I would like to see box art that represents actual tactical combat looking epic. Seriously, I'm not an artist but can someone in these forums come up with something?

That might be simpler, but what about those of us who bought the game because of the battle scene represented in this box design?  It's not fair to consumers, and it should've been made explicitly clear if it was Stardock's intention to not implement this scale of battle.  As it is, I feel very misled and don't know if I can trust Stardock to do the right thing.  I initially withdrew my refund request because of Stardock's promise to make everything better, but if they have no intention of selling me the game on the box, then they may as well have just stolen my $50.  If they were just to confirm that they plan on implementing this in a future update, I'd calm down, but the dev. silence on this matter is making me worry.  I mean, we're in a recession here, and $50 goes a long way.  I feel cheated right now.

@wayninja Hey did hang around the neverwinter nights 1 and 2 forums? I seem to remember you from there.

on topic:

I'm all for epicness sure, but for me I have some things I'd rather seen tweaked or fixed for now. I thinking adding a system like that, while there is still balancing and bugs in place will make things harder for everyone.

Reading back the old posts from Frogboy does make me sad - we were all swept up in his vision, which was what we all wanted, and the execution has been nowhere close

A lot of us agree with that sentiment. It would be nice to get an acknowledgment one way or the other. Anything really. I'd be happy with pretty much any words from a dev on it to be honest. Anything from a "We're working on it for a future update" to a "f'k off, if you don't like it here's your money, go be happy with a total war mod and quit bitching"...lol. Something, anything, would be most welcome. Especially after 15 pages of this. I honestly don't see this thread stopping until something is said about it. Maybe they don't want to say anything until they know something more definite about when they'll have time to address the issue, or maybe they don't want to address the issue because they already know the engine can't handle it? Without some kind of word from the devs we really don't know either way .

A lot of us feel that way about one aspect or another. I Love the game. I've either worked on Modding it, or have spent hours playing it, EVERY SINGLE DAY Since Release. Still, even I can't say I'm not let down at least in part about some of the plans that were made that haven't been followed through on. For many of those plans or ideas that were talked about we don't have any idea where the devs stand on it. Many of us have put in a Lot of time coming up with ideas in the ideas section or in other sections of the forums, and for a lot of those we don't know if the devs are paying attention, keeping an eye on it, or just flat out ignoring it. Of course we all know they're busy fixing stuff and that Stardock can't afford to pay someone just to hang out on the forums all day and talk with the community, but sometimes even just a couple words from a Dev on an issue can go a long long way.

Part of the reason the thread got so long is some of us who aren't too keen on the devs looking at this before the long list of more important things that need fixing or improving in the game started arguing.

I stand by my opinion that increasing the number of men on screen in turn based combat does not make it epic. You need the real time battles of Total War to get that. They look epic because the 3d models, animations and noises are so varied and detailed - it actually looks like an epic battle being fought. It's modelling the battle a lot more realistically than the abstracted turn based model, so it can show you this battle being fought. Most importantly, everything is happening at the same time. In a turn based game like Elemental, all the units will spend most of their time idle... when one unit attacks another, only the men in those two units will do anything and it will be nothing like a melee in TW. You'll just get generic attack and defence animation with no interaction between the units. Nothing like a cavalry charge into the flanks of a light infantry formation.

Turn based games get their epic feel from the strategy side of the game, not the tactical side. There are many things broken in the combat model the devs need to focus on, but "epic" feel is not one of them. These are grand strategy games and deal with things more important than individual battles. For all of Total War battles' epic feel, the game as a whole doesn't come anywhere near the epic feel of a well played game of Europa Universalis or Civ.

I wasn't talking about bug fixing. There are some serious gameplay overhauls that need to be done and these will require lots of QA, re-balancing and AI changes. I'd say in the very least they have 6 months of more important work to do, more likely even longer.

This is true, and I definitely see your point here. This is why I talked about the "interim animations" as well. Think about this. This is for a turn based environment.

When one mêlée unit attacks another, there's nothing saying the animation has to end when the attack ends. The animation of those two units hammering on each other can continue until a new order is given the next turn. This keeps the action "looking constant". I've seen other turn based games do it like this in the past especially some of the old console strategy games (just don't ask me to name any examples right this second). It's all about how creative the dev team is. I know that if I and others here can think of ways to pull it off and get that epic feeling they wanted, so can they. They're the pros and that's why they make the big bucks.

I can understand you standing behind your decision too, and I respect that. I see by your registration date though you've only been here a month and I don't know if you've went back and read all the previous dev journals. In the beginning it was planned as a "Continuous Turns" system, much like the original Baldur's Gate on PC, and for that system it would have been perfect.

As we all know the devs switched from the CT system to a true Turn Based system to try to get better depth in the strategy of it, and I can understand and agree with that as well. I don't see why though that meant that when the change was made from one system to the other that unit numbers had to be changed as well. For two years everyone dreamed of how the game would look, feel, and of course play. How the game plays is the most important thing, how it "feels" is probably the second most important thing. If you would have heard Frogboy describe all the epic battles he envisioned pulling off with the engine you'd most likely be right here with us on our side of the fence on this. Still, what you support now, which is the current system, doesn't even come close to what their initial vision was, and honestly the type of game environment, being continuous turns or real time, really didn't need to affect that at all.

If you look at a lot of the reviews floating around the web all of them tend to say the same thing when talking about the tactical battles. Here's an excerpt from the Gamespot review found here: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/elementalwarofmagic/review.html

"These are grid-based tactical battles at their most basic, so there's nothing to ignite your enthusiasm. Furthermore, these skirmishes don't harbor any visual appeal. The battlefields are bland, and soldiers don't look like they are marching across the tiles so much as they are floating while their legs move"

Now, I don't agree with what he says about the units "floating". They look like they're walking on the ground just fine to me, but, I Do Agree with him saying they "don't harbor any visual appeal". I don't mean the art style, the art style kicks ass IMO. Gamespot isn't the only review site that's said this either, and I think that feeling is the general consensus showing how far and how fast this thread took off. You're right in pointing out there's a couple pages of drama and bullsh!t!t here, but when you get past that and look (and count) the serious replies, for the most part people are complaining about the battles not looking "Inspired", or for lack of a better word, "Epic". If they would have kept the larger unit counts I don't think there would be as much of a backlash about the battles not looking right. In today's gaming world, people need something to "oooh" and "aahhhh" about. The game doesn't deliver that. Not with the spell animations, nor with the look and feel of the battles. Even old school MoM had larger unit counts than this. Seeing as how each unit only had one size, every unit in MoM started off with anywhere between 6 and 12 soldiers in each unit. I seem to remember having some pretty big battles in MoM by end game. Here's some pics of our beloved MoM from back in the day. You can't tell me these don't look epic for back in the day, because to me these are awesome pics.

Every unit here in these pictures starts out bigger than the 1 Man starting unit size in Elemental. If the makers of MoM could get together today and re-make their game, I guarantee you they'd make something with even larger unit sizes, because they were extremely limited by their technology back in the day. With today's machines....I bet they'd go nuts.

Just to stress the fact even more to Stardock about the kind of press that picture from the box is getting and will keep getting, I did a Google search on "Master of Magic Tactical Battles". You wouldn't believe how many pictures of Elemental came up. There's one right on the first page of the search results. Take a look at What Picture it is...

Edit: I removed the search link. after I went and checked the link it ended up going to a damn pirate site, so, even through extension, I'm not posting a link to that, sorry.

The game would look and feel better with the battles it was envisioned with only in the current turn based environment. It could only improve the opinion that the review sites have, it would make a very large chunk of the players happy, And it would live up to the Infamous picture that's going to start making even more people like Kevin here upset when they get home expecting to sit down and play a epic game and get stuck with not even having half the units shown in the picture. Saying that it was a "bad move" for Stardock to put that picture on the box would probably be an understatement, but, it's not just the box. There's lots of sites up, and magazines printed, that advertise Elemental Specifically With that screen-shot. Does that really seem "right"? Well...I don't know. I LOVE Stardock, I do. I LOVE their games, I'm going to keep buying their games, and I'm going to keep helping them and supporting them anyway I can, but....it feels wrong to me as a customer and as a gamer to advertise the game with that picture if what's in that picture can't be done IN the game.

Raven the comparison to MoM brings it to the point. Also it would make more sense to have more numerous but less quality troops in the beginning, e.g., peasant units in Rome Total War were like 120 or something, whereas legionaires around 40 or 60. Since the whole game engine uses hit points and squads etc. it could be easily changed to a depiction(!) appearing more realistic (and similar to that of MoM/Total War), e.g., just reduce hit points of peasants but put 12 or so in the first units.

/ signed 

With 15 pages of debate on the topic, I'm going to spell out why I'm signing on to the idea of EPIC combat, just so it's clear.  Presentation of the game matters.  And the current presentation of the tactical battles is boring, and stupid looking.  When my hero disengages from one attacker (with no penalty or couterstrike), and runs from one corner of his little square to the other in order to fight a second attacker, that looks painfully stupid.  Even if the tactical battles offered some semblance of satisfying tactical decisions, it would be difficult to enjoy because it is presented poorly.  My first hope in endorsing EPIC is that the tactical battles would start to look properly EPIC.  A big step in the right direction would be to modify the scale of the figures relative to the "squares" on the terrain so that individual figures are not defending large square plots of terrain.  This would force the engine to support units that cover multiple squares, which in turn would allow a much larger range of figure sizes - allowing properly EPIC sized creatures (such as dragons) that do not have to be squeezed into a single square.  (And, yes, I realize this is a huge amount of work from a programming perspective, but I still think it's necessary).

My second hope for EPIC combat is that some of the things talked about here would lead to a more tactical combat system.  One where the player has more options than simply charging the opposing forces, and where intelligent tactics give a significant advantage.   For example, RavenX has proposed continuous combat animations for units engaged in melee.  This clearly suggests that the concept of engagement should be included in the combat model - if a unit is engaged with another unit, it should suffer a penalty to withdraw and attack someone else.  That, in turn, leads to the concept of flanking attacks - if a unit is engaged, and it is attacked by someone else, the flanking attacker should do extra damage. 

I do not think that this kind of combat needs to be any more demanding of the user or drawn out than the current system, but Stardock is going to have to think about how it is implemented very carefully.  Certainly, the concept of unit formations would help reduce the micro-management aspect of combat, and would also potentially add additional tactical considerations - do you make smaller, weaker formations and hope for flanking attacks, or do you make a very large formation for maximum firepower?  One way to handle this would be to make formations something that you research (or something that is given to you as you research larger squads), with more powerful formations available as the game goes on.  Ideally, the tactics of managing more troops would change as the unit sizes grow, but the overall number of pieces that need to be micro-managed would stay roughly the same.  Incidentally, this naturally leads to the concept of attrition - that units with more than one figure lose combat effectiveness as they lose figures.  This is absolutely key to having EPIC battles.  If units fight the same regardless of how many men they have lost, then you might as well just represent each unit with a single figure.  Attrition is a necessary part of making squads feel different from a single man unit.

This might sound like a lot: Engagement, Flanking, Attrition, support for graphics covering multiple cells, Formations.  And to some extent, it is.  OTOH, it's the minimum required to make tactical combat interesting and relevant.  Stardock has already invested a great deal of time and effort into the tactical engine.  I think it's worth putting a little more in to make that part of the game worth playing.

I hate to do it, but I have to say...

An Official, not A Official.

I normally enjoy your posts but if I didn't say something it was going to drive me crazy.

I'm all for epic tactical battles but I think it's a horrible idea to say

number of figures in a unit = epic.

The current system wouldn't be the tiniest bit of epic even if there were a million figures in every unit.

Changes to how combat works (like this) would help much more because there would be decisions to make.
Right now I'm longing for the Auto-Combat button from MoM that would just move the units forward and attack... something. Anything.

Elemental is intentionally kept at a smaller scale because of the story background and to a degree so that champions can have the faintest chance of doing anything in a battle.
A single Achilles is not going to win against a million peasants with clubs or shortbows. No matter how good he is.
A change to the figure numbers that will achieve nothing but devalue other parts of the game is not very likely nor would I wish for that.