I like situations where you have interesting choices and small "minigames" within a game. I think that there should be situations where you need quality and situations where you need quantity.

Examples:

If the battle engine simulates that each unit gets to do something in a round, then the opposition will determine if you need quality or quantity in you army.

1. You are fighting 3 very strong trolls (level 10). 

If you go up with an army of 6 swordsmen level 5 (your best army level wise) you would win the batlle, but 3 swordsmen would die. That is bad as you really want to preserve your best army.

If you go to the trolls with 30 weaker swordsmen (level 1), you would still win and 3 swordsmen would die. This is better as your troops are expendable. The trolls can only kill one unit each in each battle round, and since your army has many units its over in one round.

2. You are fighting 5 weak orcs (level 3)

Your army with 6 swordsmen kill them in round one and the swordsmen gets injurered but not killed. This is great.

Your army with 30 weaker swordsmen lose 3 units, which is now bad compared to only getting injuries.

Am I getting this across. Is this understandable? I am assuming that noone are attacked and killed before they get to do their attack.

If they have a position like that they need to hire me

We don't know if that's how the battlesystem works. I assumed it would be like Master of Magic/Heroes of Might & Magic you got stacks. But your version is better for supporting quantity.

On the flip side though, I would personally like to see 100,000 pitch fork armed peasant to still be able to swamp, whittle down, and eventually kill a unit of legendary prowess.  While this is an extreme example, I think "zerg" strategies should never completely lose their merit, in the right circumstances. 

I'd love to see huge armies made of low quality troops. Leave the elite forces to the heroes

Imagine you are a peasant, not really wel-fed, wearing old clothes, armed (if you are lucky) with a pitchfork or a cudgel. You have 99 others like you hanging around. Never had any training in warfare, no discipline and probably not much at stake except your life.

Now imagine being at the front of that group when 2 fully trained knights on heave warhorse in full plate armor come charging in. What do you do? Try to get out of the way in hope to survive? Stay there and try using that pitchfork on he horses in the hope to unseat the knight which will almost certainly mean your death?

In a case like this, I think most of the peasants would start running even before the fight really started. So 100 peasant defeating 2 knights? I really doubt it.

If the knights are just riding along and get ambushed by the peasant it might be a different situation off course and the knights will probably die, but still a lot of those peasant are probably gonna die as well.

While we are at it, I really hope that a MORALE system will get implemented. It's a must have.

First of all can we stop with all the real world talk? It does not really matter if it is somehow "reasonable" for X units of some type to kill Y units of a weaker type. This is not going to be some detailed hyper realistic simulation game. You should be focused more on what would be fun to play than what would "really" happen.

In MoM you had stacks but this type of thing still came strongly into play. In MoM each unit in the stack would soak damage and would deal damage. In addition each figure would have the affect of bonuses applied to them (check out http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/564960/2059 sections 4.5 and 4.6 for all the math). This made groups of units far more powerful that a single unit with similar or even better stats.

I think this aspect of the quality/quantity is often overlooked and thank you for bringing it up. If your single troll can not kill more than one unit a turn it will be trivial to take it out with numbers. Until we see more details on the strategic combat and how magic will work this question will be hard to answer.

This also will depend on how unit stacking works out in the end. If there is no penalty to stacking units and no limits then you will probably just build lots of small units to stack into an army rather than build the same power single unit. This is because each turn you are getting real units to come into play allowing you to do something even if not at full power. While the person waiting on that 40 turn build can do nothing until it is finished. So stacking has to be balanced in some way to make up for this benefit.

Also keep in mind the problems of how many areas of the board you can take action in at once and how long it takes you to issue all of your orders. A side with very few very powerful units can take fast turns but will only be able to focus on 1-2 areas. Someone with hundreds of units will become bogged down in issuing a million orders but will be able to take action all over the map. This also applies in a smaller scale to the strategic map. Having a lot of units allows you to scout the battle map and take advantage of multiple terrian points. A single unit can very easily be harrased by a well played horde even if the math going into the fight shows the single unit should win.

I can not wait to get more details on the strategic map. Of all the aspects of elemental I am looking forward to this is the biggest one. I am a HUGE x-com fan and I will have a lot to say on the matter once we get to that point in the beta

It shouldn't be hyper realistic, but it should be somewhat realistic to be fun. If 4 peasants would be able to kill 2 knights every time where is the fun in that?

Yes, different units, and different types of units, should have differing abilities, both on the World map (strategic) and the Battle map (tactical). For instance, an order of Royal inquisitors could hold a friendly city in a tight-knuckled grip, greatly reducing revolts and war weariness, as well as preventing the spread of other religions ... or it could incite friendly units in religious fervor, without fear or hesitation.

Additionally, horsemen/cavalry could be great at raiding and pillaging for loot and food, while melee are better at capturing slaves from villages. (horsemen would be slowed down greatly if they had a retinue of slaves)

I think it was Joseph Stalin who once said, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

TBS's in general have done a poor job with really allowing quanitity to come into play the way it should, especially fantasy based games (space games have done just slightly better).  Quanitity of units is awesome for just holding territory and making it extremely difficult for the enemy to move.  As a bad example of dealing with quanitity lets take HoMM. In HoMM 1000 peasants is just a picture of a peasant with the number 1000 below.  If that was all you had you would actually want to split it into 5 groups of 200 to try to control the battlefield a bit better.  When I'm playing that I just want to say "Hey, look I've got 1000 freaking peasants here.  I shouldn't be moving them around the battlefield, they should pretty much be the battlefield.  My enemy should be seeing nothing but peasants anywhere".  Now consider the classic Zerg rush in StarCraft.  Until you've dealt with the rush your ground units are pretty much paralyzed.  MoM was interesting in that multi-figure units did do well in many circumstances, but you were still limited by the number of units you could bring into a battle.  You couldn't bring 16 units into a battle even if it would be good to do so.

So here's some thoughts on how quantity might impact the game:

If you have a hordes of units then some of them should step in to fill gaps.  If you kill my swordsman the next guy should probably step up into his place.  On the other hand it should still be possible to drive a wedge through defenses, but it shouldn't be easy.  This is why quantity is most often seen on defense.  You control the battlefield and make it extremely difficult to move through you.  The flip side of this is that it is usually difficult to mobilize a huge army and offense might typically want to focus on quality somewhat more just for logistical reasons.  I'm not sure how to model this in the game though.  Perhaps certain difficult terrain can only have so many units in it at one time?

There should be some sizable bonuses for flanking/surrounding a unit.  Flanking is something that should be very easy to do with large quantity of units and it seems has been the major danger of them through history and the primary tactic of those who outnumber thier enemy.  I guess this could be a factor in the above point of driving a wedge through the enemy as you will be increasingly surrounded by them.  Even ranged units should be able to benefit from this.  If your recieving fire from 2 directions it's hard to know which way to face your shield (or the most heavily armored portion of your carapace if you're a dragon).  Certain magical units who have no particular soft spots or vital organs may not care as much about being flanked.  Elementals might not care at all about being flanked, Trolls might not care as much as squishy humans.

The MoM mechanic of multi-figure units getting more benefit from a spell (since it enhances each figure individually) is good and probably worth keeping in some way, though that depends on how the magic system and tactical combat work.