Soooooo, does this mean we'll be able to stealthily cross mountains to surprise the enemy?  

if i understood correctly modded games will ALWAYS be available and with WHATEVER options you want

i think frogboy was talking about base, normal ladder mp

also if i understood right there will be rooms

Random maps for MP are, IMO, critical to replayability.  Hope that gets added, as I'm not sure how that'd detract from the SP experience, or why it wouldn't be enabled for both?  Maybe Brad can elaborate.

I could never get any of my friends to purchase GalCiv, because of it's lack of Multiplayer. I barely touched GalCiv for the same reason, never playing more than 20-30 minutes or so.  MP is a critical feature for me, these days, and my friends and I still LAN Civ4 (well, mods thereof) to this day.

I've understood from the get-go that Elemental was a SP focused game that has multiplayer, but I think every component of a SP game should be at least possible to enable via in-game options in MP, even if they're unchecked by default.

But that's focusing on the negative.  Lots of stuff in the OP sound brilliant!

I wouldn't want a click-fest either but turn based combat seems like a bore-fest to me. There are happy mediums. No turns but allow players to pause and give orders for example. It is just my opinion that battles shouldn't be as relaxed as the rest of the game. 

What's so boring in turn-based combat? It's just you making decisions. If the battle is too easy, you can resolve it automatically. If it's balanced, every decision matters, so it's not boring.

In some cases watching the battle and then pausing and giving orders can take more time than turn-based. Also in pausable realtime the combat effectiveness relies on the player's reflexes (when deciding the right moment to pause), which is not good in a strategy game.

@steelfin: Sadly pause DOES NOT work with anything but single player.

I love that! Also avaliable for MP I hope?

Random maps are very important for multiplayer - it'll seriously hurt replayability if the maps are hard coded. I realize that balancing a random map up to multiplayer standards is an added difficulty, but:

a.) better overall map balance (and particularly starting position balance) is a good thing for singleplayer too, it's not a sacrifice just for multiplayer, and:

b.) imbalanced random maps are better than not having them at all, just give us the choice if we want our multiplayer game to be more competitive (carefully balanced fixed map), or fun/unpredictable (random map that might be horribly imbalanced).

So much the better if you can balance random maps such that they are valid for competitive multiplayer, but even if they're horribly imbalanced, there's no reason to remove the option - some people will enjoy playing that way anyway, particularly if playing casually among friends.

Edit: Sorry for double post, should've included this in the first one.

You can turn realtime into psuedo-turnbased with no reflexes involved - that also works for multiplayer - by having an automatic pause every x seconds. This is like having turnbased combat where the orders are simultaneously resolved in realtime between 'turns,' it's the best of both worlds, imo. I'm not arguing for Elemental to change back to realtime combat, they already tried it and decided on turnbased; just making the case that if done right realtime combat can be as strategic as turnbased (and not the reflex-based clickfest that 99% of RTS games unfortunately turn into).

I don't think that allowing a pause feature in multiplayer would even work (as several posters have pointed out) so the point is moot.

The "clickfest" RTS stigma is completely overblown by a lot of posters on this forum. RTS games test a player's ability to make effective decisions quickly, something that takes practice by the way, and is the hallmark of any good strategist. What Stardock puts into their game is of course up to them, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and bash a completely valid component of strategy.

Not in multiplayer, which the last page of posts was about. In multiplayer it's you making decisions, then you making a sandwich while the other guy is making decisions. As you scale up the number of players involved, the time you spend waiting increases quickly. Especially if you get "that guy" who agonizes for 5 minutes every turn over inconsequential things.

Normally I hate stack limits, but this is one of the cases where it's going to be an advantage to keep the number of units in a battle small: it helps me to get back to playing instead of watching sooner.

This is not my definition of strategy. For me RTS games aren't true strategy games, they are a combination of strategy and "action" genres.

@Austinvn: You're right, although I still prefer classic turn-based combat for its clearness - when many units are moving and fighting simultaneously, it can be hard to see what's going on. RTS and its variants are more realistic, but I prefer gameplay clearness over realism.

@Tridius: Sorry for jumping into this thread without knowing what's it about. For multiplayer I guess the phase-based combat (like Austinvn suggested) would be much faster, because all players can give orders at the same time. Such game mode would be acceptable for me when playing MP.

That's a good question. The only turn based tactical battle type game I didn't stop playing a week or so after I purchased it was Dynasty Tactics.  I am not quite sure why. I guess having objectives to complete within a turn limit was part of it. Also you really needed to think many turns in advance. Setting up a trap, drawing the enemy in, then springing the ambush was critical from what I remember.  It had more of a puzzle feel to it which was addicting and fun.

Of course turn-based combat can be done right (examples: Age of Wonders series and the new versions of King's Bounty*), or boring (example: Disciples 3). I'm curious how good it will be in Elemental.

*No, I'm not Hortz 

well i suspect that working on balanced multi random map is a waste of time

also WHAT multi game? 1 v1? 2 v2 ? skirmish of 10? its just too much complicated

and a bad result is a not funny online game while i guess designing 5 maps for multi is probably faster and easier

even in civ it was cool to have 12421421 types of map but in the end in competitive games you were always pissed off from rng and wanted just a fair map

first of all i dont see the relation between making decisions quickly and strategy

strategy is about making that RIGHT decision, not who makes the same decision faster

second even in turn games there is a time, we never thought about it but ofc there is going to be a time limit in elemental too

last but not least you forget in rts there is also manual ability involved, once you decide what to do its also a matter of who moves faster his pieces etc etc

and i dont see how your speed with mouse makes a good strategy element in a strategy game

As long as you don't bring up animation you should be okay.

It's cool. It wasn't about that on page 1. There's a number of ways of dealing with the problem in multiplayer:

1. Turn phases, as suggested. Everybody does their thing, and then stuff happens. Can lead to unpredictable results though.

2. Time limits. You get say 10 seconds per stack to move, which for a full army would be nearly 2 minutes per turn. If the time isn't configurable, some players will always dislike it.

3. Don't worry about it. Obviously the easiest way, but there's some people I just couldn't play against (or even with on a team) because they move so slowly that waiting constantly lulls me to sleep.

if time is set correctly no one will dislike it

ofc you need a function of units/moves/magics/ etc not just a fixed time

this is not an option

multi with turns without time  is not possible, i tried it in civ and always regret it

in the end any time we forgot about time in settings we restarted

I never said quick and effective decision making was strategy - merely a component of it. And it is a component because it is present and has been present in every military confrontation in history. What, you think Napoleon waited for "his turn" during the battle of Waterloo? No - he had to make split second decisions based on the evolving circumstances of the battle. In other words, his decisions influenced his battle tactics and because of this became part of his strategy.

Hi, I think I'm representing the interests of many people living in Russia and is a fan of this kind of strategy games. So that's what I say - to make flawed MP is a big mistake. I've kept silent about the lack of hot-seat. We here in Russia all look forward to the release Elemental hoping to meet a friendly company and enjoy the game all together as we used to. And believe me - in Russia you will have huge sales (of course until the crack - and it is about a week minimum). So, take the mind and please do not neglect the full multiplayer. Thank you for your attention!

Sorry, used the Google translator:)

Yes, but "correctly" is a matter of opinion. I play with a friend who moves much more slowly then I do. Forcing him to the pace I'd like would probably cause him to not have fun. A value like that is actually really easy to make configurable though, since it's a base value that you apply as a scaling factor depending on the size of the armies involved. Just let the game creator configure the number.
 
I don't think you'd want it to also factor in things like magic/moves, because that makes the calculations a lot more complicated. It should average out anyway because the way magic is structured in the game you're never going to have a large army of all mages. IMO this is something best left simple. You could do:

base time of X + Y * units. So for X = 20 and Y = 10, you'd get a minimum of 30 seconds if you had 1 unit in the fight, and 120 seconds if you had a full stack. Per turn.

It's possible, but it's far from ideal. It's more tolerable in a cooperative (team) game where it's you and a friend vs the AI then it is in a competitive game though. Speaking of that - is it possible to play as a team?

Total nonsense!

You know, words have meanings.

Let's look at the Wiki which shall explain it much better than me as a non-native English speaker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy

"Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. How a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms and conditions that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy, which is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals or grand strategy, strategy, operations, and tactics."

Exemples:

- Hitler deciding to prepare then launch the Battle of the Bulge, with how many men and tanks and when, THAT would be strategy. And it didn't take 5 seconds to prepare. Strategy is about collecting data (intelligence), having them analyzed and synthesized, and only then asking experts to show you the different options so you eventually can make the final decision. It has nothing to do with quickness; strategy has to do with OPTIONS and how you weigh them to choose the one you want. And, yes, it takes time.

- Same thing with General Petraeus deciding the strategy in Irak. It had nothing to do with "Do I send 2 Apaches to patrol around Ramadi tonight?" but much more with "How many men do I need to ask the President to send me to secure those 10 cities?" or "Do we try to rally the Sunni militia or the Shi'a groups?". You can bet he had to eat thousands of pages of reports before he had any idea of what his decisions would come to be.

For a commander in the field, in battle, it's of course quicker but do you know how much time it takes to move a company? Not to talk about batalions or divisions. Strategy is not clicking like a monkey to move 5 peasants to attack 1 troll. First, that would be tactics (and that is the reason why we talk about TACTICAL battles here instead of strategic battles like in GalCiv). Second, even in tactics things must be thought. War is not a video game, the only immediate decisions would be at personal or group level, not higher.

Q: I want to know more about tactical battles

A: Without putting too fine a point on it, Elemental’s tactical battles are designed to be fairly similar to Master of Magic’s tactical battles. If you liked those, you’ll probably like these.  It’ll be an area getting the most refinement over the next 30 days and beyond since we hope to release mini-game modes that let players just play tactical battles.

On a personal note, I don’t like tactical battles normally. However, I do like MoM’s tactical battles and I do like Elemental’s tactical battles.

What is the most challenging in terms of doing tactical battles “nowadays” is that the bar on visuals is so high now. So we’re having to gather together a lot of animation assets, spell effects, unit moves, etc.  That’s what has made doing tactical battles so lengthy.  Elemental has a lot of monsters and each one has to have its own series of attack, hit, defense, casting, etc. animations. Beta 3B will basically have just a core set of these that will get greatly expanded over the next 2 weeks internally (though I did make a fuss about units “stabbing” with a club).

 Having never played or even seen Master of Magic, much less the "tactical battles" from it, what exactly are we talking about?  What is a tactical battle mean in a TBS game?  And I mean for strictly single player, because I have zero internest in multiplayer.