I myself like the Sins of a Solar Empire system, it's essentially realtime but slow paced enough that one can still use some planning and strategy; the only reason they don't call it an "RTS" is, I suspect, to avoid the "fast-paced zero-strategy clickfest" stigma that most RTS games have created, which certainly does not apply to SoaSE (disclaimer, I'm not a big fan of SoaSE, the economy, diplomacy, ship design, etc is too shallow for my taste, but the combat is great imo). If Elemental's combat played out similarly I'd be very happy.

Option 2 sounds great as well, in the distant past I played an empire-building game with combat like that and it worked well (realtime, but every x seconds - each "turn" - it would auto-pause so each player could issue new orders before hitting "play" again to watch those orders carried out. It was a combination of both "realtime" and "simultaneous turn-based" in a way, if you can believe that). Really I'm confident the Stardock people will come up with a good system either way, and eagerly waiting for them to tell us something about it.

By "Continuous Turn Based" I think he means like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age. It's live but you can pause it any time you want to give orders. Un-pause it and you watch your oders unfold.

Preferably it should have a option for both. One game that did this well back in the day was X-Com Apocalypse. It could be purely turn based combat, or it was live and you could pause as needed. You could pick this option or not at the begining of each combat.

Continous turns to me means simultaneous turns like in Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic.

That's fantastic for those who haven't met but once you meet it should become turnbased.

That wiki post you (original poster) quoted implies neither of your possibilities. It seems to imply something like the system in Laser Squad Nemesis. First, the game is paused and you issue orders to units. When both sides are finished, the game plays out the orders for say, 10 seconds or so, then pauses again for more orders.

Continuous turns: Think Balder's Gate style battles.

Are you sure that it will work well in a game like Elemental? Frankly...I don't know. Maybe it will...all I am saying is that I've never seen a good TBS game which had a continuous turn based battle system. Besides I don't understand that why was it necessary to drop the "real" turn based combat system idea. [...or was it always planned as a continous turn based system?]

..and one more thing: What about the multiplayer tactical battles? Will it be possible to pause the battle whenever we want? If it's not possible: bad. If it's possible: bad again, because it will be annoying if a player will pause the game in every second.

To be fair, it wasn't dropped. This has been the description of combat from the very beginning.

Please, no real time. I have problems playing starcraft at the lowest speed. My hands are shaking after every game I play.

COntinuous turn based battle was an idea I also intedended to use. It was for a space war fare game.

First each player selected their formations and decided a movement pattern they were going to use ( they did not move individual ships). Then they would have decided how many fighters stayed on defense and how many on offense and select the primary targets for fighter. Finally, the player would set priorities like target that type of ship or weaker ship, etc. After some battle, the game would have stoped and ask the player if he would change their strategy, then the battle would have continued. A battle was supposed to last 4 turns, because the ships where passing though each other to exchange fire, so after the time is exhausted, ships were too far from each other to continue fighting again.

I think elemental could use a system like this. I prefer that the game stops by itself and ask you for new objectives and new spells to cast. This is especially good in multiplayer because each player pause the battle and get to play at the same time. It also removes the stress of watching everything and trying to pause at the right moment. When the battle is split in segments, you know that if something bad happened, you cannot do anything to patch things up until the segment ends. So it prevent the players from pausing at every 2 seconds.

So personally I thing that predetermined pauses will remove stress during battle and will make them easier to enjoy by watching your army fight,

Erm...what turn/round? We won't have turns or rounds in tactical combat.

My brothers really enjoyed the Baldur's Gate style battles... they'll be pleased to hear this information.  

Baldur's Gate...? So I can click my unit to move, but it will only happen if the next turn has come? So if I cast a spell but no before the actual turn (a little after it started), than I will start casting the spell in the NEXT turn? Confusing system, I have to say.