You are one of those plebian paste-eaters that are boggling my fucking mind right now, because what you describe is literally how it does not work. It's a round-robin turn order, and no matter your or the enemy's initiative, you will be alternating turns. Let's say your group of 4 has an initiative of 10, 11, 12, and 13 respectively. You are meeting 8 enemies that all have an initiative of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.
Yeah, the system is insane. It's especially noticeable when you're soloing the game. Say you're fighting two enemies, both which have higher initiative than you. Until you kill an enemy, the rounds will look like this:
1. Enemy#1
2. You
3. Enemy#2
Eventually, you're gonna kill an enemy. If you're stupid enough to kill Enemy#1 first, then this is what happens:
Enemy#1 takes his turn
You kill Enemy#1, thus changing the turn order for next round
Enemy#2 takes his turn
Enemy#2 takes his turn
Yes, two turns in a row, because the last enemy is transferred to position #1 next round. If instead you kill enemy#2 first, enemy#1 just gets his one normal turn.
There's many other issues, and I'm doing a bit of a write-up right now, but there's things like:
You summon something. The summon moves right after you. But then at the next turn, it gets shuffled into the round-robin turn order, meaning that one of your characters can be pushed back as much as three turns, suffering additional attacks that it would not otherwise have done. Summoning an ally, presumably done to improve your situation, might end up screwing you completely, and there's really no way to tell beforehand. The system
punished you for buffing. This becomes very obvious as a Summoner especially, since Totems are extremely weak, but get shuffled into the turn order too, so that "lump" of potential "overflow" opponents could end up picking them off one-by-one in a single round before they can even
possibly act in that round.
You kill an opponent towards the end of the round. Because of the round-robin turn order, because you killed a weak opponent, a much stronger opponent is now reshuffled in the next round (coming right up!), and moves earlier than expected, instead of (like you likely assumed) the killed enemy simply being taken out of the turn order. You actually screwed yourself, because now that much stronger enemy moves before your wizard, and kills him before he has a time to act. While this is (as opposed to the summoning situation) entirely predictable, it's almost impossible to actually capitalize on, because you likely attack and kill whomever you have an opportunity to kill, however, the point remains;
you conquered an enemy and your situation got worse. It actually
punished you for success.
There's also the issue with the constantly and rapidly changing landscape, which is just an enormous mess in a game where they've both nerfed the power of surface effects, but also played up the prevalence and availability and sheer number of different surface effects. So in a single turn, almost nobody is going to have a chance to capitalize on any one change - they end up reacting to the change from turn to turn. One guy sets everything on fire, the next one puts it out, the third guy electrifies it, and the fourth one throws oil on the ground, the fifth one removes the oil and moves over it. And it just keeps going like that. The only ones that have a chance to, for example, throw an oil barrel at the enemy and then at the next turn having a fire wizard set it on fire are the ones at the very end of the turn order. If you actually threw out a barrel on the battlefield, odds are that the enemy would simply throw it back at you.
Before I got a chance to examine the game and notice the major issues with it, my SO was already all in planning-mode about how we should plan ourselves to be complimentary, and how if she was using fire magic, I should take something to use earth magic, so if I made some oil, she could set it on fire. But in D:OS2, that doesn't happen. What happens is that I throw oil, and the enemy either remove it or avoid it and set it on fire themselves. And this doesn't just affect the player - it affects the AI too. The AI
has the capability to do these things, I
see them do it, it's actually quite awesome. But if they were to (like me) throw out a barrel from somewhere in front of them, I'd drop it on their fucking faces the next turn. The only time set-ups like this can be done reliable, to see a plan and see it take shape, to get that rush of
"FUCK YEEAAAAH BURN YOU FUCKING CUNTS, YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, NOW DID YOU?!" is when you're at the absolute end of the turn order in a little clump. And 99 times out of 100, that's just going to be the enemy in one of those fights where they come busting in from every direction at the drop of a hat as the BBEG twirls his mustache and goes
"Hohoho, you didn't see this AMBUSH coming, did you?".
D:OS2 has many minor issues, but two things needs to fucking
DIE, and it's the round-robin turn orders and the armor system. The armor system will require an "Enhanced Edition" but the round-robin turn orders could be fixed by Larian
today.
