On Baldur's Gate series I frequently on some sections went only with the rogue, and started taking sneaky pot-shots at people until they died searching for my rogue.

This game as soon you hit a sneaky pot-shot the game enter in combat mode, and you cannot leave combat mode anymore :(

Including if you hit ONE guy that was isolated, everyone nearby will join the combat, even if they are not aware of you, resulting in you stuck until you go to them yourself (thus ruining your surprise attack).


So, any strategy ideas on how to tackle combat beside just charging into it?

You can't really pick people off 1 by 1, if that's what you're after. You pretty much have to charge into a whole group at a time.

You can still sneak attack in combat, without being hidden. If two characters are on opposite sides of an opponent (one in front, one behind), a rogue gets to use their sneak attack damage. Both characters should also be getting a +2 bonus to hit.

The most reliable way to get sneak attacks is by casting greater invisibility on your rogue.

Actually I saw in a blog post of a modder that the game combat mode IS buggy.

My issue has no fix, to the point that several quests break the unpatched game badly.

Mostly, the game never end combat until everyone but your party is dead, this mean for example is coded on the game a faction system, related to the reputation system, and they made a API but never used (or used and removed) to allow factions help the player character in combat, to allow some crazy battles with lots of people on both sides and whatnot.

The problem is since combat never ends until everyone is at least knocked out, this result in that after you kill all enemies you have to knockout all your allies too (and this is obviously absurdly silly).

So yeah, combat is broken, if combat is triggered with some character, it cannot go away until that character is dead, even if that character is unreachable on the other side of the wall and joined the combat because of a bug.

EDIT:

When playing the game started I decided to call the game Temple of Elementary Errands.
Now it is clear to me the name really is Temple of Elemental Evil, the Evil in question being all those elementary bugs that the programmers left in the entire game...