Unit order of go in battle

the order of movement is determined by initiative, the higher it is the sooner and more often a unit takes its turn

I don't find the initiative order of units up the left hand side of the screen particularly readable or intuitive.  Is it possible to re-configure or mod the screen layout, so I could if I wanted have the initiative order along the bottom of the screen in left to right reading order?

You don't? Only problem I have is when my heroes is going to have 2 turns in a row - then it only show my heroes once.
I do think it needs some debugging though.
(I am not opposed to having the ability to change where the initiative bar is.)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Well if I tilt my head to one side and read from up to down it's a bit easier 

Ya, I had a problem with the 2 turns in a row thing too.

But back to the topic, they were talking about removing the ability to switch between units in tactical combat back in WoM, because it allowed so much abuse. For example:

• Opponents had a set number of counter attacks each turn. After they attack, you could switch to your your defensive units and attack to soak up the counter attacks, and then switch to offensive units once they had no more counterattacks.
• Or you could spread the counter attacks amongst several units so that no one got too badly beat, and the army as a whole would heal faster after battle.
• You could make 2 of your 3 (or however many) attacks, and realize that if you made your final attack the counter attack could kill you, switch to your healer, and then switch back and still make your final attack.

Since the AI wasn't good enough to take advantage of this same logic against you (and personally I would have found it frustrating if it could), it could be considered an exploit. Having said all that, at the time I liked that system, and was likewise a little miffed at the idea of changing it. However, Fallen Enchantress is a different game, and I think the initiative system works well in FE.

Am I supposed to have played War of Magic to join this discussion?

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

"the higher the more often" is clear to me, but it's completely unclear to me:

1) How many initiative points does attacking "use up" - that is what value of Initiative is exactly enough to go twice as often as everybody else?

2) Is there an explicit concept of "turn", or is everything in terms of the intiative of the unit. Frex, if I have a caster with four times the number that answers (1) for initiative, and they cast a "2 turns casting time" spell, will it go off after they would have acted twice more, or only after all units have gotten to act twice?

You don't use up Initiative. The system is complex, but very robust. This is my humble understanding of the game. Here are the basics:

20 Init. is the standard value for a unit with 0lbs. of gear. Two units will go every other time if they have the same Initiative. If one unit has 21 Init, he will get 5% more actions in a round, witch is rounded up at the the end of a turn. The game has a round, which is two actions at 20 Init. If a unit has only 10 Init, he only gets one action per round. More Initiative means more actions. 

All this is complicated by encumbrance. Each unit can only carry so much before it starts to affect his Initiative. If a unit has 100lbs of carrying capacity, he can carry 50lbs before incurring a penalty. At 51-75lbs he gets -1 to Init. At 76-100lbs he gets -2 Init. At 101lbs he gets -2 Init, -1 Moves. 

You can increase the Initiative of a unit to make him get more moves and attacks during a battle. Figure 25 init means you get 25% more attacks and chances to move per round.

Hmm.

Honestly I think I would prefer if every 10% of encumberance gives -1 initiative.

Either that or 0-25% = 0 penalty

26%-40% = -1 initiative

41-50 = -2 initiative

51-60 = -3 initiative

61-70 = -4

71-75 = -5

76 - 80 = -6

81-85 = -7

86-90 = -8

91-95 = -9

96 - 100 = -10

Either one of those I think would be great!

I have mine set up to do -4 Init from 51-75% and -8 from 76-100%, with -12, -1 Moves at 101%. This works well considering that my armor gives no penalty and you can choose strength bonuses to stay at 0 penalties. It works great for how I am balancing things, but I think your way could work too. The only problem I see is that it is a little too incremental in penalties. 

Whatever the final system we get is, it just needs to have specific numbers in mind for specific armor types and traits. Since we are so early in the beta, they are still probably waiting for the core mechanics to stabilize before crunching the numbers. 

Thats some insane numbers, would ruin armor even more, as it is I usually find having little armor and initiative boosting traits to be a better option than all this initiative reduction...

I allready dislike strength being the key factor for every hero due to encumbrance, so my mage heroes having a hard time walking around with a staff in theyre hands -.-..

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I really need to give your mod a try. You keep spouting off some pretty reasonable numbers and systems for things.

In terms of OP, the initiative system is overall WAY better than the willy-nilly one side goes then other mechanic of WoM. The current implementation, however, is a bit screwy in that many of the systems have multiple layers of costs that make many of the improvements ultimately "not worth it".

Make it so that "- initiative" is strictly based off encumbrance and nothing else, and make it so that the "wait" option bumps you back a few initiative phases rather than if the model had actually acted, and I think we would see the Initiative system make a lot more sense.

I personally would also like to only see the next 5 or so turns, since the huge list of sometimes repeating units clutters the screen and is really not very useful past the first handful.

^^^ This.

"Make it so that "- initiative" is strictly based off encumbrance and nothing else, and make it so that the "wait" option bumps you back a few initiative phases rather than if the model had actually acted, and I think we would see the Initiative system make a lot more sense."

Talking about willy nilly initiative systems.. I think this would make me feel empty about the initiative system, again strength becomes the attribute to deal more damage, AND act faster... for some reason...

"I personally would also like to only see the next 5 or so turns, since the huge list of sometimes repeating units clutters the screen and is really not very useful past the first handful."

Fantastic idea as an Option in smaller battles, but I would like largers initiative bars in important battles, also especially in huge battles (where there is alot of units, therefore need for a bigger inititative bar).

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Good point. Howsabout Dexterity sets base initiative and Encumberance modifies Initiative down?

Example:[(-)Dex+10] + [Encumberance modifier] = Initiative interval (assuming that a higher initiative interval is bad, that is)

That way your standard units are modified by encumbrance, and units with improved stats can either be lightly armored and be faster, stronger to wear better equipment at the same speed as a normal unit, or +Dex and +Str to either wear even heavier stuff with less penalty, or better equipment and be faster.

What does dexterity have to do with how quickly you wield a 30 pound hammer?

But see, this would run parallel with REMOVING all current armor penalties. And likely removing many initiative bonuses as well. So the only real affect on initiative would be encumbrance.

Dexterity has to do with how fast you are as an individual (base initiative). The 30 pound hammer has a lot to do with how much slower a fast person is when wielding it (encumbrance).

Yea they need to improve that. But I love the initiative over the 'all one side moves and fights then all the other side move and fight' as we see in many games.

And it is very D&Dish which I like.

No and trust me you don't want to play it. It was not very good at all. Many concepts in FE are from that game and they look similar but WOM was very poorly implemented.

Basically FE is what WOM should have been. I like to look at WOM as the pre-alpha phase of FE development

Well he said the Base init is based off Dex.

Now given that you could have the weapons and armor etake away from this score and only Magic items/armor weapons add to it.

So for example lets say a unit has 20 Dex which gives them a base INIT of +20. (you can use what ever numbers you like but I'm partial to the 1 to 1 ratio)

So lets say a Hammer is a -3 Init so the Adjusted Init would be 17. You get the gist of it.