Just going to repeat this:
Re: encounter design, I just want to say this - I think it's very possible for somebody reading this thread who hasn't played the game to get the impression that Solasta is some sort of repetitive trash mob fest. But it really isn't. Altogether, the game does not really have that much combat. There were many moments when I was going through a dungeon and thought to myself "Some other game would totally have plonked down a filler encounter here".
Compare Solasta with Dungeon Rats, for instance. A typical scenario like the fire ant tunnels will have you encounter three ants, then four ants, then even more ants, and finally the final battle against the ant queen. A pretty typical encounter progression scheme in an RPG.
In Solasta, there are often only two encounters in this sort of scenario. The goblins outside Caer Lem and the goblins in the cave. The spiders over the pillars and the spider queen.
Or take an elaborate dungeon like the Manacalon Ruin, a pivotal location in the story where your party obtains the game's titular MacGuffin, which has only three battles in it (and the first one vs the cultists outside is a quick cake walk).
Or how about the Cradle of Fire, Solasta's "orc caves" where you don't actually fight all that many orcs. There are exceptions that are more typical like the zombie and ghoul-infested Dark Castle, but I think the devs did make an effort to do things differently here.
I just think it's weird how some people give Solasta a particularly hard time for its encounter design. It doesn't stand out but it's not terrible either, we've all played worse.
Seems like a strawman to me. I've argued endlessly about why Solasta's encounter design ruins the experience - using arguments you usually support in principle, actually (content > system design).
Who has argued anything that sounds like "too many trash encounters"? Nobody. Solasta's encounter design is bad because it requires little thought or input.
Have you played Artyoan's mods? The difference between how the mod and Solasta proper uses the terrain features and systems in Solasta to produce interesting, thought-provoking engagements is plain as day.
For example, one of the first fights in Solasta involves an area that's very intersting on paper: you have to cross a divide and your only way across is a bunch of spaced out pillars. You have to navigate these pillars while fighting spiders able to climb on their sides.
I remember looking on my Spider Climb buffed Paladin stand sideways on the side of one of the pillars engaged with a spider thinking "this should be the most fucking cool thing ever, why isn't this cool?" And the answer was because the spiders, despite their superior movement abilities, posed almost no threat to the party. Their composition had no superiority in terms of action economy, placement or abilities, but were complete fodder.
That area alone shows Solasta's squandered potential perfectly. It is such a brilliant systems implementation used for nothing of worth at all.
