I agree and this can be experienced within AoW:SM as well.  It was also annoying how all players could view your battles.   Ideally when one human player is fighting someone or something else the other human players should be allowed to view and adjust their towns, resources, units and marching positions.

Continous turns (perhaps they mean simultanous turns like in Age of Wonders?) are superior to turnbased turns for multiplayer and allows the game to flow better.

Feels like it's the future. Like when I played KotOR and immidietly thought it better then Ice Wind Dale and Baldurs Gate games.

Y'all are thoroughly reinforcing my desire to see single-player mode have (at least the option for) 'true' turn-based tactical combat. I almost certainly will try the multiplayer stuff, but I still have no idea if it will hold my interest. But I guess I'm especially weird, even for a crowd like this one, because I'm far more likely to be put off by required click-fits than I would be by required waiting periods. I never was very good at the card game bridge, but I believe that the dummy hand is a brilliant innovation for grownups playing a game. It means there's always someone available to make a new pitcher of martinis.

Well, especially when all players involved are pretty experienced and good players, battles don't take that long. They know what they want and don't have to sit there formulating a plan - once they see the battlefield they can almost instantly come up with a strategy and go from there. Unless we're talking huge, end-game battles here, they rarely took more than 5 or 10 minutes (player v player). Player v Monster battles are obviously faster. So yes, if you're playing on a large map your game is going to take a very long time to play. But that's true even if you play a large map in singleplayer, even if you autoresolve all combat. If you want a relatively quick multiplayer game, the trick is to player on a pretty small map with settings conducive to a quick end.

That said, multiplayer turn-based strategy matches are inherently longer than FPS or RTS ones, for obviously reasons. If you only have an hour to play, then either find someone willing to play a short match on a tiny map, or go play a few turns in your latest single-player endeavour. Multiplayer TBS games will never have as many active participants as real-time games. You have to wait for other players, and the games themselves take a long time to complete, and I think the demographic that is more likely to play Elemental is probably less interested in multiplayer.

Yep, I'm looking forward to finally having a proper chance to play at least these early games(missed them entirely back in the day) via GoG for a low price.  I think Steam has some sort of combo pack for HoMM V though.