Yes I know you can pre-set one spell but why arn't the runes remembered?

Why do I need to click at least three times to cast a spell?

Why can't I equip a spell to a hand or wand and then just click on it when I want to attack or cast the spell?

If I am missing something please tell me.

You did not miss anything. Almost Human considered that magic was powerful enough, and with pre-set spell combo, things would be way too easy.

And that wouldn't be in the old school spirit anyway.

They could balance the game and not have to compensate with poorly implemented mechanics.

The game is new trying to be old, it doesn't need to do the old annoying things.

There should be more options for how old school you would play, for example I wouldn't mind the option of a mini map.

The reason I wanted to play Grimrock is I thought it would be like Stonekeep except new and without all of the annoying rock/arrow throwing in the beginning of the game.

This. A combination of stiff laptop mouse buttons and framerate drops can make casting three-rune spells quickly a giant pain.

As much as I've gotten used to it, I still accidentally hit runes when racing back to the 'cast' button after putting in the runes for a spell, and fizzling. I just want to be able to click with left button on rune, right click to cast, SOOOO much. The cast button is clunky for the sake of being clunky, the runes at least have style.

It was a deliberate design choice... some like that, some don't
I might be wrong, but I think the dev want that to stay as it is, so no upcoming updates... for those that are really bothered however, there are some nifty AutoHotKey scripts that helps quite a lot (you can find those both on the Grimrock forum and the AutoHotKey forum)

Not that I expect the developers to change the system or anything but I wonder if assigning runes to keys would be a viable alternative. IE when you open the rune menu, instead of, say, clicking on Fire and Balance to cast Fire Shield, you press U and K to prep the spell instead.

This would be very awesome. And even more 'oldschool' than using the mouse! :)

While my opinions on manual and automation goes as a mix I still liked it. However I would have preferred the combat to be turn based.

I think the key is some exercise, in the beginning it's annoying but after a while it should go with ease. Try to save before a lot of enemies where you have the spells ready then reload and try different things to understand the game mechanics so timing will be easier. It also could help to have a decent mouse, I can see this becoming a huge issue if you're not comfortable with your mice or simply just bad.

To be honest I am both using a laptop touch pad and inexperienced in fast paced PC games, but casting spells quickly was never really much of an issue when the game was running smoothly. When the framerate dropped a little though, which it did somewhat often for me, it became very difficult to cast spells properly because it didn't register your input consistently. And when you're using two mages, it can be a little frustrating.

I forgot about framerates but I always assume people try their best to keep it at a reliable speed. I only played with one mage so I can see the issue while playing with two or more, at least if you are meeting a lot of enemies so you have to repeatedly press the runes and attack.

I wonder if it's possible to play as three or four mages, that could be an interesting challenge. :)

Spell cooldown is easily long enough to get you killed if you aren't paying proper attention, and fumbling the mouse pointer around for runes whilst in the midst of be swarmed can easily see you not getting the correct sequence (eg: fireball) loaded within even that length of time.

I really don't think having a clumsy mechanic is a valid answer to balancing magic. If it's overpowered, then tone it down. Or increase the cooldown.

I found that in most of the "classic" games (Eye of the Beholder, etc) I simply rarely used magic; in the interest of "balancing", they made spells mostly unusable in combat; I'd use missile weapons for the back-rank folk, and melee weapons in the front.

In the EOB series, the only spells I used were Create Food, Light (I think), Detect Magic, Healing spells. The rest was just ignored.

The game creators seem to be so afraid of magic that they try to avoid allowing its use at all. I don't see it as balancing, rather its just the opposite... magic becomes way UNDERpowered by virtue of being unusable.