DatonKallandor

I'd 100% disagree on spells being easier to land in turn based - retargeting a spells made them absolutely simple to land. It's also much, much harder to land AoE buffs in turn based mode, because you can't just quickly pull your party together into a clump for the buff and then break them apart again. First-shot advantage was even more of a thing in real time. Have you ever tried running a 5-arquebus party? You could just straight up remove at least 1, probably several, enemies at the very start of any fight and then just switch to other weapons.

The thing is the game is already balanced around action speed affecting...action speed. Making this also true in turn based mode isn't going to suddenly make it any more or less overpowered than it is in the real time mode. The same tradeoffs that apply in real time mode would still apply in turn based mode - armor vs speed, might vs dex, fast weapons doing less damage per action and dual wield having an accuracy and damage penalty (which, by the way, needs to be bumped in Turn based mode anyway since single weapon is hilariously bad in a both-weapons-attack-in-one-action and one-action-per-round world). They've got two options - find a way to apply existing balance to turn based mode (fairly easy) requiring minimal rebalancing. Or completely throw all previous balancing work out the window and make a completely new balance from scratch for the entire game for a fixed-rounds 1-action per round turn based mode. One of these is affordable and realistic, the other isn't.

There's a simpler way to do this than messing around with action points and stuff, using the current mechanics: Characters with 0 init are the active character. They do an action - the init cost of that action is how much init is where they fall on the init tracker, just as it does now. Now the game reduces everyone's init evenly until any character hits 0 - they do an action....repeat from above. The only difference to the current implementation is there's no discrete round count, letting characters that only do "fast" actions act more often compared to characters that use "slow" actions. This does have a problem of course, I admit - and that's buff/debuff duration tracking. If you base it on the originating characters "turns" you penalize fast characters. If you base it on the recipient characters "turns" you again penalize fast characters if it's a friendly or slow characters if it's an enemy. I'm sure there's a good solution though, and I'm sure the devs or someone else could come up with one.