Very tough battles require attention and fine management to characters' builds.
Prepare to die, gentlemen. A lot. :)
Story is OK, but nothing really outstanding. You cannot change armor & looks of the characters, you can only change jewelry - rings, amulets, relics, etc.
If you want good, serious tactic battles - buy this game. If you want an RPG - forget it or wait for serious sale.

I am very happy to hear you died a lot. It makes me feel better about all my deaths :)

It's a shame this game/forum doesn't seem to be that popular on GOG.

I'm playing on Normal difficulaty and I am currently near the end of Chapter 2 so some of this may be inaccurate. I haven't found a lot of deaths except when trying to make a given spec work. For example I had a boss fight where Wendaroo was specced to have leech grain drain life; this was a problem since the boss did AOE damage and I could not heal with the spell. I've also tried to make Nella my primary healer.... There were also a few times I tried to use Wendaroo's directional heal to hit moving targets.

As a mechanics thing, tanks don't have a lot of talents to gather mobs & I seem to luck my way into having tanks attacked first. I have also had little success moving buffs and debuffs. First you must spec for it, but there are effects that cannot be moved. The UI to show these could be more visual instead of the up/down arrow with a number. Kiting has worked obscenely well.

How does this game rack up to prince of qin and other real time action/realtime party rpgs?

-Can you control each of your party members?
-Are there party members that can join that have different stats like bg, ps:t and kotor 1 and 2?
-Can your party members level up on their own and can you do their stats?

Much obliged.

It's best not to think of this game in terms of other party RPGs, as it's more of just a realtime tactics game with a pretty thin plot to keep things moving along. You have control of every single party member (and you'll need to carefully control each of them to avoid having your ass handed to you). Each party member has a unique set of abilities, along with other inherent attributes that end up defining their role (tank, ranged DPS, healer, etc). There aren't attributes (aside from what you get from equipment), but as each character progresses you can choose how to allocate points to their skill trees which can have significant effects on how those skills function (each character has 4 skills, but progressing along the development path for each of those skills the path splits twice, each time changing how the skill functions). For what it is (realtime tactics game) the game is quite good, just make sure that this is the kind of game you're after (if you're hoping for a party RPG along the lines of BG or KOTOR then you'll be disappointed).

Also, be aware that the game is poorly optimized; there isn't any stuttering or things like that, but it really kicks up the temperature on CPU and GPU (I ran the game on only the second-highest graphics setting to keep the temperatures down, and the temperatures were still significantly higher than when I run a heavily modded Skyrim on max graphics settings).

I don't, I've activated the VSync video option (which are to the max setting) of the game.
Intel Core i3 3320(?) with ATI Radeon HD 7700