As a developer myself my guess is that adding more attributes and calculation factors to combat would break the AI or cause it to have to be completely rewritten to take the new factors into account.  My guess is that this is too big to do after the release. 

The complaint and suggested changes in this thread seem to me like "Love the car I just bought, can you change the front wheel drive to rear wheel drive now?  I consider a car with front wheel drive to be broken".

The only thing I think tactical battles need is a range penalty for non-magic missiles, or a defense bonus against ranged attack for mounted units.

My deepest fears. And if it does happen, gaming history will record the fall of a great game, over such a silly mistake.

Look... The game is called Elemental. I do not want a MoM clone. But at least let's have Elements in it!!!

What you said is... Well, let's say I'm totally against your vision.

Fireballing flame giants to death? Because you have more shards? Sorry, I find it lame, but your opinion is as valid as mine...

In my opinion this is how the combat system should be set up.

Weapons should have two modifiers. Weapon speed, already is there, and weapon damage, already is there. Weapon speed should modify the chance to hit, weapon damage should modify the damage the weapon can inflict. These two attributes should largely be inversely proportional.

Armor should have three modifiers. A dodge rating, a protection rating and a magical resistance rating.

Again this should work in an inverse relationship. As the protection rating goes up, the dodge rating goes down. How magical resistance is related to the other two is not something I would like to comment on.

This right here adds all sorts of tactical and strategic depth to the game.

At the mechanical level, add a first strike ability, give it to spears. Change the current, I hit, damage is dealt, you hit, damage is dealt system as it favors one hitter quitter type weapons too much. Change it to I hit, you hit, we both receive our damage. Spears become useless late game, so you kill two birds with one stone. Now you give spear using units a tactical advantage in that they cannot be counter attacked on their first attack, and you fix the balancing nightmare of front loaded damage weapons.

Most people believe the world is round now, by your logic they must be wrong. The vast majority of people believe in gravity too, which of course must mean that if you drop an object it will actually go up.

What's the point of fixing up Tactical combat without fixing the magic system that is a PART of the Tactical combat?

I mean right now patch 1.07 the spell Confusion is equivilent to the magic "I WIN" spell/button...  Confusion seems to drop that Ogre's 152 Atk value to -57 and it cannot hit your wimpiest pioneer.  It is the very means to which I win fights I have no business getting into in the first place.  Confusion should do something good but as it is right now I only need a channeller with confusion spell and one peasant to win most Single Tough Mob fights, sure it may take 3 hours to whittle through the Ogre's 84 hp one miss or -1 hit at a time... 

Yeah fix it all (Tactical Combat, Magic, rebalance, AI, BUGS, CRASHES) and we'll have a very fine game on our disks here.    

My moral values are not what needs changing here ... I am not the subject of this thread...Let's keep it on topic and improve the game.  It's not as fun as it could be...

How do you know where the game ends and the bugs begin?  Is the exploitable combat system one big bug?  How about the imbalance in the potency of the various tech trees?  Some spells being vastly more useful than others?

I find many people who make a similar argument to yourself are more interested in the RP side of this game.  I'm interested in the strategy.  I have trouble overlooking an obviously superior path to victory.

Dexterity is already in the game.  I know it effects Defence (now) but it seems to me the easiest attribute to also add in an initiative system (and maybe the hit/miss system for melee).  Right now, having ALL one side going, then ALL of the other is so overpowered.  Imagine a battle with two magic casters: One with low Dex that usually casts last, but has large/powerful spells, vs another that usually goes first, can cast lots of little spells.  Add in some magic resistance (and even specific magic resistances) and there's actually some strategy and choices to be made.

It's very disheartening to want to play a caster in this game, only to see a monster/enemy with a very high "sheild" stat, and know your spell will most likely miss, miss, miss.  I have no idea what spell type would be most strategic to use, or what target would be best to attack.  As it is now, I usually just pick a spell (any spell) and attack a target (any target).

Also on another link, someone was suggesting cooldowns on spells/abilites, that way you'd have to chose when and where to use your best spells; you could not just spam fireball over and over the entire battle, every battle.

To continue with your metaphore, it depends on how you define the Earth and the Sky.  Essentially, at what layer of the atmosphere do you consider the transition to have happened?  Same goes with bugs.  Some are going to be obvious.  Some are going to be subtle and will straddle the line between poor design and bug.

I agree that attack (percentage), damage (die roll), defense/parry/evade (percentage), armor (fixed, or die roll), and spell resistance (percentage, with elemental modifiers) are pretty basic, and if you go any simpler than this it gets maybe too basic.  Hopefully will see something more like this down the road but for now adjustments in the attack/defense system are still interesting. 

I'd like to see more and stronger defenses both tactically and strategically.  Only problem with tactical defense is that it might prolong already less-than-satisfying battles.  I like better defenses on the main map to enhance turtling and encourage alternative victory conditions.

then just remove shards and limit magic to one school - yawn