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Looking forward to combat encounters where balance fully depends on the team's design and not sourcebooks.
Looking forward to combat encounters where balance fully depends on the team's design and not sourcebooks.
constantly micromanaging on the fly making lots of rapid-fire decisions
On this, the alpha starts at level 15, so it is not a matter of low level combat I don't think. At the lower levels I would expect it to be even more repetative!Also, are you talking about low-level combat where you still have few tools at your disposal and therefore use the same ones over and over again, or have you reached a point where you'd expect well-designed complex boss encounters?
I had a think a bit more and the game the combat seems most similar to is the the Shadowrun games, which were shoestring budget.Thanks for sharing the details to understand what you dislike about the combat and what the reasons behind that might be.
It sounds rather disappointing, but on the other hand, as you said, some part of it are personal preferences, so there's still hope it might turn out interesting enough for people who don't share those preferences.
For example, I'm not a rigid fan of per-rest-abilities, because sometimes that would make it even more likely to always use the same or similar approaches, the same overpowered spells or abilities. I like it when I see a battle went sideways that I can simply stare at my skill slots and pick different ones this time, combine differently, use positioning and synergy of party members in a different way, not travel back to an inn, decide which other 5 of my 20 spells for that level I might want to memorize, rest for 8 hours, and go back.
With that said, what you mentioned about being able to use the same abilities every turn is a different matter of course. Either the combat needs to be complex and difficult enough to require different approaches and skill mixes, or there needs to be a system to limit the use of very powerful stuff, like making some abilities "once per encounter" only or giving them different cooldowns.
There's also the fact that you're not the "average player", you have a lot of experience with challenging games on highest difficulty, so I'm hopeful that what you find boring might still offer enough of an interesting challenge for me
For example, positioning is, or should be, an important factor in tactical fights, too. To some people that comes naturally or their minds are able to focus on that automatically, either through experience or a different overview.
For myself, I have observed that in RtwP games (and even more in action gameplay without pause), I start to overlook even the simplest basics of battlefield control, like fanning out to avoid everyone getting caught in the same AoE, like using bottlenecks or cover to my advantage, etc. It's getting better (started playing games regularly in 2019 only, and between work and children besides), but sometimes the barbarian part of my brain still takes over. In turn-based combat I can take a step back, breathe, switch from tunnel-visioned battle rage to board game mode and make more calculated decisions. The result is more satisfying to me than beating myself up for forgetting the obvious in the heat of the moment.
With that practice, I now manage more often to switch into that mindset when I hit Pause in a real time game, but it still happens occasionally that the adrenaline makes me rush in (yeah like a charging Krogan) and overlook the bigger picture.
Combining the factors that it's early alpha, that turn-based helps me use my brain's resources in a way that real time combat overrides with "berserk" alert, and that I'm a far less seasoned player, I'm hopeful Rogue Trader will still be fun. Also, combat is an important factor in games but it's not the only deciding factor for me personally.