I am a long time Gal Civ fan and day 1 WOM buyer who has literally never posted on here before, but I need to throw this out there, because I want to help this game get to where I really think it can.  Tightening up the damage range is an obvious fix, as is raising champion HP (or even better letting them lead squads of troops, but that's a bigger change), but there is one thing combat really needs - SPECIAL ABILITIES!!!  Make combat more than just a simple addition and subtraction game.  The proper use of special abilities, rather than just adding attack values up, is what makes a strategy game strategic. 

This actually ties in to my main problem with the game - For something that is theoretically a fantasy game, WOM isn't nearly ... fantastic enough.  The mechanics could use a little fine tuning, but they're honestly not that bad.  Right now, I think the game isn't that good because there's just not that much that's really cool or fun or different about playing it.  You can't really train any cool units, there aren't really any cool spells, etc.  Where are my griffon riding archers who can fly across the map, my frogmen units with a tongue slurp attack, my basilisks with a stoning attack, my giant walking mushrooms with a fungus attack, and so on and so forth.  This awesome unit creation system, something I thought would be so cool, is basically wasted because you're just building a bunch of identical units with higher numbers for attack and defense.  The exact same argument applies to spells, none of them are particularly interesting or fun to use.

This is a fantasy game.  Make it fantastic.  You don't need programmers to play with numbers, you need writers and artists to come up with assets the players have never even imagined that can be used in the unit designer. 

Just few things

If you want to make Heroes more important on tactical battle, just avoid HOMM Style battle, as they always make the heroes chickened and hide on the back of other units. Plus, if they died, just make a system that allow them to ressurected. But of course, level 1 heroes will always died and can't be called back, as they are not heroes, but wannable heroes.

I think that adding more statistic on unit is not a wise idea. Why not just use the current statistic that we have in the game instead? By change it's nature to make the game more fun and exciting.

About the strong and weak point, Elemental has already Cutting and Blunt Weapon. So instead of adding / change the nature of these existing weapon, why not just add some property to them.

For example : Cutting weapon is strong against Light Armor, while Blunt Weapon is strong against Heavy Armor.

Light Armor : Leather Clothes -> give less def, but keep the mobility intact

Heavy Armor : Padded Armor -> give more def, but decrease the overall speed of the unit. So it will not only decrease the tactical manouver of the unit but also decrease the mobility of the unit on the strategic map.

Then we have pierce weapon (bow, spear, javelin) that strong against these two type of armor but weak against the shield. While shield limit the unit to use single handed weapon (Shield should give little boost the the def, but more def to pierce attack)

Then we separate the one handed and two handed weapon. One handed is always has less damage but can equip a shield, while Two handed has greater damage but will make the unit vunerable to arrow attack.

By this config, we have already several different purpose units that matter not only on tactical battle, but also on strategy map, without even change the core of the game itself

Then we have this other kind of combat method : Magic

Magic is strong against everything. So to fight a wizard, you need a wizard. Give several defensive spell that give the units capability to stand against a rain of fireball. It is just natural for magic to be strong as wizards in Elemental are rare breed.

This setting is true to the historical battle. As cutting weapon (sword) is better against light armored opponents, while blunt weapons are better against heavy armored ones. That's why knights in medieval era love to use mace instead of sword in the battlefield.

Spear is a pierce weapon. No armor can stand against a pierce attack. That's why people use shield to avoid the damage from this weapon.

Adding to the discussion--how about the implementations of parties/armies+?

I am a little confused on how these are to be incorporated properly via physical properties; for instance, if one soldier takes up one tile, then how is it that additional soldiers cover the same amount of ground? via hex tiles, that is. Currently, a single object can be attacked from 8 sides. Would it be easier to implement a larger object that has additional tiles to be attacked from and removing parties/armies+? Seems it would also be a fair bit easier to balance on a unit by unit basis.

I may be missing a piece of the puzzle, though--perhaps it is intended that a single object, dragon for example, can take on a company of men? Do armies/parties have some sort of upgrade path or future plans? They seem expensive to both create and seem to be retired relatively quickly, especially when advanced designs can be created at a rapid pace.

1st. Let units move in initiative order (not the I go you go system used now). Let initiative be a random factor + training bonus + armor factor + amy leader bonus if any.

Example:

Talent - Expert Tactician - +2 initiative to units in the army commanded by a champion or sovereign with this talent.

Expert Unit gets +2 initiative bonus due to training.

That means that an expert unit commanded by Sovereign with the expert tactician talent is more likely to move before an untrained peasant militia unit lead by a champion farmer.

2nd. Give units access to tactical actions based on their training (or army commanders)

Example: Peasant Unit might choose Withdrawal - and thus withdraw 1 tile if an enemy unit moves to attack it.

Example: Expert unit might select Withdrawal, Shield Wall (defense bonus). Charge (attack bonus, defense penalty). First Strike (chance to strike first if attacked, -2 movement penalty), or form square (no morale check if attacked on flank, but suffers -50% attack rating and can't move that turn).

Much like a fire or stone elemental can elect to use one of their magical attack powers let normal units select a tactical action if they wish.

3rd. Line of Sight - let a player view only units that are in their line of sight. Terrain and magic could affect this (i.e. Water Spell - Rain Storm reduces line of sight for all units to 3 tiles). You can't see units that are on the inside of a a city wall, but they can see out.

• Give the defender in a city with a castle a bonus to their line of sight.
• Perhaps a strategic hill gives the occupying player a longer line of sight.
• Archers can only attack units they can see.
• Magic can be directed at an apparantly empty tile - which may or may not be empty.

4th. Add bonuses for flank and rear attacks. Perhaps, the defender needs to make a morale check to avoid panic if attacked from the side or rear.

Note: A unit attacked from the side flank suffers a -25% morale penalty, a unit attacked from the rear a 50% morale penalty.
Note: A champion or sovereign can use his action points to rally a unit in panic.

5th. As suggested above, make weapon and armor choices count. Perhaps a seperate initiative rating to control which unit moves when and a strike rating to decide which unit makes the initial blow when combat is joined.

Example: Unit with armed with dagger attacks unit armed with spear. Spear equipped unit has a chance to strike first due to its longer reach.

This gives the players real choices to make when constructing units.

6th. Let armor and mounts affect movement. Currently a unit on a mount moves just as far as a unit on foot. A unit in heavy plate moves the same distance as one in leather armor. Let lightly encumbered units move faster.

7th. Make the battlefields bigger for larger engagements and add terrain that really affects the battle - i.e hills that block line of sight, a river, etc.

8th. Allow players to rotate the battle field. Currently some units are blocked by terrain.

9th. Allow units to save a standard deployment layout for each army and let the computer use this when placing the units on the tactical battlefield map.

10th. Allow Mana users an option to choose cast counter magic (cost 2 mana). I.e. A magic user choosing this loses his action points for the turn but increases the chance for an opposing magic users magical attack to miss/fail. The chance for this to occur would be based on what type of elemental magic the magic user prepared to counter the opposing magic that the enemy casts. (i.e. fire, water, air, or earth).

Example: Sovereign A decides to stand ready to counter magic with Fire Magic. Fire against Water is highly effective - +50% miss chance; however, against Earth this has no effect. On the other hand water magic is more effective against Earth Magic (water can move rock) and Fire Magic and less effective against air magic (water conducts electricity).

Thus this is a game of rock/paper/sissors if you choose to counter an enemy's magic during battle.

Water vs Fire - +50% Miss
Water vs Earth - +25% Miss
Water vs Air - No Effect

Fire vs Water - +50% Miss
Fire vs Earth - No Effect
Fire vs Air - +25% Miss

PS: From this list I would start with;

• Initiative - movement order based on a unit's initiative.
• Flank Attacks - defending unit makes morale check if attacked on flank. Flank is determined based on the first attack defended against that turn.
• Combat Movement - let lightly encumbered units or mounted units move further
• Tactical Actions for Combat(not summoned units) - start with just a few for trained units, you can always add more later.

I doubt that would ever be under consideration, seeing as your sovereign being an active part in battle is such a huge part of the game.  The mentions to a HOMM style I and other have made is because they are very similar systems, and a few things HOMM did right could apply to Elemental.  Not implying a cut and paste since they aren't the same game, they just use the same template for tactical battles.  My hero being a passive player in HOMM is one thing that always bothered me particularly the less magic oriented heroes in those games. 

I think we should try to focus on the basic mechanic before adding tons of stuff to it, so I'll just stick to these:

At the moment the biggest problem in my mind is the 1D roll on defense. As it is, you'll never be able to have a melee champion or sovereign. The reason is simple, one bad roll = dead (especially since ATK is many times more than HP in most cases). Defense has to either be 100% straight reduction, or a % of damage mitigation, or both, one value for straight reduction, and one for mitigation. This can depend on the type of armor, so that plates are good at straight reduction, leather are good at mitigation, etc. That will make the choice of armor important instead of wearing plate on everything. In the end though, the most important point is that if you want the game to be about strategy and not luck, you have to be able to figure out if you can survive a hit. If you can't figure it out, you have to not get hit, this is why all player champion/sovereign are using bows/spells, and all the AI's are... well, dead.

The number of dice rolls for offense is less important because you can conceptualize it as a complete miss, a glancing blow, a half hit, up to a full hit doing full damage. It would be nice to have a bit less randomness, but it's not completely necessary. One of the thing that you could do is make the dice roll a value for each weapon (instead of straight attack). Thus, you can have weapons like axes with really high ATK still use 1 dice, and have it represented as strong weapons, but hard to wield/hit with. Then have weapons like swords use 2D rolls with less ATK, representing an easier to wield weapon that does more average damage. Daggers can use 3D rolls with least ATK... etc. This will go a long way in giving flavor to the various weapons types, giving choice for the "ultimate" weapon, and thus giving some real value to unit design (IE: if you don't like random damage? Use daggers, etc). You can also expanded this further to make the factions unique by having certain faction preferring certain types of weapon (Gilden prefers axes, Altar likes swords, etc). Aside from just that, if you have the dice roll as a modifiable value for each weapon, you're looking at some kind of holy grail for a lot of mods.

I understand combat speed/initiative is getting an overhaul already, so I'll wait for the changes to comment.

My preference would be for a MOM style calculation, with action points calculating the number of attacks available to a unit or unit set.

Attack strength was the number of 30% chances to hit.  Attack 9 meant 9 such chances.  A 4 unit stack would have 4 x 9 such chances.

Damage would be a rating that would be the damage per hit.  A 4 person squad with attack 5 training (note: training defines attack strength, weapon class defines damage) and shortswords doing 3 damage would on average deliver 4 x 5 x 30% = 6 hits for 3 damage each, or 18 points.

Defense gives the number of chances at 30% the defender has to block one hit.  With action points in the game, defense should be convoluted with that.  A defense 8 defender would then stop 8 x 30% = 2.4 hits.  Let's say they block 3; so the damage is mitigated to 9 points.

Resistance to specific attack types changes the percentage chance to block.  Weaknesses do as well.  Magical attacks increase the percentage chance of hits of that type.

Maybe an interesting thing to do would be to give a defender the ability to choose how to defend, once attacked.  If you're willing to burn action points, you can parry an attack, and reduce the number of incoming hits (like defense rating), or you could choose to eat the hits, hoping to dish out more damage on your attacks with your retained action points.

i think at its base the combat should be set up with

att vs soak : mean attack hits, units soaks up some damage(based on armor and whatnot) and the rest passes through.

att vs miss(better chance with higher combat speed): mean attack completely misses.

damage rules:  modifiers, modifiers, modifiers.  look at d20 rules for great results.  you have a base damage thats modified by other other things(spells, str, weapons etc)  so if a weapon does 1-6 damage that's fine but then add your modifiers on top of that. 

short sword of fire: base 1-6, fire damage +2, str of 15 +2 = 5-10 damage.  still a bit random, but atleast 5 PLUS fire damage(incase you fight stuff weak vs firedamage)

also i am not sure its in the game, but critical hits are nice, and a crit would also have a chance to lower morale because of heavy loses.

I think an easy way to alleviate some of the 1dN problems is by changing the stat to an average.  Instead of a single 1dN roll, how about an average of three 1dN rolls?

Let’s say your attack is at 1d50.  People are getting upset when they do 1 or 2 points of damage due to an unlucky roll.  However, if the stat rolls came up as “(2, 25, 39)/3,” the damage would average out to 22.  This method would create a bell-curve average for damage over the long term.  You’d still get low or high damage rolls sometimes, however, the standard would be something in between. 

This system could work for both attack and defense rolls.  It give players a rough idea of how their units will perform but it still leaves it up to chance what the actual numbers will be.

I do not like the 'attacker and defender strike simultaneously". I suggest to either base that on an initiative system, or to have the attacker go first most of the time (and have some weapon with the rule "defender goes first", either has an advantage - pike - or as a disadvantage -hammers.)

Aside from that, here are some of my opinions concerning tactical battles:

One important thing, IMO, is that the hit points of a standard humanoid should be high enough that a good weapon doesn't necessarily kill him outright if he's unarmored, and certainly doesn't if he wears a decent-to-good armor. This means that:

• Hit points need to be raised. 15 HP is fine: that still makes the guy killable with a good hammer or sword, but it avoids one-hit-kill. This is important, because otherwise first strike becomes too important. Killing without retaliation should be a very costly strategy, reserved for powerful heroes or elite troops. Higher damage weapons are almost fine as they are. Lower damage weapons are ridiculously underpowered. They need some love.
• Why not lower the armor and higher damage weapons instead? Because of the armor. In order for armors to have progressively higher (non-fractional) values, with the current system, you need to reach at least 25-30+ armor. Think about it this way: if a basic breastplate has 2 armor, then the 2nd level needs at least 3, the next one 4... etc. For each new piece of armor to be stronger than the previous one, you need to have them raise to the 30s when endgame comes around. (By the way, fix chainmail, it has no purpose as it is since it's strictly worse than other options). There are ways to soften this, such as giving later armors other bonuses than just straight better "armor factor". Resistance to magic, dodge factor, immunity to some effects, better protection against piercing/bludgeoning/whatever or even a special ability. Even then, armor will reach the higher 20s no matter what. This means armor is the scale which sets the nominal value of everything else. And as it is, having units 30 armor and 5 HP is total nonsense. The HP is almost useless here, it's really "soak everything or die". Elite fighters have only 15 HP, which makes it barely better for them. That really should be what basic soldiers have.

We need tactical positioning. There are several ways to achieve this, and maybe using several of the in conjunction can lead to an even more interesting game.

• Add special terrain in tactical battles. Give the terrain some features which influence the battle. Maybe a cover system which impairs some ranged attacks when trying to shoot through rocks/allies/enemies/any sort of obstacle. Hey, this would have quite a few cool side effects: you could have new spell options ("indirect fire" - style spells, which ignore cover, and others which don't), city walls would become less abstracts (block units *and* lower the probability the defender gets shot. Has to provide one-way cover: people inside the walls should not be impaired by them). Another idea would be to have hills/trees/whatever feature on the tactical map give a bonus to the stat of the unit standing on it. Civilization-style. Don't put this on the strategic map, put it directly on the tactical battle map.
• As lots of people said, add special abilities. Especially those based on movement, positioning, and reaction to the opponent's movement and positioning. Tripping, shoving, trampling, attacks of opportunity/control zone, some units could have infinite retaliation or retaliation vs. ranged attacks, some units could do AOE damage in retaliation (around them or at a distance) or use a power, or some units could lack retaliation all-together. Adding flanking/backstabs (for all units or only for some with the appropriate ability, both are interesting in their own way) is a nice example.
• Increase the size of tactical maps. It is impossible to outmaneuver someone on a dime. And maybe have some units that have stealth-like abilities in some terrain types, making outmaneuvering even more of a possibility. If you increase the map size, though, you'll have to increase the default combat speed of units. Which is fine: as it is, for now, combat speed is a monster, mostly because those fractional values are completely nonsensical. But the fact that the default speed is 2 forces you to use those fractional negative modifiers on metal armors and hammers. If you increase the size of tactical maps, you can increase the default combat speed, and you solve the problem.

There are many other interesting points that have been made here, so there's no point for me to repeat them. So I'll just stop here and will say that I can't wait to see what tactical combat will become in the future...

Suddenly, I feel less bad about my own  O(N^2) data analysis code at work...

Oh, and don't go too far in the other direction when softening randomness. There are many good aspects to it, and the current system has its advantage: mainly, it avoids total immunity of later armor against mid-game weapons. Randomness adds a sort of excitement: that's what D&D has critical hits. They're fun, and taking out the troll with a giant blow will be a memorable moment.

We're in a non-deterministic universe, let the game be at the image of the world we live in . (Yes, that's a stretch).

After reread Mr. Frogboy post again, I realize that General Combat system is different than the Tactical Combat. In tactical Combat Idea, you can say about adding a lot of skills, make the weapon do dice roll, etc. But the General Combat System means that they want to overhaul the whole Elemental Stat Concept, if not the whole gameplay concept. is it true Mr. Frogboy?

So... instead of talking about the tactical combat, we should to talk about how should the general combat should work. From the weapon perspective, to Character's RPG stats, Strategy, etc, etc. Well, it is a very very radical change. The Elemental will become a very different game because of it.

If it is true that Stardock want to overhaul the game concept, then I can only say that Elemental has already a lot of good points here. The problem is it's depth in each department. But, no one can give everything. So you should make priority. But please, the whole concept is yours to decide. Letting the community to tell what they want will only make the team confused.

Just make a good concept, give the gamers a great deal of replaybility, make the strategy game fun, and also give the RPG fan excitement. If you can make a spectacular Galactic Civilization Game, why should afraid to give the customers a creative, fun, and unforgetable game? For one thing, you should not forget that Elemental is Elemental; not Master of Magic, or Age of Wonders, or Heroes Might & Magic. So you must make a unique Elemental game that surpass the previous 4x games on the market, not just the clone of them.

This doesn't change anything with grouped units: if 1 guy can kill another with only one blow, unless you really, really, really change how things work (think: Total War series), a 8 guys group will kill another 8 guys group in one blow. It's the exact same problem. Unit groups don't solve the problem; if anything, it makes it worse.

We need higher HP so that groups of equal size will not fight on a "first strike wins" basis; this isn't a problem limited to individuals.

i'm sorry, but to my mind you're contradicting yourself here. total war games and many other games that are considered far more casual than elemental still have vastly more complex (and more numerous) stat systems than elemental. even games that people play far more often like WoW. the difference between the two is that the total war games (and WoW) are much less abstracted because they have better stat systems that produce more intuitive results.

WoW is a more complicated system, but you don't need to understand it to get decent results, just apply a little common sense. elemental is much less complicated, but you must understand it perfectly to get good results because it's so unintuitive. who when applying common sense would ever guess that a short sword would double you movement rate, that first strike would be so important, or that a fireball would do the same total damage to one guy standing in a square as to 10?

to my mind there is nothing complex or ridiculous about the idea of allowing, withing the stat system, the ability to give a fire elemental fire resistance. the ability to stop a being made of elemental fire being burnt.

and to my mind, the idea of having a decent, intuitive stat sytem that tells me everything i need to know about a unit at a glance, is also far more straighforward than having to look up a multitude of special abilities that everyone is constantly clamouring for, probably in some separate screen that's hidden away from me. special rules and abilities are just crutches that illustrate the limitations of your system.