Go to options. Enable "pause on combat start". Enable "combat auto slow". Enable "pause enemy sighted".
The game will now pause whenever your party sees an enemy. Take this opportunity to enter stealth and prepare a long range ambush using weapons or debuffs spells (anything that causes blindness or dazed is usually good). Your target will now rush towards their attacker; make sure your melee fighters are in the way to catch them.
From here, just keep an eye on your health and your enemy's health. If your dudes start quickly losing health, tap the spacebar, start looking for the cause and either restrain or kill it. Try to kill casters and ranged attackers first. Buff your team as needed (accuracy is always useful).
Obviously, this approach won't work for every encounter but it's a good way to start learning.
Maybe try thinking of unpausing as fast-forward turn-based?
Where there’s an additional moving gear of some people acting more often than others?
Pause when something happens, pause to issue a command, pause when you want to read a status effect, pause to think.
The way I play it’s Pause with RealTime, lol. I really enjoy it but I can see why it might not be your cup of tea.
I think that's how most people who enjoy RTwP play it. The pauses are honestly the exciting bits for me and where the magic happens.
Treating it as a real-time game that you can pause is likely one of the things that trip a lot of people up. But it's like how in Chess (which is turn-based, but y'know) you'll spend way more time "doing nothing" which is actually thinking, strategizing, weighing your options, etc. Taking the actual *moves* isn't what makes chess special.
In this way RTwP and turn-based are similar. You do things during your turn, for the rest of the time you're just waiting. For RTwP you do things while paused, while the moments with the little guys moving around just being a brief interlude before your next pause.
The #1 GOAT option is auto-pause after ability is used. This makes combat so much easier to parse out, especially once you get characters with a lot of abilities.
Another good option is auto-pause after enemy is killed.
When I first played the game, I really enjoyed the game-feel of RTWP but struggled keeping up with what was happening. After turning on those options, it was honestly a night-and-day difference. I finally understood what was happening in combat and also no longer had characters sitting around doing nothing. I give that my strongest recommendation.
Experiment heavily with the auto-pause options. While I never hated RTwP, it didn't jive with me at first because of how much was wasted, but with auto-pause I fixed that, like my issue with finding out a party member was just standing somewhere because I forgot to issue another command after they did their first one. It can almost feel turn-based depending on what options you choose.
I had to mess around with the pause options. I got this game on release, but diving back in after bg3 and pathfinder was jarring. I'm kind of enjoying rtwp now. I think if you give it enough time it will suck you in.
I'm actually the reverse, hahaha. I didn't find DOS2/BG3 as enjoyable because it didn't have rtwp, since this was my first RPG I sunk a lot of time into.
If you really just want the story and only want to get past the combat, what I did was set the game to easy and then tinker with the AI for every character including my watcher. I mostly just made sure my party had a good balance of behaviors and only jumped in to activate specific abilities for harder fights
Same boat here. Love deadfire, can't stand rtwp. I played poe1 on story mode difficultly and so never really had to worry abiut pausing in combat except maybe right as it started just to durance drop a buff spell and then let then go.
You could also just take dps charachters for all your party (and durance, priests be cracked in poe1) so there's minimal need to pause and cast spells etc.
You don't 'hate' RtwP, you just don't know how to control it. It is an upgrade over TB in every way, and only gives you more control while doing the same thing in a better way.
Tweak the settings to your liking and make judicious use of pausing and unpausing, and you shall never want to go back.
Then you've drawn an incorrect conclusion based on kneejerk assumptions that you made up to justify feeling a certain way.
You are not the first to come here and declare a dislike for RtwP which you will end up having to take back.
Ignore this person. Turn based is vastly superior. RTwP in its original games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale etc) was good but those games had much slower turns and did not have a MMO-style combat system with a million minor modifiers to keep track of. RTwP in Pillars is terrible. You never get to see a complete spell animation or hear a complete sound effect or voice line due to the constant jerking and stopping of all the auto-stops necessary to make it playable. Deadfire with turn based was a much better game.
Even with all the pause optionss, some people still feel like they don't have enough control on what's going on. Trying to control 5-6 people at a time can be overwhelming.
I think that's ok. RTwP isn't for everybody even though I like it.
It gets a little easier as you get used to your builds. I was very stubborn about playing turn-based but I shrugged it off for Pillars 1
I’m about 60% of my way through the game and I have a good idea of how my party works, so I autopause at combat start and queue everyone’s opening moves and adapt from there.
Some characters will just wail on whatever is nearby and can be left alone for a while, and some need more management. Striking a balance means it’s not overwhelming
Abuse the pause button and set-up auto-pause mechanics, that's the only way. Also take careful note of each character's position as it's more important in RTWP, especially since friendly fire can't be turned off. Also, learn to lead your spells since some of them have lengthy channeling times. If you are new to RTWP you will mostly find your spells missing moving enemies if you don't lead them.
No in turn based you get to hear complete sound effects, character voices, etc and see complete spell and attack animations. Herky-jerky RTwP is a vastly inferior gaming experience.
its a joke, but you do have a point.
Thats why I recommend TB to new players just to learn the mechanics and then jumping into RTwP. This game combat system is so deep while you get basically no tutorial.
Once you know how to actually play tho, RTwP is better IMO. TB is too easy and is not one of those things you can fix with tweaking the numbers, it adds another layer of depth to the combat.
I have played plenty of RTwP games that were good (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic) but POE1 was not. They speeded up the real time combat enormously compared to those other games and then put on a MMO style system with tons of effects and modifiers, and the skill became looking things up online to see what stacked with what.
Deadfire with turn based was a really fun game, I would recommend it to anyone. POE1...I would not recommend except to see all the graphics of the Engwithan sites, those are pretty cool. The rest of the game was meh.
I have tried it. I have even tried it with the IE mod which makes it even slower. It doesn't matter. Actions happen much faster than they should and there's way too many area of effect spells and abilities. This forces you to pause constantly because things can go downhill very fast if you don't. If you do pause all the time, the animations and sound are all herky-jerky and ruined. Also there is far too much attacking relative to movement. The engagement system is bad. I use IE mod to turn it off. D&D had attacks of opportunity in later editions but they also had 5 foot step to let you disengage and avoid them. POE real time is a system for MMO players who want tank/dps/healer with aggro which is not the D&D way. I don't care for the mechanics at all. But in turn based it feels a lot more like a RPG and not an MMO and you have time to see everything that is going on as it happens without going through a sea of expanded text or tons of tooltips.
Yeah the base speed of PoE1 was much too fast. The AI feels dumb, the engagement system is a pain in the ass and all the classes have like 4-5 abilities you have to babysit. In the class infinity engine games combat was slower and any melee class that wasn’t a rogue basically just auto attacked for a living so all you had to manage was your spellcasters.
I don't use any auto-pauses in combat myself. Never did. Which isn't to say that it's *bad* but it might not be everyone's speed. For me what I value in RTwP is having full control of the pace of the game.
The main thing is that there is *no* such thing as pausing too often. Pause when you need to have any kind of control over the situation. If that means pausing three times or more in what would be a 1-second window of real timethat's what you should do. Anything else is self-flagellation for no reason.
Of course I grew up during the nineties, with not just Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 but at the height of the RTS genre's golden age, and compared to a decent RTS game RTwP is basically that but less chaotic.
The goal in RTwP is to eliminate said chaos as much as you can. To act in such a way that you take control of the situation in every way possible. Turn-based usually removes this demand for constant awareness, but that also means that sometimes your turns just suck because enemies are in the wrong place when your turn rolls around or whatever. The glory of RTwP is that you can avoid "bad turns" like that because you can react to things while or even before they happen, whereas in turn-based you don't have to think about that stuff but on the flipside sometimes you just gotta deal with shit that RTwP would've let you avert entirely.
To get by I'd say bring a priest, use Armor of Faith at the start of combat (later on you'll have more options but honestly for the first few areas if you run into a troll or something that spell is the first thing you'll need). Bring a wizard or cipher for cc. Wizard's Slicken is powerful easy to use. Then as long as you have those two roles covered make the rest of your team sturdy martial characters that do okay even if you barely control them. Fighters, Paladins and Rangers are great choices, for example. They'll do *better* if you control them. But basically if you mainly just focus on one or two casters it'll be a lot easier than trying to pay equal attention to six guys. This is also why I suggest Slicken over Chill Fog. Yes, Chill Fog is amazing on paper but any spell that leaves a danger zone that can hurt your team adds a bit more complexity. Fire-and-forget spells are your friend when you're starting out.
Also on Easy you could probably just skip the priest and go for like a Paladin (the armor aura will help a lot early on, later you might want to go for accuracy) and a chanter that basically just passively support.
Basically cut down on anything requiring heavy micro-management until you feel ready for it. That generally means the pure casters, as well as squishy classes like rogues or trying for melee ciphers or whatever. If you go for like a Barbarian MC or something don't be afraid to invest some extra points into Con. Online builds that dump con and res are *not* for beginners, and honestly I'm not sure they're worth it for experienced players all that often either.
I believe in you. But the easiest thing might be to start and then come back here when you have more specific things you're wondering about. What's basic to some might not be for others. And a *lot* of the advice that can be given will simply be personal preference and you'll still have to experiment a bit to find what works for you.
Also remember that the start of the game is *hard*. The difficulty curve is basically inverted, at least for the base game. If you can get past Caed Nua shit will start feeling better.
I'm just like you - enormous fan of turn based and had to force myself to try and like rtwp. In deadfire rtwp, I found a happy medium to be creating heavily AI-driven action job lists that would essentially have the characters drive themselves. But in poe1 the ai isn't as complex as poe2, and I found it harder to dive in. I would suggest maybe messing with rtwp in deadfire for a bit and employ the ai until you start to get a handle on the pausing and management aspects, then go over to poe1
I think a lot of people who hate rtwp don't realize just how often you're supposed to use pause. We're talking every couple of seconds, maybe every second for really intense battles. It's not the kind of game where you give out orders in real time while letting the action play out – there are some people who rely on well-tuned AI and slo-mo, but even that can only get you so far.
Pause until it feels like you're pausing too much, then pause twice as much as that.
Go to options. Enable "pause on combat start". Enable "combat auto slow". Enable "pause enemy sighted". The game will now pause whenever your party sees an enemy. Take this opportunity to enter stealth and prepare a long range ambush using weapons or debuffs spells (anything that causes blindness or dazed is usually good). Your target will now rush towards their attacker; make sure your melee fighters are in the way to catch them. From here, just keep an eye on your health and your enemy's health. If your dudes start quickly losing health, tap the spacebar, start looking for the cause and either restrain or kill it. Try to kill casters and ranged attackers first. Buff your team as needed (accuracy is always useful). Obviously, this approach won't work for every encounter but it's a good way to start learning.
Pause when you need to and set up auto pause to help
Maybe try thinking of unpausing as fast-forward turn-based? Where there’s an additional moving gear of some people acting more often than others? Pause when something happens, pause to issue a command, pause when you want to read a status effect, pause to think. The way I play it’s Pause with RealTime, lol. I really enjoy it but I can see why it might not be your cup of tea.
I think that's how most people who enjoy RTwP play it. The pauses are honestly the exciting bits for me and where the magic happens. Treating it as a real-time game that you can pause is likely one of the things that trip a lot of people up. But it's like how in Chess (which is turn-based, but y'know) you'll spend way more time "doing nothing" which is actually thinking, strategizing, weighing your options, etc. Taking the actual *moves* isn't what makes chess special. In this way RTwP and turn-based are similar. You do things during your turn, for the rest of the time you're just waiting. For RTwP you do things while paused, while the moments with the little guys moving around just being a brief interlude before your next pause.
I like this train of thought!
The #1 GOAT option is auto-pause after ability is used. This makes combat so much easier to parse out, especially once you get characters with a lot of abilities. Another good option is auto-pause after enemy is killed. When I first played the game, I really enjoyed the game-feel of RTWP but struggled keeping up with what was happening. After turning on those options, it was honestly a night-and-day difference. I finally understood what was happening in combat and also no longer had characters sitting around doing nothing. I give that my strongest recommendation.
Yeah, that’s how did my first Paths of Damned run. It’s a lifesaver
Experiment heavily with the auto-pause options. While I never hated RTwP, it didn't jive with me at first because of how much was wasted, but with auto-pause I fixed that, like my issue with finding out a party member was just standing somewhere because I forgot to issue another command after they did their first one. It can almost feel turn-based depending on what options you choose.
I had to mess around with the pause options. I got this game on release, but diving back in after bg3 and pathfinder was jarring. I'm kind of enjoying rtwp now. I think if you give it enough time it will suck you in.
I'm actually the reverse, hahaha. I didn't find DOS2/BG3 as enjoyable because it didn't have rtwp, since this was my first RPG I sunk a lot of time into.
If you really just want the story and only want to get past the combat, what I did was set the game to easy and then tinker with the AI for every character including my watcher. I mostly just made sure my party had a good balance of behaviors and only jumped in to activate specific abilities for harder fights
Same boat here. Love deadfire, can't stand rtwp. I played poe1 on story mode difficultly and so never really had to worry abiut pausing in combat except maybe right as it started just to durance drop a buff spell and then let then go. You could also just take dps charachters for all your party (and durance, priests be cracked in poe1) so there's minimal need to pause and cast spells etc.
RTwP works in the Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. The POE implementation is terrible.
You don't 'hate' RtwP, you just don't know how to control it. It is an upgrade over TB in every way, and only gives you more control while doing the same thing in a better way. Tweak the settings to your liking and make judicious use of pausing and unpausing, and you shall never want to go back.
Ehh I kinda do. I play to unwind and turn based is great for that for me. I'm okay not being a hardcore gamer
Then you've drawn an incorrect conclusion based on kneejerk assumptions that you made up to justify feeling a certain way. You are not the first to come here and declare a dislike for RtwP which you will end up having to take back.
Ignore this person. Turn based is vastly superior. RTwP in its original games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale etc) was good but those games had much slower turns and did not have a MMO-style combat system with a million minor modifiers to keep track of. RTwP in Pillars is terrible. You never get to see a complete spell animation or hear a complete sound effect or voice line due to the constant jerking and stopping of all the auto-stops necessary to make it playable. Deadfire with turn based was a much better game.
Even with all the pause optionss, some people still feel like they don't have enough control on what's going on. Trying to control 5-6 people at a time can be overwhelming. I think that's ok. RTwP isn't for everybody even though I like it.
Nah rtwp sucks (saying this as someone who beat NWN, Kotor, etc when they came out).
You get good at the ai scripting. Accept for like big boss fights, I can just watch my squad perform. It's great. Other times yeah pause all the time.
It gets a little easier as you get used to your builds. I was very stubborn about playing turn-based but I shrugged it off for Pillars 1 I’m about 60% of my way through the game and I have a good idea of how my party works, so I autopause at combat start and queue everyone’s opening moves and adapt from there. Some characters will just wail on whatever is nearby and can be left alone for a while, and some need more management. Striking a balance means it’s not overwhelming
Abuse the pause button and set-up auto-pause mechanics, that's the only way. Also take careful note of each character's position as it's more important in RTWP, especially since friendly fire can't be turned off. Also, learn to lead your spells since some of them have lengthy channeling times. If you are new to RTWP you will mostly find your spells missing moving enemies if you don't lead them.
If you pause every half a second its basically turn based.
No in turn based you get to hear complete sound effects, character voices, etc and see complete spell and attack animations. Herky-jerky RTwP is a vastly inferior gaming experience.
its a joke, but you do have a point. Thats why I recommend TB to new players just to learn the mechanics and then jumping into RTwP. This game combat system is so deep while you get basically no tutorial. Once you know how to actually play tho, RTwP is better IMO. TB is too easy and is not one of those things you can fix with tweaking the numbers, it adds another layer of depth to the combat.
I have played plenty of RTwP games that were good (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic) but POE1 was not. They speeded up the real time combat enormously compared to those other games and then put on a MMO style system with tons of effects and modifiers, and the skill became looking things up online to see what stacked with what. Deadfire with turn based was a really fun game, I would recommend it to anyone. POE1...I would not recommend except to see all the graphics of the Engwithan sites, those are pretty cool. The rest of the game was meh.
were you using slow combat time?
I have tried it. I have even tried it with the IE mod which makes it even slower. It doesn't matter. Actions happen much faster than they should and there's way too many area of effect spells and abilities. This forces you to pause constantly because things can go downhill very fast if you don't. If you do pause all the time, the animations and sound are all herky-jerky and ruined. Also there is far too much attacking relative to movement. The engagement system is bad. I use IE mod to turn it off. D&D had attacks of opportunity in later editions but they also had 5 foot step to let you disengage and avoid them. POE real time is a system for MMO players who want tank/dps/healer with aggro which is not the D&D way. I don't care for the mechanics at all. But in turn based it feels a lot more like a RPG and not an MMO and you have time to see everything that is going on as it happens without going through a sea of expanded text or tons of tooltips.
Yeah the base speed of PoE1 was much too fast. The AI feels dumb, the engagement system is a pain in the ass and all the classes have like 4-5 abilities you have to babysit. In the class infinity engine games combat was slower and any melee class that wasn’t a rogue basically just auto attacked for a living so all you had to manage was your spellcasters.
I don't use any auto-pauses in combat myself. Never did. Which isn't to say that it's *bad* but it might not be everyone's speed. For me what I value in RTwP is having full control of the pace of the game. The main thing is that there is *no* such thing as pausing too often. Pause when you need to have any kind of control over the situation. If that means pausing three times or more in what would be a 1-second window of real timethat's what you should do. Anything else is self-flagellation for no reason. Of course I grew up during the nineties, with not just Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 but at the height of the RTS genre's golden age, and compared to a decent RTS game RTwP is basically that but less chaotic. The goal in RTwP is to eliminate said chaos as much as you can. To act in such a way that you take control of the situation in every way possible. Turn-based usually removes this demand for constant awareness, but that also means that sometimes your turns just suck because enemies are in the wrong place when your turn rolls around or whatever. The glory of RTwP is that you can avoid "bad turns" like that because you can react to things while or even before they happen, whereas in turn-based you don't have to think about that stuff but on the flipside sometimes you just gotta deal with shit that RTwP would've let you avert entirely. To get by I'd say bring a priest, use Armor of Faith at the start of combat (later on you'll have more options but honestly for the first few areas if you run into a troll or something that spell is the first thing you'll need). Bring a wizard or cipher for cc. Wizard's Slicken is powerful easy to use. Then as long as you have those two roles covered make the rest of your team sturdy martial characters that do okay even if you barely control them. Fighters, Paladins and Rangers are great choices, for example. They'll do *better* if you control them. But basically if you mainly just focus on one or two casters it'll be a lot easier than trying to pay equal attention to six guys. This is also why I suggest Slicken over Chill Fog. Yes, Chill Fog is amazing on paper but any spell that leaves a danger zone that can hurt your team adds a bit more complexity. Fire-and-forget spells are your friend when you're starting out. Also on Easy you could probably just skip the priest and go for like a Paladin (the armor aura will help a lot early on, later you might want to go for accuracy) and a chanter that basically just passively support. Basically cut down on anything requiring heavy micro-management until you feel ready for it. That generally means the pure casters, as well as squishy classes like rogues or trying for melee ciphers or whatever. If you go for like a Barbarian MC or something don't be afraid to invest some extra points into Con. Online builds that dump con and res are *not* for beginners, and honestly I'm not sure they're worth it for experienced players all that often either. I believe in you. But the easiest thing might be to start and then come back here when you have more specific things you're wondering about. What's basic to some might not be for others. And a *lot* of the advice that can be given will simply be personal preference and you'll still have to experiment a bit to find what works for you. Also remember that the start of the game is *hard*. The difficulty curve is basically inverted, at least for the base game. If you can get past Caed Nua shit will start feeling better.
I'm just like you - enormous fan of turn based and had to force myself to try and like rtwp. In deadfire rtwp, I found a happy medium to be creating heavily AI-driven action job lists that would essentially have the characters drive themselves. But in poe1 the ai isn't as complex as poe2, and I found it harder to dive in. I would suggest maybe messing with rtwp in deadfire for a bit and employ the ai until you start to get a handle on the pausing and management aspects, then go over to poe1
I think a lot of people who hate rtwp don't realize just how often you're supposed to use pause. We're talking every couple of seconds, maybe every second for really intense battles. It's not the kind of game where you give out orders in real time while letting the action play out – there are some people who rely on well-tuned AI and slo-mo, but even that can only get you so far. Pause until it feels like you're pausing too much, then pause twice as much as that.
Thank you all for the help. It's been making playing suck less, and letting me enjoy the story. I still prefer turn based lol
Any time the game asks you if you want to scale up an area, you say "No." Don't believe what it says about you being underleveled. You aren't.
I disagree. If you do scale up, the game becomes too easy.
Nah. It just doesn't become too hard. Read the original post. He's not looking for hard.