RPGs take their combat style from another genre whether it be turn-based strategy, action game combat or real-time strategy combat (among other things). I mention RTS-style because the Infinity Engine games use an RTS engine. The Infinity Engine was originally developed for a prototype RTS called Battleground Infinity and was later re-purposed for Baldur's Gate. I say that combat in Pillars of Eternity is RTS-style because it's an isometric real-time (with pause) game with RTS-style camera and controls, unit movement and mechanics where the player controls potentially a group of units - just like the Infinity Engine games. Aarklash Legacy, another RTWP game also has RTS-style combat. It doesn't matter whether you view kiting as an exploit or legitimate gameplay because Melee Engagement does not prevent kiting. I honestly don't know where people get this notion from - especially for a real-time game. Let me use a real life example because that's what you seem to be implying here. If you swing a weapon at somebody and they move away while you're swinging, for the time it takes from the attack backswing for you to recover the weapon that person is getting away from you. You do not suddenly get an invisible automatic attack at them, or any other person you are "engaging", they simply get away and it is up to you to follow them. If you have a dagger or a two handed axe and you are not ready to perform your attack ("in recovery") and I run away from you, you are not going to be able to hit me. You will have to chase me and hit me. You'd possibly be able to hit me with a longer weapon though. Combat in games is an abstraction, and just because the in game animation depicts your character making an instant turn and walking away, it does not mean that the character has dropped their guard or makes them 'vulnerable' like you and others depict. The animations are such because that's how they were implemented in the Infinity Engine games and Obsidian went for depicting the Infinity Engine feel with encouragement from backers (such as myself). It's also cheaper to do them that way rather than to try and animate them so that their movements feel realistic. For some reason, you and others (including some of the developers too, most likely) are willing to give disengagement attacks a pass, chalking them off as abstraction but yet you are unwilling to consider that the character running away from melee combat did so skillfully rather than exposing himself. The guy above - Fenixp also seems to be unable to make this distinction. You cannot use the realism argument. Feel free to argue that you enjoy the gameplay it creates, but don't try and claim realism here. The quoted line is absolutely incorrect. The Infinity Engine games ARE real-time with pause, and they are currently the best implementation of real-time with pause out there in my opinion. The fact that they are real-time with pause is not debatable, and here is why. For the IE games to be a 'simultaneous turn system' that would imply that player input is limited, the Infinity Engine games have a constant input stream and you can override the actions of any character at any time. Not only can you do this, but if you issue a movement command, that character will respond instantly, overriding their currently queued action. The other reason that it is blatantly not turn-based is because the game does not stop to wait for input. The game continues in real-time unless you pause the game. Turn-based games dictate the structure of player input. Real-time games have a constant input stream where the player may change the commands to any unit at any time. What I believe you are referring to is the "attacks per round" system. I am not sure if you completely understand how it works either, so I will explain it to you. Each character operates on their own individual 'round timer', and that timer begins when they begin playing an animation of a non-movement action. This may be performing an attack animation, drinking a potion or using a door. These rounds are NOT turns, they simply designate how many non-movement actions this character can perform in a period of in-game time, which is I believe six seconds at 30 FPS animation speed. They function very similarly to Pillars of Eternity's recovery system in that the system dictates the amount of time a character has to wait in between actions, except in the Infinity Engine games, the system is unified for all characters and actions. Every non-movement action uses up "one attack". It doesn't matter what it is. Whereas in Pillars of Eternity, they've chosen to go with a system where different actions have different animation speeds and recovery speeds. In fact, the Infinity Engine system is simple, unified and effective and is easier to understand than the Pillars of Eternity system. People get hung up on the fact that it's an RTWP implementation of D&D, but don't look at how the system actually works. I honestly do not feel that the system is clunky at all. I find that combat has better pace, feel and visibility in the Infinity Engine games. It seems that you guys have not considered what I said about real-time with pause gameplay either. What is combat in games if we break it down? It involves decision making and the execution of decisions. Turn-based games dictate to the player when they may have their input and technically how many decisions they need to make. Real-time games do not dictate the player input and it is up to the player to realize when and if they need to make decisions, and it is up to them to perform their actions in the space of the game's time (which you can pause in RTWP). A passive system to 'punish' players (and AI) for making good and logical decisions in combat does not really involve much active decision making at all. All it does is take away an inherent aspect of the game. Would it not be better to instead reward the player for active decision making? Would not that be more fun? That is why I believe that the game would be better off where units (player and AI) should have to actively respond to actions taken by other units, which is why I think no engagement system is needed and the use of crowd control abilities to control movement in combat would create much better and much more rewarding gameplay. There is no sense of accomplishment when you score a disengagement attack on an enemy unit but when you knock them down or stun then through use of an ability, there is. That's all I've got time to say at the moment, and most of that wasn't about Engagement but I'll come back and post some more, addressing some of the other things people have said later.

Kiting is mostly an AI and encounter design problem. Kiting will exist in all real-time games where there are different movement speeds and/or ranged combat. It is a core part of multiplayer RTS gameplay. This is an axonometric real-time with pause RPG with RTS-style camera, controls and map layout that has ranged combat and different unit movement speeds. Instead of trying to think of intelligent solutions the developers simply said "We don't like this style of gameplay because we are tabletop & turn-based players, let's try and punish it". Originally in the beta, creatures all had faster movement speeds than the party - that's how much they didn't want you to be able to run away. That had a negative effect on the gameplay in the beta as all units would simply just rush at each other into this massive cluster in the middle of the screen and it didn't feel right. If they really, really didn't want people to run away then the most sensible thing to do would have just been to use common sense and have in combat movement endurance or something where units slow down after running for a period of time The key element of real-time with pause combat gameplay is that unlike turn-based combat, it is up to the player to process a higher amount of information at once (due to simultaneous resolution of actions), identify problems and come up with solutions in game time (with a bit of real-time pressure that is mostly nullified by the pause function). Identifying that you need to make in combat positional changes or movements is actively thinking and doing exactly that, and so is reacting to units making those actions. This is IMO where the fun in RTWP gameplay lies - identifying problems, making decisions and implementing your solutions in real-time. In turn-based, combat follows a set discrete structure and the game determines when the player needs to make choices, rather than the player actively identifying it themselves. Decision making in turn-based is about making a decision with incomplete information - you do not know what actions enemies will take on their turn, you have to try and predict what they're going to do and perform your actions based on that. In real-time (with pause) gameplay you are reacting to actions in real-time as they are made. Engagement is a system that actively punishes the player for making natural decisions, and you can see that this caught out many, many new players. Every youtube video I watched of the game, the casual gamer was getting destroyed by disengagement attacks - it was punishing them for using common sense. Imagine if the system design had actually taken this into account and designed it so that you had to actually react rather than being all about planning and opening and then spamming a neverending set of per-encounter abilities with virtually zero tactical consideration. Then combat might have actually been somewhat enjoyable, and less rote.

It is actually fine in a turn-based game that uses shared action points for movement and non-movement actions and addresses the problem whereby one unit may spend their AP making a full move to get in range of another unit, only to have that unit simply move away on their turn. The AoO allows a unit to act when it's not their turn. In real-time gameplay this makes zero sense because all units act simultaneously, if you try and run away, that same unit can attack you and follow you in real time. The system does not even remotely address the main form of kiting that occurs in all real-time games with ranged units, and that is where a single unit kites one or more enemies while party ranged units shoot the enemies that are chasing the kiting unit. All it mostly does is punish actual proper tactical decision making in combat such as aggro switching and tactical retreating from the frontline, which are an inherent part of RTWP RTS-style gameplay - actively identifying and addressing problems that arise in combat and using movement and positioning in real-time to solve it. The developers of this game are not fluent in real-time or RTS gameplay they are self-proclaimed tabletop and turn-based fans and this system was created because that is all they know and that is them applying their influences incorrectly. Kiting, or retreating is an action that should have to be actively addressed in real-time, and that is done through use of crowd-control. It's not that difficult to stop a unit from moving by applying a disable on them. Not through some bull**** automatic passive system that breaks the rules of real-time gameplay. Engagement isn't really a new system, it's simply a take on the AoO mechanics that were implemented in the Neverwinter Nights games, a system that should never have been ported to real-time, and was laughably bad in both of those games.

Free, invisible, instant attacks that can occur while units are mid-swing attacking a different unit are completely retarded in a real-time game.

The Melee Engagement system is an absolutely disgraceful system and always has been. It seems that the system, now rather than just having detrimental effects on the gameplay, is also somewhat pointless (I have not played the game since April but the general consensus seems to be that engagement tanking is no longer very useful). Have you tried the IE mod and playing without engagement? It improves combat quite a bit (although not enough for me to consider playing the game again). I was the person who designed the No Engagement mod for the IE mod but I'm not sure if it's still being actively updated. Check out how broken it used to be: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69602-stop-right-now-thankyou-very-much/

Nice to see that someone's willing to continue working on the mod (tools) Karkarov's UI and a bunch of the UI tweaks really add a lot to the game IMO.

It was a bad mechanic to begin with and I told everyone so.

There's actually even a command to re-enable achievements if you disabled them with iroll20s (in the IEMod) but I forget what it is.