But this is with current balance and without a mod. For a game that basically advertises immense moddability, the tactical combat system definitely has to be able to decently accomodate most "normal" (meaning, not "Hey for kicks and giggles let's do 10 million vs 10 million fight!) mods.

Partly see above concerning mods, but also consider that right now we're on Tiny maps. The 64 bit version will allow for maps massively bigger than the "biggest" we've seen in any game so far. It's not only possible but virtually guaranteed that on a map like that you're not just going to have 5-6 cities by the end of the game, but 30, 40, or more.

Most games, even moddable ones, have a target battle size though. I think that many people would be surprised how small battles were prior to modern times. If the population of the biggest city is capped at 1,000, then having battles with 1,000s of troops makes no sense at all. You're going to need probably at least 100 citizens to support one troop.

Well this is true, of course, but not really what I was talking about. A good battle system, even if "sweet-spot" balanced around the core game expectations of battle size, isn't going to break horribly when a mod reasonably changes that battle size expectation for its own needs. It has to allow for enough natural scaling to accomodate changes.

How small battles were before modern times is not relevant at all to this discussion, however.

Are you sure you're understanding what unit means in this case? I'm pretty sure I had more than 10 units in an army in the beta already.

Right now. That won't last.

This, my friend, is why we can hit "Auto Resolve" ANY TIME WE WANT. You don't Have To Play Long Battles If You Don't Want To. That's fine. Just Don't take away the ability to play Long Battles for those of us (which I would say is the Majority of us) who WANT To Play Long Battles.

If you get bored half-way through a fight, hit Auto Resolve and be done with it.

The player should be given the choice, period.

I fully agree though that a small battle, maybe 30 soldiers against a couple of monsters, would or should end quickly. I wouldn't even call something like that a "Battle" so much as I would call it a "Skirmish". I don't see how a Army of even 5,000 soldiers would be able to take a Entire City in 3 minutes unless it was a small city with No Walls and only Meager Defenses. It would take 3 minutes just to breach the Walls. Regardless of whether or not the battle continues during the next turn of the game, large battles should take more then 3 minutes. 5,000 men wouldn't even be able to run the length of a football field in 3 minutes, much less breach a defended city and kill everyone inside (unless you use some seriously destructive spells).

Speaking of Spells in battle. I Do Fully See The Possibility of even a Large Battle being over rather quickly if a Sovereign or other Powerful Caster Type of unit was present at the battle. Or maybe even a Dragon. I can see a Dragon killing a few Thousand soldiers in only a few minutes, sure. For some reason though I Can't See how 10,000 Mundane Soldiers vs another 10,000 Mundane Soldiers would end so quickly, unless the battle mechanics are seriously gimped.

I'm fully willing to "wait and see" and "try it for my-self" before I pass judgment though, How-ever by then it Will Be Too Late for Us Beta-Testers to have ANY SAY What-So-Ever in them being changed at this late stage of development before release.

Like I said in another thread the other day, if this isn't Done Right the First Time then Elemental will get Bad Reviews and it will be tanked by gaming sites before it ever really has a chance to get off the ground. No Matter What I DON'T want that to happen and I doubt anyone else here does either. We ALL want Elemental to succeed and be the next Successor to the Legend that is MoM. Even Age of Wonders, though it was a Great Game, didn't quite capture that Magical Feeling that games like the original MoM, MoO, and X-Com had.

To quote you:

It's so not true that hitting autoresolve is an option in any serious game. I've played at least 30 TBS games where I've tried autoresolve, and not one of them does half as good as manually playing it out.

Unless you don't care about losing units, autoresolve just isn't a viable option.

Lets not get into the ridiculousness that is Trek species from different evolutionary lines interbreeding. But as far as I understand, fallen and human can breed to create some pretty hideous offspring.

Terminology problem I think. IIRC the biggest unit you can make right now is 10 soldiers. But that's 1 "unit", even though it consists of 10 troops. Presumably higher levels of tech and larger cities will enable units that have more soldiers in them.

An "army" is a group of units, and there doesn't seem to be a limit on that. (edit - apparently there will be.)

What happens to enchantments when a channeler dies? It would make sense to have them simply go away, but this is a world so full of magic that even after massive destruction plenty of magic stuck around. Maybe there should be a small chance- 5%?- that enchantments stay in place once a channeler dies. It could add a little interest to the game and would probably take very little effort.

Everything looks great! I can't wait for the release date!

If you're going to speak for the majority Raven, you had better define "long".

Some of the crazier numbers being thrown around exclude me from that group. It'd require a pretty extraordinary situation to make hour long tactical combat reasonable.

It shouldn't take longer to move 5000 guys to point X then it does to move 50, unless we're dealing with a UI that only lets you move one thing at a time and that 5000 is broken up into 100 units of 50 each. THAT would make battles take a long time, but it would just be tedious.

Far as I'm concerned if you have to spend 30 minutes taking each city, and there's 30 cities to take before you win the game, there's a serious design problem. That's 15 HOURS just to take the cities, not including any time on the overland map or any other combat on the way to those cities. Speaking as a software developer, this really looks to me as a case where users are asking for something without really understanding just what it is they're asking for. If they were actually given that game, very soon the forum would fill up with complaints and requests to make tactical combat faster so people can actually concievably use it.

A game that slow would be unplayable to most people. Even the revered MoM didn't have anything that moved at the snails pace people claim they want.