it's about removing the clunky 6 second round action lockout and abusable dead time, which PoE did.
It's not strictly 6 seconds, that is only if you pllay at 30 FPS. I play at 40 FPS, so it is 4 seconds because the animations are smoother and the game feels much better at this speed, I think there's several other codexers that also play on 40 and wholeheartedly agree. I think the wait time after a cast or 'full round action' was a good implementation and reasonably balanced for the most part. At 40 FPS, where the wait time is only 4 seconds it feels much better than the default game speed. I also think that being able to move about in between actions is great and the difference between the IE games and Pillars of Eternity here feels a lot more like some of the differences between Starcraft: Brood War (IE games) and Starcraft 2 (PoE). Using movement to control enemy aggro, and as a response to unit actions is one of the things that only adds depth to the combat, and removing that takes away from it.
Yes, you can kite quite badly in the IE games but I don't think slowing down unit action recovery is the best way to solve that problem (I think it's quite terrible, nor do I really care about people kiting) and it only does damage to some of the other tactical uses that IE style and general RTS movement permits. There are many other ways in game design to tackle that without even touching action speed, or even movement speed. Aarklash Legacy chooses to seal combats within a certain area. Once again not my favourite idea, but the area you do get is reasonably generous does allow you to use the movement system to react to enemy actions without being able to run away from anything.
The idea that units or people should or do just stand there in combat and fight it out no matter what is bullshit, sometimes people run and sometimes retreating is the best play and I think it's a silly design for being able to leave immediate combat to be very difficult. It should be the other way around. Running away doesn't take much effort but stopping someone running away with some kind of special move does and it feels much more natural to use things like blink daggers, slows, stuns and holds etc to deal with retreating units, like how pretty much every other game that has combat similar to this handles it.
No? It feels clunky as fuck and doesn't feel intuitive at all. I guess people can acquire any taste but I played loads of RTS before RPGs and as soon as I realised the game has fake turns in terms of action rounds it lost all its fluidity.
While it never bothered me personally, I do agree that the fake attacks in the IE games are not good, good thing is that you can remove them in BG2 with Tob:Ex and in IWD1 with a mod (probably by the TobEx devs) and combat feels a lot better. The Let's play I did a few years ago that I put on youtube has this mod.
With 40 FPS it's basically like this. Let's say I have 2 attacks per round, when in combat and my character starts playing their attack animation, this timer begins, attacks at 40FPS are somewhere between 15-25 frames (a bit less than a second). I make one attack, and I can perform another in this time. I can do it immediately, or I can move a short distance and make another. By now the timer has ended and I am free to perform another 'round' worth of actions at will.
The default game speed does feel a bit crap. but switch it to 40 FPS and it feels great.
, I'm sure it will be addressed.
