I'm very excited, very excited Indeed!!! This all sounds wonderful. Turn Based combat sounds amazing. It would have been nice to have the option of real time or "pause when I want-give orders" though like X-Com Apocalypse. I love turn based too though so you won't get any complaints here. I'm happy as hell that we have battles We Control as I thought that was the only thing really lacking in Gal Civ 2.

For the next strategy title you do, think along this line...

Have the Strategic Map and Game-play depth that the Civilization series (or any other super deep game-play) has and marry it to the Total War battle system that plays in real time with custom units you create. You came very close with Elemental and with all the Mods we'll be able to make I'm sure it won't be long until we see "Civilization: War of Magic".

Still, this is an excellent time to be a strategy gamer and a Stardock fan. Well done all around.

For Frogboy--Master of the AI:  During the turn-based battles, will I be able to turn on the AI for my side, so that you can essentially get a good AI v AI fight?  If so--hopefully I can do it at any point during the battle.

Also I am assuming there will be a sort of "auto-resolve" choice at the beginning of battles that will calculate the battle result and let you move-on.  Please, please, please make the resolution process somewhat intelligent.  Nothing will make me want to heave my monitor quicker than to come in with a group of my darn hard to produce +10 Demonically Possessed RavenXs (love the picture man) with super-regeneration and lose a unit to a group of +0 Slightly Agitated Slugs because the resolution algorythm decided to lump all of the possible damage on one unit and end up destroying it--when this could have never possibly happened if I done the battle myself.

...sorry if this has been answered somewhere else and I missed it.

three cheers for the return of tactical tbs combat.  My dream is to have a simultaneous action combat in a fantasy game.  Similar to they systems in Combat Mission and Laser Squad Nemesis.  I find the ability to bluff, feignt and outthink your opponent much more interesting in those types of games. 

At the end of the day, I want the tactical battles to be heavily influenced by player skill.  Too many times, I see tbs combat games come down to who brings the bigger army. Give the players some tools to be clever, surprising and ruthless!

Funny thing about global ressources: the first time I played a TBS game with global ressources, it was Master of Magic, with food and mana crystals.

Master of Orion 2 also have/had a global food system and you can blockade planets/systems.

Thanks to Gog.com I have been playing again both games lately, and it's a blast.

Turn based tactical battles is great news.Thanks a lot.Maybe you could add hotseat option now ?

Does this mean that you no longer need to have NPC in your influence area in order to recruit them?

The AI in such a case, should try to destory one of your untis hard.  It's what a player would do.

What I want is something between quick battle and full-on tactical battles- there needs to be some sort of middle option where you don't control the battle, but can give tactics to units, and maybe orders for units to be cautious or aggressive?

I doubt it. Turn/Tile based combat is more tactic&strategic oriented than the RTS style combat, and that is what matters.

TBS + Multiplayer really is kind of rough.  Auto Resolve takes the David / Goliath battles out of it too.  Hmm.

I think people would get used to it pretty quickly, since its already how RTS games work. It's a bit of a change for a TBS, but not a harsh one. Especially with what modern computers can do, it's easy now to put an overlay on the screen when you select a unit showing it's movement range from where it is now, along with attack range, spell effect AoE radius, and so on.

Square tiles are particularly bad, because diagonal movement is faster then straight movement. If each tile is say 4 square meters (2x2, which to hold something like a cannon and supporting troops probably isn't a huge stretch), then a unit with a movement of 5 going along a striaght line can move 10 meters. But moving diagonally, it's going ~14 in the same amount of time. That is particularly gamey and doesn't make a lick of sense, though hex tiles fix it. Speaking of movement, you're reduced in movement speed options. To make a unit that's say 5% slower then another unit, you need to use very high movement scores (20 tiles per turn). If your average movement speed is 3 tiles, a faster unit is a base of 4 which is a huge relative increase.

Most TBS games also have limitations whereby a unit can only be one tile big. That leads to strangeness with a single soldier and a Red Dragon taking up the samount of space, in terms of targetting (even though the dragon *looks* a lot bigger). When calculating a fireball blast radius, the soldier is counted as bigger then he really is, and the dragon as smaller then it really is because they're both one tile big.

For AoE spells, radius style effects just get weird. A one tile effect is hitting 4 square meters. The next rational size up hits all surrounding tiles, which with squares is 8 tiles around the center of the effect, or 36 square meters total. The granularity here is very poor, the next size up is nine times the size. The only way to prevent that is to create effects with unnatural shapes like just hitting the target tile, and the one to its left.

pigeonpigeon mentioned a smaller quantum, and you can reduce the tile problems by shrinking it. If units can take up more then one tile, you can use very small tiles and have units of any particular size take up more of them. That reduces the granularity problem somewhat. You might get really big numbers in that system though, if each tile is 0.25m by 0.25m, you will start seeing units that can go 80 tiles in a turn.

Though if you eliminate tiles entirely, you can have a unit move 10m precisely, and you can tell if it's in a blast radius or not based on it's distance from the impact point.

I'll try to make this as thoughtful as a I can.  (also, I have been told about squads, this post was made before I knew that....)

I too am slightly disappointed by the drop  of the continuous turns, partially because that means that large-scale battles are relatively impossible now.  Can you imagine moving 1000 units individually? 

I was looking forward to continuous turns, as the battle would flow and the decisions would have to be more strategic:  the "go here... flank this group... pincer this magic dude to kill him fast..." etc.  Rather than a "you go here.  Now attack this guy.  Move here to block that unit..."

Don't get me wrong, I REALLY like HOMM, and I've played the snot out of it.  But part of the promise of Elemental was the large scale battles, and the adjustable battle speed.  I KNOW it was on the website at one time, though it seems to be removed now, but the website specifically talked about being able to adjust the game speed from Full Turn Based to Continuous.  This was appealing to me, as I feel there are situations where both are enjoyable, some people preferring the full turn based, some preferring the continuous.

I'm not going to NOT buy the game over this, but I feel that the loss of this option is more of a "bait and switch" than leaving the Continuous in there.  I'm not upset with going Turn Based only, it's more the loss of the option that is kinda irking.  I LIKED that option.

Ah yes, it was a post by Frogboy:

November 28, 2009 1:27:14 PM

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.

Master of Orion had continuous turn tactical combat as well.  You could, however, stop the action at any time and give new orders to your ships.

I think you should reserve judgment until you've tried it. 

What was wrong with this?  I could make it turns, give orders, explicitly say "go here, do this" just like in HOMM (though I presume I could pick the order, as opposed to HOMM's speed determining WHEN you got to move), or I could go continous and enjoy the battle, giving orders as necessary.

(I'm really not trying to whine, as I like turn-based too, it's just I like options!) However, Frogboy:

Can you explain why this was dropped?  How has the battle system changed from the above?  Is it now more like HOMM, where in my turn I move ONE unit, or is it more CIV, where I move ALL my units, then the other guy moves his?  How much would it take to bribe you to leave the awesome epic-ness of continuous turns in?

<edit>  Found even more regarding the size of armies (and hence why continuous turns sounded like the natural answer to this)

Journal entry by Frogboy:

Sizes of armies

As a player, one of my questions about this kind of thing would be how big are the armies going to be?  The answer is that it’s going to vary a great deal.

At the start of the game, I would 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.

Hence, even if you enjoy watching the tactical battles, you may eventually want to build up your heroes leadership ability so that you can have confidence in letting them call the shots so that you can just sit back and watch the show in fast motion.

Is this still an option?  Does the switch to turn-based cause us to lose this "large army/big battle"?  What about the commanders?  Have we lost them?

Again, not trying to whine.  You haven't lost a sale.  I'm just an interested gamer that's very interested in the game being FUN.  Not necessarily what I or anyone else expects.  I don't need or want a clone, I want a gamemode that is fun, and is a natural extension of the foundations.  If that's Turn-based, then that's what I want.  But make sure the shoe fits!

The only major change that I would like to see- but won't happen - is a hex tile-based map.  I always liked hex maps for outdoor map movement as well as for unit facing modifiers for combat, as it seemed more realistic, without the diagonal movement incongruity inherent in a square tile system.  This is one mechanic that I think Civ V is going to get right.

I still sort of miss some of the early ideas re: Frogboy's point #1 (resource collection and logistics and item/unit construction).  Some of the peripheral side-effects relating to the change were for the better though, resulting in a more fluid gameplay experience (instead of getting stuck waiting for something to finish production in the process).  But I still get wood thinking about some of the possibilities that would have been available in collection, processing and construction of stuff with the original ideas on resource and construction.