Well, if leadership is just a stat bonus, this merely comes down to tweaking the value(s).

[quote quoting="article"]Our goal is that if you want to see the whole “Battle of 5 armies” type thing you should see each and every soldier fighting if you want or you can zoom out and see it more abstracted.quote]

Oh yeah, I would love to do something epic like that. 

I think your reference to the "battle of 5 armies" was mostly lost though, not sure many people here have read that book.

Mmm if we don't have to fight battles I hope you can preconfigure your armies, like in Dominions 3 where you can script and place every squad of units so while you don't fight the battles your self they do use the strategy you lay out for them. I hate it with the Total war games when you do auto-resolve battle it's just a bunch of numbers and you don't have a hand in it yourself (Don't get me wrong, I do love TW games ^_^)

In other words, I'll actually not play optimally unless I take control of my troops. Then, I'll be forced to invest in Leadership instead, foregoing more interesting or fullfilling pursuits; Unless, of course, I take control over my troops directly.

I've been constantly pushing for 'auto-resolve' to be a viable option in face of tactical battles, knowing full well that it's futile (an AI is unlikely to ever be better than a human controlling her own troops). If I want to be remotely viable on auto-resolve, I'll have to sink my points straight into Leadership and hope that the AI on the other side hasn't sunk more into his. And that's just for viability. I'll still shoot myself in the foot compared to controlling the turn of events myself.

I loathe the idea of TC in my TBS, but I agree. If I achieve better results with TC than with FC, I'll basicly be forced to go TC. It feels like Leadership somewhat cements that notion.

That kind of 'Tactical Combat' is infinately preferable to actual on-hands Tactical Combat in a TBS.

Edit: Goddamn quoting!
Edit2: Goddamn GODDAMN quoting! Why the hell do we have a quoting system that is "interactive" and gives links to whatever we are quoting, when it never works and we have to edit it out anyway? Godammit.
Edit3: Added a quote of and comment to Noldofinwe's post, which naturally didn't work as it's supposed to work, so I had to tweak it again and "fix" the quote tag.

"You're" (as in "you are") insane (referring to your current "mental and psychological state") deep tactical combat is one of the most interesting aspects of elemental and orders of magnitude better than the auto-resolve combat style of Galciv2. 

Edit: That specific enough for you? I would also point out grammar is a figment of humanities collective imagination.

'Your'? Rephrase, please.

That is rude. People with opinions different from yours aren't necessarily insane.

Anyone else seeing all the fonts go bold & italic starting with Darkodinplus' reply 80?

Ooooow I saw that earlier...but not now, how odd!

Hah! It's the magic of Elemental!!!!!! Another, well hidden teaser!!!

I'm a bit skeptical of this 'leadership ability'. They described it as a sort of micromanagement reduction. I believe this kind of thing should be default. Players who don't spend xp on certain skill will have to click more ? I don't like where it goes.

It sounds like more of an AoE boost to AI abilities.  I'm sure that there will be benifits to those who want to micromanage as well, so that way the skill is always useful.

i know i may be out of line here but im more interested how you will recruit soldiers. like will you unlock technologies that allow basic,intermediate, and elite training then get to choose which one you will give your soldiers? I think it'd be cooler if it was just the longer you left them to train the better they got but it increased the chance of them dieing in training or something like that.

Thinking Tatical:

Leadership:

Several types of leadership, small unit, big unit, shock troops leader etc.  the type of leadership + unit mix given to the leader should define which AI scripts the leader will have access to.  More advanced AI scripts will have access to more advanced formations and attacks. 

Dirty Tricks:

We are playing a tatical game, Dirty trickts will be like horse archers kiting slower creatures, charging units creating a rotating charge (charge, open up, new unit charges through the opening)  A type of leader will have access to dirty tricks of his attack type + some others (this allows hero customization)

Counters:

A leader should have Dirty Trick counters, if one leader is using horse archers and kiting, a smart leader would use heavy shields and stand there ground (not chase after the faster unit) losses to the units would be vary small.  Calvery charges would be met with walls of spears etc.  A dirty trick should have a counter or 2 (or more in the case of flying units.)

This lets us customize leaders to fight the war we are trying to fight.

After reading the whole thread, I’ll like to express what I’ll want in this game, rgds to 2 issues mentioned, heroes & tacitcal combat.

Just like Campaigner & others mentioned, I’ll like heroes give numerical advantage to all units statistics in the stack.  For example, a level 2 General type hero will give additional of 2 (or 2% whichever is higher) to the ATT, DEF of all humanoid units in the stack.  A level 20 Beastmaster type hero will gives additional 20 (or 20% whichever is higher) additional HP, DEF only to all beasts in the stack.   All these bonuses will be shown in the form of “DEF 10(+20)” on the screen.

So when a level 20 General fighting with a level 1 General with exactly the same stack, the level 20 General will have 18% advantage in the stack’s strength (not exact math here)

What I am saying here is, different hero type give different bonuses to the stack.  Players will have fun forming the stack he needs depending on what hero the player got.  

Asiding form bonus, different hero should have some additional abilities; e.g. some provide swimming ability to the whole stack, some will have zone of control, some will regenerate 10% HP per turn, some will be able to recurit roaming monsters etc.

===

I love tactical combat for single player.  However, I knew it slows down multiplayer play a lot.  I’ll like to see implementing a Winning % system to resolve this.

On the strategic map, whenever player highlight an attacking stack, hover the mouse pointers over an enemy stack, the game will shows the % chance of winning.   The player will determine if he want to fight or flee in his turn.   This Win% can be determine by running a few AI simulation behind the scene or use a formula to calculate (using their relative stack strength).

Before the game start (either Multi/Single Play), players will need to pick/agree on the following choices:

1) Always Auto Resolve first.  However, whenever I lose, start the Tactical Combat.

2) No TC, always Auto Resolve

3) My stack always wins if the Win% is over 75% (or whatever value I choose), otherwise starts TC.

Default is 3) for most games.

I’ll hate to waste time doing TC, when I know I’ll surely win/lose; no matter it is in MP or SP.

===

Finally, a word about losing a hero stack.  If my stack is defeated, the hero will have a certain low 1% of dying or 2% of being captured.  However, the most likely result is that the hero will escape to the last town he visited.   The game will calcuate when he will resurface, factoring in the town distance & his movement speed & then add 1 more turn.

Losing a hero is a significant event, however, player cannot whine because player usually knows the odds before the fight.

 

 

This is a great idea. :b:

 

Doesn't this amount to "all battles are tactical" if in multiplayer.

I would suppose you would be right, because like its been mentioned before I seriously don't think an AI could match up against a human player. But the question I am having is mentioned in original post by Frogboy:

Now correct me if Im wrong people, but I remember this being discussed somewhere else and I just can't seem to find it, but I was positive that Frogboy mentioned that this could be a simultaneous turn based game, and is that what he means by "real time"? or that battles can be played out like a RTS and a TBS depending on ones preference? 

But in all, this post is spectacular I cannot wait for this game! Looking forward to the beta

Edit: Fixing the silly quotes

Beware speaking of elemental in any such fashion as to explicitly or implicitly refer to game-play in any way, shape, or form relating to a "Real time strategy" will invoke the ire of the TBS masses. That being said I had similar such ideas but Brad's response seemed to suggest to me that the game will have no true "real-time" tactical combat which can be found in page 1 of the thread Concerns I'm starting to have.

Refering to RisingLegend’s “(from “turns” to real time)”, on that page Frogboy says:
"Elemental is a turn-based game. Not an RTS.  Even the tactical battles are turn-based, they're just continuous turns (ala The Corporate Machine)."

I did not play Corp Machine.  It sounds like if I set the combat speed to fastest (or Real time), the AI play both side without player's involvement.   It became AutoResolve with nice step by step presentation.

Otherwise, when I set the combat speed to slowest one, does player have the opportunity to issue commands to each unit each turn, aka traditional TBS?  If we don’t get this opportunity, I may not play this game.

LdiCesare my thinking about TC has changed slightly & recently.  I think below is even better
<q>
The time consuming TC should only be done when needed. For example, before the game start (either Multi/Single Play), players will need to pick/agree to ONE of the following choices, when they initiate attack:
1) Always TC.
2) No TC, always Auto Resolve
3) Always Auto Resolve first.  However, if my stack lost over 30% HP (or whatever % agreed be4 the game starts), start TC
4) Decide if always Auto Resolve battles against roaming monsters or not.

A “% HP lost expected" indicator should be shown automatically, whenever I hover my mouse pointer over enemy stack. It can be determine by running AI AutoResolve once behind the scene or use relative stack strength to calculate.
<q>

Insanetitan, No.  If my lone scout ventured into my enemy terrority & being attacked, it’s ok to not start TC in multiplayer.

RisingLegend.  No AI can match up with Human tactics, but AutoResolve is great time saver for non-crucial battles.  Also pls note in a STBS MP, any TC will disrupt player doing what they do on hand.  If there are many TC, the turn will be very very long.  What I suggested above is just a way to do TC, ONLY when it is crucial.

Not necessarily.... I am envisioning a system in which you have a set number of "orders" you can issue each turn to any unit or group of units. You can take personal control of a small commando squad and penertate deep into enemy lines, or move every single (wo)man in your army ahead just one tile. I would still consider this to be TBS, but it is not an every-unit/every-turn system.

If I'm remembering the long dev saga for MoO3 correctly, this sounds a lot like their abandoned effort at a command point system. I liked the idea in early, broadly conceptual terms, but have never gotten to play with anything that worked that way. Can you name a civ-scale game with an orders/command points system that I could read up on, and can you point to any Stardock dev posts that have encouraged you to think Elemental turns might not be an "every-unit/every-turn system?"

I personally have never seen anything like it implimented in practice, but I definately think it would be worth some thought, especially in a battle mini-window. Besices, the devs have been rather vague on the specifics of battle mechanics.

Here's something I'm curious about: can tactical battles span multiple game turns?  And if so, what sorts of actions can the player take during a battle?

 

I played a game once, one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms ones (not much for strategy, but had some interesting ideas), that implemented multiple-turn battles -- I don't remember the exact ratio, but some number of tactical turns equalled one day (the normal unit of turns).  Moreover, if your sovereign was in the battle, you couldn't interact with the rest of your empire until the battle was resolved!  I actually found it to be a really nice touch, that gave me much more of a feeling that my avatar was my presence in the game world.  It also forced me to think a lot more about whether to have my avatar participate in battles: leading the battle personally pretty much guaranteed victory or at worst a defeat that crippled the enemy (the AI was extremely dumb, think a few horse units defeating entire armies), but if it took me a month to win, I wouldn't be able to fight on other fronts or build up my empire the whole time I was fighting.  It was often better to send some of my generals to fight the less important battles (in which case you couldn't influence the battle's outcome, other than maybe sending reinforcements), and only intervene personally when it really mattered -- IMO, that's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you're leading an empire and not just remote-controlling a bunch of tactical units.

I agree that this point is very important in games in general, especially for us who are looking for more of an RPG aspect. I think a lot of civ style games today dont represent this at all either. But luckily, I think that the aspects that Brad has already discussed (especially with 4x economic) are helping to create a more realistic, and "living" world

I want to hear about this too, so i guess Im giving another shout out to anyone who might be able to name a few games