Auto-Pause: Round Ends

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After some lengthy plays through TOEE, I've come to decide that I'm a definitively turn-based kind of guy. I always felt like Infinity Engine game combat was too fast, even with lots of auto-pause turned on.

I've recently tried playing BG2 with the end of round auto-pause turned on, but it seems a little bit strange - individual characters seem to have different "end of round" times, and occasionally it seems as if no action is taken by specific individuals before the round ends. I would expect every character has at least 1 attack or spell (assuming they have someone targeted) before receiving the "end of round" message, but my brief play testing doesn't seem to bear this out.

So, does anyone have a good understanding of how specific individual rounds work in these games? Round/turn/day definitions I don't have any problems with, and I understand how casting time works -- they just seem to behave strangely within this specific area.

 

I can't honestly even try to guess why "End of Round" is listed as a valid choice, as all of the personal initiative rounds for characters and monsters alike come and go in total unsynchronized mess. If they were NOT unsynchronized, you wouldn't be able to voluntarily delay your actions to, say, ensure that your Mage#1's Malison hits the enemies before Mage#2's Fireball.

So I guess the only thing you get out of it is a pause roughly every 6 seconds, whatever that might be used for. Not much of anything practical at least, as you noted.

 

The engine looks at each character as a different 'unit' and each combat is treated as such.

Two characters attacking the same thing count as one combat, likewise if someone is attacking a goblin, a second goblin is attacking them and the party rogue is attacking the second goblin - that is one combat. Generally though, it goes round by round per character. This is to allow for multiplayer and was simply the quickest and easiest way of implementing a recognisable feature from pnp.

 

Just a little add-on:

If your character is under Improved Haste, then the round is split into two sub-rounds, and you will get the message 'Auto pause: End Round' twice in the same round - once every 3 seconds.

I have played with this feature, and found it extremely useful in very hard solo battles (1 man party) with no summons. Once you have summons, it's that same annoying auto-pause thing which actually makes it harder to track the round.

There are other tricks with which you have to be familiar to make a full use of this autopause, but provided you don't have insane tactical mods and you're not playing solo no-reload, then you don't need that option at all.