Can I move, THEN attack?

[Green Raven]

I keep knocking baddies out of reach of my allies, I want to flank around and then strike.

[Letari]

Only when the enemies are within your character's attack range. Otherwise you have to manuever and wait until your next turn to attack.

[Green Raven]

Thats...wierd.

[Erpy]

The cooldown time of a move-action is lower than that of any other, so if you move a character your next turn comes up fairly soon after. You just need to determine for yourself whether it's worth it or not. When dealing with enemies who don't move around a lot, repositioning is often worth it.

That said, the problem you mentioned is only a problem at the start. Eventually your move stat becomes high enough for your melee characters to walk across half the battle area.

[Berahlen]

I wish you could. It doesn't take long before your characters can run far enough to hit whatever they need to, but I still would have liked to be able to deliberately shove more targets into AOE or line attacks.

[smenj]

As Erpy said, you sort of can do this, to a degree. If you choose just to move, instead of attack, your next turn comes up really quick most of the time, so you can usually run around the back of an enemy and attack the next time your turn comes up, hopefully before whatever AOE attack you're trying to knock them into, for example. I believe once you select the move option, the turn order at the side ought to tell you when your next go will be, so you can see if it's worth it or not.

[Berahlen]

It rarely is, unfortunately. I think in my entire playthrough, I managed to move before attacking without losing a turn all of three times. All of them were Joshua, all of them were pretty late into the fight when speed offsets had built up, and all of them were long past the point in the battle when it would have helped to pitch the target in a specific direction.

The game seems to have been balanced with most characters and enemies having very close turn frequency. Obviously life would suck for half the cast if they didn't do that, but it also means that it mostly just dictates who gets first dibs. The first couple turns before the actions can significantly offset are usually the only ones that matter. Even Clock Up doesn't make a particularly noticeable difference, and Clock Up EX is a very questionable advantage given the cast time versus the duration.

[smenj]

Clock Up helped quite a bit during the more difficult boss fights, particularly against Lorence. Takes quite a while for any of these really difficult fights to come along though, and they're few and far between when they do. Perhaps those things will be more useful in SC, where the fights are likely to be harder from the beginning?