Listen, this is a turn based strategy game. You're lucky that there's tactical battles at all. Most TBS just calculates a die roll, you see an animation and that's the battle. The last thing Elemental needs is to have tactical battles turn into some over complex 'Final Fantasy Tactics' thing. Please Stardock, do not over-complicate tactical battles. They should really be for eye candy anyway, GC2 and Civ are just fine with no TB...I think people are forgetting they're playing a TBS and not Starcraft II.
You are completely unfamilear with the genre, right? All similar games that are TBS, have magic, heroes and a mix of RPG and TBS have much better combat! Here are the games that I remember and played: all AoW games, all HoMM games and expantions (lots of them), Kings Bounty (2 games), there are probably other games of this kind that I did not play that have better combat. It is actually difficult to invent more boring combat. Square grid (instead of hexagonal), boring combat fields, effectively 3 kind of troupes: melee, archer, and spellcaster. No different spellcasters, no different melee combat capabilities (stun, poison, hit too cells ahead), just one spellcaster type with boring spells, no special ability of ANY troop (like teleport, stun, block), single damage type (this may be changed in future, but so far this is it). And AI is as dumb as it can be.
Let me put it like this. Any game that I am aware off and had tactical combat, has better combat. More variety, more options, actual strategy, etc.
Right now, the combat is just a placeholder for combat. They just made an engine that can have combat, it is like a tech demo.
Also, be careful just praising the game aspects just because you like SD - they may think that that aspect is good enough and stop working on it.
