I really think we need to play the tac battles first before passing to strong a judgment.  we need to see the bigger picture here.  stardock has been making games for a long time, i really enjoy their games, so i am gonna have to just put my faith in them that what they have going will be great(if not perfect).  i do think that raven makes alot of valid points, and i think beta 2 is gonna give us our first real taste of elemental.  just gonna have to wait i guess.

BTW: its funny, frogboy did warn us about getting pissed when we find out how much they were holding back.  i guess he was right to a certain degree, the shit did hit the fan a little ha ha.

yeah, i guess that we all really want this to be the game of our dreams, and if something seems to not go the way we want it, passions flare.  i think that most of us realize how talented brads team is, this is why we are so passionate about getting the features that we want.  because we know that the game we always wanted will be in such good hands.  i guess its like parenting in a way, you watch your children grow, and you hope they turn out exactly how you want them to, but there's so many chances for them to stray.   maybe they will turn out better than you could have ever expected.  just gotta hope for the best.

I would just like to add, perhaps emphasize, that while I am strongly in favor of allowing retreat, it should be strategic retreat.

I would rather have no retreating at all than a retreat button that ends combat, and an RNG decides which units get away and which don't, and how much damage they take in the process.

I really think retreating should work very much like it does in Total War. Troops that make it to the border of the combat map should successfully get away. I should be able to choose which units to send into a retreat, and whichever units make it make it, and the ones that are killed in the process die, obviously. Retreating units are more vulnerable because their backs are turned to the combat and they are focused on getting away, not defending themselves. Routed units will break and run, out of the player's control. But this allows to me to decide which units are important enough to me to retreat from a lost cause (probably including any heroes involved), and which units I'm ready to sacrifice in order for those units to get away.

Whether all retreated units end up on the same spot on the strategic map or not, I'm less concerned about. Regardless, you can either have retreated units automatically move as far away from the attacker as they can, or you can give the player the opportunity to decide where a retreated army should retreat to (obviously within their available movement). If a city or other defensive structure is located within range, perhaps they can automatically go there. If it turns out that people can retreat ad nauseum, then implement penalties or limits where appropriate.

Like others have mentioned, guerilla tactics and harrying skirmishes would add an enormous amount of strategy and tactics and excitement to the game. It's easier to pull off in continuous turns or real time combat, but if you could somehow work that into the combat in Elemental it would be amazing. To do that, though, you would need to give the player control over where retreating units move to on the strategic map, or offer multiple modes of combat, for example:

You could give the attacker some choices when they initiate combat: regular combat, or guerilla combat. Choosing guerilla combat, battle could be initiated on a smaller map and movement speed, attack speed and stealth/ambushing skills/abilities could be emphasized. You'd go into this sort of combat with the intention of slowing down the enemy and/or whittling down their numbers, and then retreating. The combat wouldn't end with a victory or defeat screen, it would simply display the results and leave it up to the attacker and defender to decide what the outcome means to them. Obviously, when up against a larger, superior force a harrying attacker would not want the battle to drag on - they would be overwhelmed. The attacker would want to rush in, do some damage, and then run away before being overwhelmed. Clearly, going into guerilla combat with slow, conspicuous troops probably wouldn't end well. Going in with a raiding party of light cavalry, or nimble ranged troops, or stealthy units would be much more successful. I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish this in terms of mechanics, though.

The ability to engage in guerilla warfare could even be a skill. Only units with that skill (possibly implementable as something like the "scout pack" or something) could engage in guerilla tactics, or a force led by a hero who has that skill could also even if some of the units don't have it - though those units without it probably wouldn't be very effective in guerilla combat, anyway).

Something to think about, anyway.

EDIT: 

Another nice thing about this is:

The larger force would pretty much always have the opportunity to annihilate the smaller one in standard combat the next turn, or, if they decide not to, the guerilla would be free to harass the larger army next turn, too. This poses both players with options - guerilla warfare would be risky not only because your troops could lose the skirmish, but also because they could be easily hunted down the next turn (depending on movement and stealth, etc); and the larger army could choose between hunting down the guerilla force, removing the thorn from its side or it could march on, knowing that it'd have to fight off harrying attacks every turn but arriving at its primary destination faster.

It's exactly what guerilla warfare is supposed to achieve, really.

My original "shooting" used dice and "pointing" was trying to avoid knocking the chits off the game board

*waits for the inevitable "you're just a whippersnapper -- we didn't even have dice or game boards, we used rocks and actual dirt boards" when I was a kid*

That old Mechwarrior was a great game.  Knowing when not to shoot was as important as knowing when to.  Patience and self-control are interesting game 'features', eh?

Agreed.  In this case "WTF" is an acronym for "reload", but how...... "Want To Flashback" ?

Then break out the Python and make your own random map generator.

Seriously, four years is a long time to worry about how new the maps are for tactical combat. If the 'community' is robust early on, we should see thousands of maps to keep it fresh. As a developer, I'd be more worried about having lots of interesting, tactical battlefields when my community was at its largest. A lot more than just maps would need to be fresh to keep me playing for four years. If the community as a whole has moved on I doubt there would be much to keep people playing that some random maps would fix.

Sounds like HOMM5.  Worked pretty well.  Months ago when I first heard about "continuous turns" combat I thought that's what it meant.  Silly me.

Winner take all Sucks. It is unrealistic and it really sucks if in a close match you are forced to lose it all.

I wouldn't want to see tactical battles go longer than 20 minutes. 10-15 would be ideal with maybe the occasional longer "epic" tactical battle when sieging a capitol.

I think there is a happy medium between randomized & richnesssuch as semi-randomized with modular tilesets.

Also, my biggest concern about tactical combat is whether or not auto-resolve makes it irrelevant.

Just a few thoughts

I have to agree that we are argueing about a lot of details when we haven't even remotely seen what they have. While obviously the Stardock internal build is different than what they are giving us, that is to be expected. Who wants to test something that crashes all the time or balance is so out of whack that you can use the same tactic over and over? The core of the internal testing will be looking for killer and out of whack mechanics, testing early builds for holes in the design and lately probably looking for graphic glitches.

Stardock wants us to give feedback on if they are going in the right direction. What tweaks can they make that would make the game better. Just that they threw out RTS for TBS alone but didn't remove it from modding says they are listening.

So in closing, beta 2 is out in a week or two. My sense is Frogboy is asking for replies on the broad scope of what they are looking at. For all we know, some of the things he posts are quite opposite of what they think. That way they can validate what they thought by everyone going NOOOOOOOOOOO! and look like heroes when they did it the way they wanted to begin with. I am not saying they are, but it would be rather clever and good marketing. So let's calm down a bit and discuss things and wait for the beta2 before we say "that will never work!" or "If they do that, I will never buy another game!"

Charity to all, malice toward none.

One thing that really bothers me about tbs that might be good to think about is lack of group movement. If we have hundreds of archers they should be able to all fire in one chorus. Furthermore, I hope ranged units don 't need to be aimed at a specific enmey, it takes too long with today's interface and doesn't apply to real combat. It sure would save a lot of time during epic battles. Being able to move formations of units towards one's enemy would also be an advantage.

Games like this are never playable when we have to spend ten minutes just advancing towards the enemy.

As to issues of combat speed. Armor will probably be the major issue affecting hits per turn and movement speed. It is a little ridiculous though that a horseman with a sword would be able to attack more than a swordsman on the ground. I assume there will be a special rule for this issue as I trust Froggs and the boys would not let my archer horsemen get twice as many renged attacks as foot soldiers. It would be Zhengis Khan all over again.

Whoops -- that was me quoting someone else.  Is there a way for you to take the Karma away ?

Yeah, I think this is definitely a good idea...