I find it humorous that you use, of all examples - shades/spectres as an example to try and ridicule me when I don't have a problem fighting against shades/spectres even with engagement on. Their AI is fucking dumb, so all you have to do is make sure that you either have the characters you don't want targeted in higher freeze DR than the ones you do (Hide and Scale Armor have higher freeze DRs in the early game) or you simply plant them out of line of sight.
You're conveniently ignoring every single issue with the system - such as units being able to get a free, instant attack against any unit they are engaging as long as they have a melee weapon in their currently equipped weapon set. They can be casting a spell, in the middle of using a scroll, mid-attack animation swing against a completely different unit - and they still get a disengagement attack. You cannot tell me that any of those cases are "good combat design".
And then you have the gumption to tell me that disables are a good way of 'breaking engagement', that's real funny because this is one of my exact problems with the system - the game does not need engagement because in these types of games - in the Infinity Engine games and in other real-time RTS style games you FUCKING USE DISABLES to control enemy movement. That is what I have been fucking saying the whole time. If you want to control the battlefield, you should have to fucking DO SOMETHING about it - such as use disables. Holds, Stuns, Fear, Charm, Paralyze, Petrify, etc - this is what you did in the Infinity Engine games to disable enemies, and one of the good things about the 2E games was that there were hard counters and immunities, so you couldn't just use the same tactic on every encounter.
It baffles me that you think that melee enemies need free invisible attacks to deal with moving nearby enemies, when all you have to fucking do is just issue an attack command against them and fucking hit them back. Shoot them with a ranged weapon, use a fucking ability on them - you know, normal things you do in
real-time combat, you react to the enemy in real-time. You act at the same fucking time, you don't need a fucking system that gives you free invisible actions just because some nigger next to you moved.
Combat is an abstraction. Just because in the game when you issue a move command the character models turn away from enemies to run, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are dropping their guard. If they had a larger animation budget, they could probably afford to have an animation where characters still face the enemy when they're moving forward and backward or something. But I'm not fucking retarded and characters turning around in combat doesn't break my immershun and thus require punishing, like a lot of the 'realismfags' here (even though AoOs are in no way, realistic).
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You say that 'engagement effectively minimizes kiting' - what kiting? The most useful form of kiting in the Infinity Engine games and in Pillars of Eternity is to shoot an enemy with a ranged character, and then run that character around while the rest of the party stands still and shoots the enemy AI chasing the moving character. That's the style of kiting that people actually use, and neither engagement, nor movement recovery slow stop this style of kiting. In any real-time isometric game that has different movement speeds for units, ranged weapons and the space to move around - there is going to be kiting. The only way to stop it is some kind of fatigue system where units get tired and suffer a movement slow after running for a while, and not that I really give a shit about any of that, because I don't do that kind of retarded kiting as it's simply not fun.
The engagement system penalizes micro-movements in combat such as stepping to the side to allow a character to fit in the pathing space (which is particularly useful in this game with the fucking woeful combat pathfinding), retreating to make use of a formation or chokepoint and micro'ing wounded characters back from the frontline. These are all valid and fair things in the Infinity Engine games and in other games of this style. They're not required to win, so I fail to see how you and others get your undies in a bunch over being able to actually perform these actions.
I couldn't give a fucking rats arse about D&D 5E, because D&D 5E like all other editions of D&D is a tabletop turn-based game. This is not a tabletop turn-based game - it's a real-time with pause computer game, where unit actions occur simultaneously in real-time.
You sound like you're just copy/pasting what Josh Sawyer says on the subject. To which I can only do this:
You don't need a fucking AoO system or an MMO threat/taunt system, you just need good AI targeting clauses, snappy target re-acquistion and enemy AI that actually uses disables themselves. Go play some other games other than RPGs to see how it's done.
Obsidian's Melee Engagement system is the buggiest most awful system there is and it is a fucking disgraceful black mark on real-time with pause combat design.
