Well, quite a lot of unfair dislike for tactical combat...

In a game where you are controlling regiments, you are not running through the trenches telling individual soldiers what to do.  You're doing exactly what an actual general would, commanding.  Auto resolve between armies is just silly.  The better led army almost always won in history, being larger or more advanced alone only won with massive disparity.

I wouldn't blame shitty AI on tactical combat either.  Lazy developers are lazy developers.  Turn based tactical AI on a small grid is not the insurmountable problem that real time tactical AI in a standard rts is.  You have a vastly smaller quantity problem to tackle, and your only processing constraint is not letting the AI sit there and think for five minutes while people go crazy.  Even students have designed better tactical AI than most games ship with.

It's either pure laziness, or, and this is my suspicion, most game developers fucking suck at playing their own games.   I suspect the Frog has no such hindrance as his AI in the Galciv games plays better than I do.  If they can't design a tactical AI that doesn't blow, they aren't trying to.  It's simplicity next to designing the strategic management systems.

I'm firmly with Annatar on this point.

Additionally Frogboy can surely make a pretty good tactical AI. Moreover it would be nice if he would make the system in such a way we could program AIs for our user created factions.

In the past, auto-resolve used to use shortcuts because in a big game with a lot of AIs, they'd fight each other. Going through the full combat algorithm on them really slowed things down for the human.

With the computing power we have now, I don't see why auto-resolve would be anything other then doing the full combat simulation, only without the display. So terrain and all that *would* count.

At least, that's how I'd do it now.

I just have to say, using auto-resolve even though tactical combat is available is not shooting yourself in the foot. Really, using tactical combat is like cheating (assuming you are good at tactical combat - not everyone is even if you are). Auto-resolve is fair - it puts you and the AI on equal footing. Tactical combat, on the other hand, gives an advantage to most players over the AI.

Most games have cheat codes. Do you always use cheat codes, because you feel like you'd be gimping yourself by not using an option provided by the game that would probably make things turn out better for you?

I personally don't like giving the player two bites at the apple - if you go with autoresolve you should live with the results. But that's me, I will play almost exclusively ssingle player, so if it was in I wouldn't care

It's an interesting idea. Perhaps rather than a specific auto-resolve result it would just give you a general approximation of what you can expect. Like the TW tactical result summarizes as "Decisive Victory", or "Close battle" and things like that. So you initiate combat, and it gives you a hint of what you can expect, and then if it's a Close Battle you can auto or try to squeeze the most out of it with manual.

That way it's not exactly two bites at the apple, just more information to help you decide which you want. TW has the basic slider, but it's a very generic combat power reading that doesn't take everything into account. Though something like that would also work.

Something like in HoMM where it would tell you the relative strength of a stack compared to the one you have selected would be nice.

On the subject of tactical AI, I'd like to point out a post by Sorceresss made on the Demigod forums: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/354259/get;2236466. Sorceresss points out an article by Christopher M. Park. "The approach that I settled on, and which gave surprisingly quick results early in the development of the game, was simulating intelligence in each of the individual units, rather than simulating a single overall controlling intelligence."

My one problem with that is that sometimes, even when TW predicted a Decisive Victory, the results would be wholly unsatisfactory. Literally, I have gone into combat with more experienced, higher quality troops and outnumbered my opponent by as much as 3 or 4:1 with the terrain to my advantage and gotten horrible results from auto-combat. I am not exaggerating when I say that it lost as many of my own troops as it killed of the enemy. And sometimes, even though my units were capable of easily outrunning my opponents, most of their troops managed to escape. Now, overall TW has a pretty good auto-combat, but that it could sometimes screw up so badly even when it predicted wonderful results really put me on edge committing to auto-combat. It resulted in me fighting even most trivial battles manually, unless I had just saved.

I don't like save/loading, but I don't like game mechanics in TBS games that amount to mindless gambling even more. There's a difference between mindless gambling and strategic gambling. Slot machines are mindless gambling, poker is strategic gambling. In one you pull the lever and pray, in the other you actively try to put yourself in a better position and improve your odds, and you usually have the ability to cut your losses. 

I like that.

Please please please don't fall into the manichean Good-Evil thing. Please include shades of grey, neutral factions, and Order of the Stick-like paladins/goblins, with their "alignment" being twisted around and hard to read (for those who don't know OotS, Goblins are often peaceful while Paladins commit attrocities in the name of good).

In other words, please twist conventions around, play with shades and nuance, and surprise players...

I definitely was not a fan of the M:TW auto-resolve.  I haven't tried E:TW, however.  Auto-resolve is nice option, but I too want to direct my army to march across sodden fields of enemies to victory.  Or, if I'm playing multiplayer, to send my units scurrying around in hopes of escape from impending doom.

My biggest reason for wanting tactical battles is the possibility of synergistic powers -- stats are very flat and cold.  You can take stats all you want, but something like MoO2's Energy Absorber, Xeno Armor, DamperField, Repair system, and cybernetic race trait has an effect completely out of line with their 'stats' because of the way they synergistically interreact.

And I like that idea!

Yes, but while MoO2's tactical combat vas very nice initially, I always felt it was more of a chore at the end. Seriously, I got so bored having to always more every single one of my ships at every single freaking battle.

About the "if the AI sucks, let Frogboy develop a new one". I feel like he's already struggling a lot to create the best Strategic AI possible, and that is still a far way down (even if I feel like he's had the best AI in the video game industry). Asking him to impliment a tactical AI on top of that? That'll be downright cruel.

I just don't see the appeal of Tactical Combat in a game such as this. I never felt like Civ4 or GalCiv2 shot me in the foot. The results were randomly generated, and I simply had to make sure I out-strateged my ennemies decisively rather than leave clinching down to luck. That's what a good general do. I like to have me and the AI to be on the same footing when it comes to pure combat. The rest is about where to put my troops on the map, and when to engage.

I guess, if we could have some blur generalling option available (not a direct control over your troops like you have in strategy games, more of a realistic generaling mechanics, where you give orders to your troops and hope they understand what you said and do what you wanted), with efficiency of General being linked to his leadership ability, that might work. Since combats orders have become simplier, you might create a decent AI out of it without much work (compared to a Starcraft-like AI), and they get the very same penalties regarding ordering their armies around than you do.

Are you sure you are talking of Order of the Stick? Maybe talking Goblins? Not that Order of the Stick doesn't have stick up somewhere paladins.

Yes, I know, I've experienced the same things. But I would fault that on TW's auto-resolve. In essense what I'm saying is to run the actual auto-resolve simulation, and then instead of displaying the actual numbers, just display the general outcome. That way, there's no surprise for the player like you described, if it shows "Decisive" but you end up losing half of your army. If it shows "Decisive" you know that you pretty much obliterated them, but you don't know what you lost - only that it's not a lot. But it could be a few of your rarest and most powerful units, or it can be more of your weaker ones.

Then, you can either slug it out in tactical, or settle with the auto-resolve and then it will show you the exact statistics.