I feel engagement is too strong at the moment. At least in the early game, once you’re locked, you’re locked. I understand the rationale, but I just witnessed Pillars of Eternity facing issues with this very feature. In that game, battles are essentially “tank and spank” (lock the enemy with one or two “engagers”, then pelt from behind without the enemy being able to do anything about it), and many players seem unhappy about this.
I personally would tone down disengagement attacks a little. Probably put up some limit on how many such attacks one unit can make in one turn. I understand the notion that at the moment, “memorable moments” happen, and I’m the last one who wants to whittle them down, but I find the engagement rules to be too static, and also I believe it doesn’t really make sense that one warrior is able to stab four fleeing werewolves in the back at the same time. He isn’t Shiva, the multi-armed god of destruction… With a new system, we would get other types of memorable moments, for instance one Brother sacrificing himself to the disengagement axe of an orc just so his friend at his side can make a run for it while the orc is distracted.
In general, I think engaging, disengaging and fleeing (especially for enemies!) need to be a little more fluid. At the moment, enemies will basically never do a tactical retreat, and a single enemy bandit will still head for close combat with four Brothers even if he just saw three of his comrades being cut down. This doesn’t make sense, every bandit in his right mind would turn and never look back, but that’s a different topic (which I do think overlaps with this one, however).
