That's sad to hear.  Don't get me wrong, even though I am a bit underwhelmed by the scale of the battles, I actually like Elemental much more than GalCiv 2 even without the huge tactical battles for a lot of reasons.  First of all, I think Elemental has a much higher upside that GalCiv 2: there will be more modding and multiplayer.  Secondly, I love the rich fantasy world much more than GC2, there simply seems like there is more to do in Elemental than GC2.

To be honest, I think the battles will become far more epic once the AI has been improved and multi-player has been implemented.  Nobody is saying that these epic battles can't happen, we're just saying that they haven't been necessary yet because of the weak AI.

That picture above.... unless they are really low-end troops (i.e no such fancy full armour troops), unkeep cost of such side of troops will exceed 50+.

Assuming both units are in combat range at turn's start -- it would depend on unit movement speed.  If you're faster you should be able to attack before they move.  If they're as fast, whoever has initiative would 'go' first (I'm assuming there'd be initiative).  If they're faster, they move off before you could attack (assuming their movement takes them out of weapon range before the attack occurs -- ranged attacks will be different from melee, etc.).

If there's an auto-follow feature, yes.  Being TBS you could manually 'follow', or do a combination of both from turn to turn.  Knowing pathfinding problems of many/most games, manual is generally 'safer'.

That's one of the tactical benefits of a WeGo -- you shouldn't always know where the enemy unit is moving to, or if it's moving instead of attacking, etc.  Fog-of-war and all that.  It allows more chances for surprise/tactics/strategy/etc.

Some of this depends on how far a unit can move in a turn -- the greater the distance the more chance of 'surprise'.

Consider how to handle enemy cavalry -- with IGoYouGo you have an idea whether it's coming at you or flanking or moving off before you make your move.  In WeGo you don't know, you have to intuit while making your move.

Just replying here in response to Raven X's petition thread... while epic battles are cool, does it make sense to work the economy towards this until tactical combat is improved? Right now it's boring enough with a few units, but having to do the same thing with dozens more cookie cutter troops will be very tedious. Once the combat model is improved to add actual "tactical" aspects, this may become interesting.

Even then, I'm not so sure. It's one thing to have an epic battle in Total War, where you set up your formations and plans ahead of time and watch the action in real time, doing the odd adjustment here and there. But this is turn based combat... having to issue orders for so many units every turn doesn't exactly sound very rewarding. You'd need some serious gameplay thrill to be added to make it worthwhile.

I can't see any way that "epic battles" in TBS can be made interesting enough, rather than diluting what could have been an interesting 10 minute battle into a tedious 30 minute brawl.

Oh and Raven X, I suggest you make a post in that thread telling people to come here to debate it. Your note about that is far down the post and most people won't read that far before posting debate about it.

I'll just keep things simple and say that I don't think that the number of units in a battle necessarily has anything to do with making the battles feel more epic. Nor are more units in a battle in and of themselves sufficient to convey a feeling of "epicness."

My sovereign all alone battling a dragon for survival, casting spells and resisting the dragon's fire abilities could well feel epic to some people.

Another possibility is that in a big battle with a few hundred units things don't end up feeling epic for some people but rather feel boring and tedious, with even more units to click on, advance a square or two, watch mediocre animations that take forever to complete, and so on.

Making the battles feel more epic and less bland is a worthwhile objective, but there's much more to it than scale. A lot can be achieved with a good, well balanced and strategically deep rule-set combined with good art direction.

The point is ... the more soldiers you can have in the battlefield ... the stronger Monsters/Heroes can be, and you can choose to field an army of weak mooks to try and take down a few overpowered Monsters (not possible with a "fair" take on the current numbers)

 

So yea ... its for more variability in battles, not cause we always wanna see "more" ... its just so we can have Quantity be a Quality all of its own (fielding "Russian" armies vs enemies)

or in other words, more choices.

It's not even that. Basically "epic" means... instead of showing, say, 4 models, display SIXTEEN. Then, times all the stats by 4. The gameplay would be 100% identical. Which is why it's silly. Elemental performs only marginally well as it is (on my machine, at least). We don't need further complications. 

Second, the title is terribly misleading. Only a "loser" would say no, eh? 

If it was titled "Petition for Larger Model Counts In Game" it would be totally different. Instead it's "Official", RavenX is self-proclaimed voice of the Community and ... ITS EPIC. >> 

Now, I do think that the stack limit should be increased? Why? Because it enables 50 Peasants versus 10 Soldiers. Right now, quantity is a bad choice (quantity in excess of stacks of 12, I mean). 12 Peasants always will lose to 12 Soldiers and there is no way to beat them. 2 sets of 12 Peasants won't win because the Soldiers can take them fine 1 at a time. But that's a gameplay change, not an arbitrary and unimportant aesthetic change that does nothing but slow down our computers and give the illusion of grandeur. 

That's exactly what I'm saying. From a gameplay perspective, removing stack limits is good. Because it enables quantity v quality arguments to actually be valid. Raising the stack limit is good, for that reason. 

Arbitrarily increasing model counts so you simply "see" more fighting... doesn't really make any it more epic (except, perhaps, when your Champion destroys 80 men with one blow). It is, again, just an illusion of grandeur. 

Obviously the combat system needs improvement first (along with other things) ...  but this game was originally concept designed to eventually evolve into NATION-STATES fighting against each other ... not just whoever gets a Company of War Hammers first.

King's arthur the roleplaying wargame found an elegant answer : a hero can't be alone, he is always attached to a troup and give them bonus/abilities. The hero fights and can cast spells.

 

The problem with this is that it would probably cause the game to crash every other battle. These cap limitations were proably put in place more for game system reasons than any other reason (I'm supposing). Also, could you imagine how long it would take to manually resolve a battle with 200 4-man squads, a dozen champions, and 500 single warriors??? It would probably take the better part of a day just to resolve one battle of this magnitude on manual, so I'm for the cap more for efficiency (I don't want to spend 8 hours on one battle, and I don't want to risk such a large important battle to "auto") and system (avoiding crashes) reasons than anything else.