Combat in D&D/Baldurs Gate/etc: What's the appeal ?

The point is that using, let's say, contingency to destroy your enemies would be awesome if the combat wasn’t a mess and there was any sort of resource management in place. The fact that you can use a bunch of options is nullified by how hilarious broken the combat system is. If you prefer the variety of stuff over the challenge you should stop and rethink your priorities as a cRPG player. Challenge is the key word here, not replayability.

Fixed.

 

Encounters in Bg2 just assume you will have your full arsenal ready for major fights. There is no pretense of resource management, this also hold for mods.
The challenge levels of the encounters take that into account - it even makes the baseline harder since designers can create them with full loads in mind.

 

Depends on what you are trying to do. When raiding the Cult, for example, I have my 36 agents dig into the foundations of the building with their devastators, and line up, prone, on one side of the map. Then, I simply have all of them fire at a target that is across the entire map. Cult members come falling down into the basement and prompt got shot to pieces from the near constant purple beams. Don't even have to aim. Bodies just start appearing all over the map. Fun times.

 

First of all, thank you for a straight answer! In my opinion, variety is still a goal worthy of pursuit in this context because many games with excellent variety have equally breakable combat systems, such as Might & Magic 6-8 or Final Fantasy 5.

I am currently an SCS-only player, so my memories of vanilla might be foggy but I do remember that formulating a good plan and being aware of what you can and cannot use, and taking note of your wands, potions, scrolls, and spellslots was still necessary to beat encounters if I didn't want to rely on reloading until I get some lucky crits off. I also think most RPGs are guilty of becoming poor in the resource management game, such as, for instance, Fallout, where you have Stimpaks growing everywhere like mushrooms in autumn and you can burst-heal yourself very, very quickly at any point at a very meager price, both in game economy terms and within the Fallout action economy. So I'd say that for all of the faults in the IE system it still works enough for them to be considered worthy games and tactical challenges. It has upsides and downsides.

 

Funny that people disagreed with my comparison to a cardgame, but the more I read you guys descriptions the more I feel like this kind of combat is indeed a sibling of Magic or something, as the gameplay boils down to a competition to see who has the best powers/power-ups (which most of times are 1-time use and then go to the "trash") to overpower or counter the opposition. Or, in the case of fighters, just use the only card it has - Attack - on the enemy (even Thiefs have the "attack from shadows" or "lay trap" cards). Which again, only makes the whole design feel awkward, because who thought giving certain classes a bazillion options (eg: mage) and others almost none would be fun?

Well, I'm on a pilgrimage of sorts to try these games, so thanks for the recomendations everyone.

 

Just for clarification:
I did use auto-pause, but I still had to press space to un-pause. I felt like a pro Korean Starcraft player. 13000 APM. I never had this complaint with any RTS game.

I do like RTwP, I prefer TB combat though, but the only game that got the pacing for that correct was Tyranny.