IDK. I skipped horse archers in my latest dark elves playthrough of total war warhammer 3, because they are so trash. No shields + large targets means they die really easy to missile fire, And since you can’t use a longbow on horseback they lack the range to engage other archer units without taking a few volleys first.

Basically they are only good for fighting factions like undead that that have no ranged units.

Aye. Like all design paradigms, there are places where they can be useful or can be used to achieve a certain feel.

I actually hate “choose from a menu combat” but have thought of a few cases where it would make sense - for example a Legend of Galactic Heroes style space warfare game based on hyper-realistic combat between massive fleets of 20,000+ ships each, which according to lore, line up in nice neat firing lines and shoot at each other for 12+ hours until one side has won via attrition. There is no way to simulate that in real time and be fun, and the ranges at which combat happens in deep space means that there is basically literally no room for maneuvering once the battle has began…

This is actually two different design paradigms you are talking about.

The first is the exploration map transitioning into a battle map during encounters. The second is randomly forcing players to fight encounters. Games like Zelda 2 had a exploration map and a battlemap, but the encounters are visible on the exploration map and could be avoided if you want so they were never forced. And games like Shining in the Darkness had exploration and battle on the same map; there was no transitions and the view perspective did not change, the game just randomly forced you to fight encounters while you walked around. Then you have something like Vermintide 2 which is a realtime first person action rpg/shooter where random mobs are spawned in at random times on random places on the map to attack you, but the mobs spawn out of sight and it’s happening seamlessly in real time.

IMO battle transitions are an outdated mechanic designed around the technical limitations of 8 bit era systems, while random encounters are a great way to improve exploration and overall replay value of a game.

Wipeout is my favorite racing series. Jet Moto was pretty cool too.

every beth game has always had game breaking bugs on release

Try Kenshi.

The game was a ripoff of phantasy star online 2 except with less slutty costumes, which is the main reason people play phantasy star online 2. The game was always going to be DOA.