They aren't in the beta yet

As a work in progress (updated tomorrow, I hope): https://forums.elementalgame.com/374531

Tactical Battles

(1) Players won’t have to actually fight these if they don’t want.

The idea is that you zoom in to a given battle and you see all your units there. From there, you can set the speed you want the action to take place (from “turns” to real time). On the map you give your units orders and those orders appear on the screen and they go and fight it out. You can zoom in and out as much as you desire on the map to see either the whole epic battle or down to seeing individual units fighting.

There will be quite a bit of skill involved in managing the battle in terms of where you place your forces and how you handle your hero. One of the concepts is a leadership ability. Leadership basically gives a general bonus to your side. The idea there being that players who don’t want to monkey around with the tactical battles can focus on having heroes who are also excellent generals (high leadership) who you can have confidence that they will fight a battle with maximum capability. The AI too will be allowed to invest in leadership skills to help their generals get better and better.

At the start of the game, we could imagine the sovereign walking around alone or maybe with 10 foot soldiers armed with pikes. Those early battles will be pretty straight forward. Later on, however, you could have battles with thousands of soldiers with a few recruited magical creatures involved along with your hero.

(2) The idea is for battles to be able to be controlled by players at all times so that they can make battles that last less than 1 minute or as long as an hour all depending on their options without it feeling like a click-fest.

• Battle Options:
  1. Instant Resolve (army 1 and army 2 meet, one is destroyed instantly).
  2. Auto-resolve. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and plays out automatically).
  3. Player resolved. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and players can give orders. At any time they can have the computer take over to resolve it).
• Tactical battle options:
  1. Weight of action. This determines the consequence of each action and determines how long battles will last. Effectively, it determines how...decisive each action is.
  2. Speed.

(3) Continuous turns: Continuous turns are turn-based. The difference is that the turn button is held down by default. Baldur's Gate was most certainly turn-based in its combat but, like Elemental, it was continuous turns. It literally used the D&D combat system in which every action used up X number of time units and such. A player can turn off the turns at any time they want in the battle and literally just do it themselves if they want to be the one pressing the turn button. With Continuous turns, you can literally pause the action, give orders to your units and see how many "turns" it'll take for that to happen. But when the action is moving, it moves fluidly.

(4) There will be an Arena mode that would play out a bit like Myth or XCOM - that is, a single tactical battle. Those two games are the inspiration for the tactical battles.