Quote Originally Posted by Jade Dragon View Post
Personally, real-time + pause is my favorite way of doing single-player strategy games. When you're controlling a full squad of irregulars, guerillas, or otherwise guys whose best tactics involve splitting up, you can't expect to be able to keep an eye on all of them at once in real-time. If you want that, you have things like Planetside/Planetside 2 and Arma 2, where each player controls a character and the coordination is like in real-life combat. But when it's a third-person isometric viewpoint on a full squad of soldiers under your command... yeah. That pause button is a life-saver.
And shot-by-shot turnbased gameplay can easily get dull. Sometimes I don't want to spend a minute and a half wasting one guy with a semi-automatic weapon. Real-time lets the bodies hit the floor a lot faster.

As for reaction fire (only XCOM 2012 specifically has an Overwatch feature, other games just trigger it if you have leftover TUs/APs), that only works if they've got action points left. If they're crouching down, waiting to unload some slugs and buckshot on the first guy they see, then you're dead. If they're not, killing everybody in the room is a trivial matter, since I'm assuming you spent the last turn getting up to the door and still have most of your TUs/APs. It's even less realistic when he opens the door, fires some shots, goes to one side, and another guy comes bursting in guns ablazing.
The CQB improvements RTP offers are fairly vast. I find it makes a bit less difference when there's a bit more space between combatants. Even then however I shouldn't be able to pull crap like stand up, take a few shots, and drop back to a crouch in perfect safety.


All the D&D FR computer games are also A) really popular as far as computer games go, B) based on D&D 3.X (a non-stellar system, although the mechanics aren't cut-and-paste from 3.X to BG), and C) in Forgotten Realms (I personally find it a rather boring setting, especially when you don't have a tabletop game's freedom).
Torment isn't FR, but it's still D&D. And I really cannot stand D&D anymore. The entire thing is just such a flavorless lump of munchkinism.

Given a decent system I actually am rather fond of RTP for RPGs. I've gotten quite a lot of fun out of the Drakensang games.

Anyway, just weathered my first demon-thingy invasion in Warlock. Those dudes mean business - they actually knocked out one of my cities! It's been a while since anything's managed that. And they destroy any city they take, and convert the surrounding terrain to goop, so now my economy's blown to hell. Would have caused a lot more problems too, except I happened to have a frankly abusive number of elven archers at hand.