Not by me.

I gave you one. Empire: Total War. I've seen auto-resolves that ended in the entire 2000+ enemy army killed with only ~200 losses on my side. There is no way such a victory is even remotely possible in a hand-fought tactical battle. Especially because when you're actually doing the battle you have to deal with getting past that town wall, whereas auto-resolve just ignores it and resolves purely by stats.

And from everything you've read about Elemental so far, you don't think the same will be the case? If anything, in Elemental you will need more strategy to get there because it's looking like it won't be "hey you found Iron, now you can just build anything that needs iron!" and you'll actually have some worry about supply and usage.

There is zero logic in this statement. Whether or not you have the option to do it, in the games that aren't built around tactical combat you are neutered by default (I'll start using bolds, too ). In games that have it, you are given the option to either keep it that way, or try your hand at manipulating the battle. Not the other way around.

Hey Annatar, Luckmann,

Perhaps I missunderstood the whole problem...

If you have a general auto resolve option, then the player can decide in a single player campaign if he wants to fight the battle personally or not. Sounds fine to me.

In a game against another player, both sides need to agree on the mode: Either both are autoresolving, or both are fighting it out. It does not make sense to have one player autoresolve, while the other leads the battle personally.

That way, no one has an edge over the other, both sides are served.

Well, Luckmann's argument is that fighting the battle personally is inherently superior to letting it auto-resolve (as in, if you fight personally you will always get a better outcome than auto-resolve) and thus not using tactical battle is like gimping yourself because why would you want to settle for losing more. So in that sense he feels that he's being forced to use it because if he doesn't he won't be maximising his units/army's potential.

My argument is that there's nothing that anyone can do about that since it's a condition he's created. If both auto and tactical are made well enough that both are completely viable ways of playing exclusively, then there's really no issue. The big problem is if you have a tactical layer, people can still use auto-resolve if they don't like it. But if there isn't one, everyone is forced to use auto-resolve, even if they don't like.

I'd rather have both, than either one exclusively.

I see. Thus the question is if we'll have tactical battles or not at all...

Hm... I personally would prefer to have tactical battles. Otherwise designing your own units is just eye candy. And I would just hate the Civilization problem: "the stone thrower shoots down the fighterjet..."

How about waiting for the first beta reports about that matter? Does not make sense to talk about the disadvantages and advantages of a system we haven't even seen yet...

Well we know we will be having tactical battles, but I do not think we'll see them even in beta 1. We'd probably get them closer to the end. They've already said they want to make the early betas playable on the cloth map only without all the fancy stuff, as it's a lot easier to make gameplay changes like that without having to worry about artwork and all of that. And the principle being that it should be designed so that it's feasible to play it completely zoomed out.

The thing that bugged me most about both Civ4 and GalCiv2 was that the game shot you in the foot every time.

You're basically arguing that you want the game to shoot you in the foot every time rather than choosing yourself.

The fox speaks!

But that's kind of how I see it. The baseline is always the auto-resolve. So if you feel like it or a particular battle is important enough, you can try to do better by fighting it out manually. I guess that's the "half full" side of the glass.

The half empty side would think that the baseline is tactical, and so not using it is doing worse.

I had a thought extending the Dominions track and tying in with a Leadership skill. Maybe have a Domions like system, but you can pause and give new orders mid-battle. However, your new orders would be a limited resource based on your battle leader's leadership. For example, you could give, say 10, specific orders mid-battle with a leadership of 10. If you've just got one small group, that's a lot of control, but if you've got the same guy leading 100,000 troops then, well, battle is controlled chaos . That'd do a couple of interesting things.

One, combat would get away from pure tactical. That's a plus or minus depending on your viewpoint.

Two, a small well led group could beat a larger poorly-led group. You can adjust to create localized numerical advantages (think hit-n-run attacks with, let's say, bear cavalry). You could adapt to a weakness in the opponents battle line. Your opponent though can only make minor changes mid-battle because he simply lacks the leadership to properly control a large army.

Exactly how many "leadership" adjustments you get to make has some interesting tuning points. Maybe each "unit" has an inherent 1 point and leadership adds or multiplies that. Maybe enemy Dragons cause "fear" which makes it more expensive to give orders to units near a dragon or some such.

I could see a very cool hybrid of the Domions like system that gives interesting choices in battle, but avoids some of the complications that arise with a full blown tactical combat system.

Why not have Tactical Combat an option set by-game, rather than by-player?  In the multiplayer world, people can hack it out amongst themselves, though this option should be really conspicuous when starting new games.  In the singleplayer world feel free to use or ignore.

Brad's GalCiv2 AI is pretty good, so I'm hopeful both the strategic and tactical AI in Elemental will be just as challenging and sneaky.

I think that's the current running assumption of how it should work. In MP, there should certainly be an option to enable/disable tactical battles.

I like tactical combat - especially in a fantasy setting. What good are fantasic creatures if they can't show off on the battlefield?

Amen brother!

Back to the tactical vs strategic discussion...

I have been thinking about it, and I think that auto resolve that does nothing but number crunching is lame.

Units should have a default behavior. I would love if you could give each unit within an army specific instructions like "protect unit y" or "advance until you are in range then fire volley at nearest enemy", etc. The capability to "program" your units to fight effectively without your direct help could become a mini-game in itself.

In auto resolve, it should play out the battle via algorithm, taking terrain, your scripted instruction (if any) etc etc into account. You should be able to watch a non interactive movie (other than camera angle) of the battle. Basically a lot like Dominions 3, with possibly a bit more depth of scripting behavior. This should be the the most auto resolve option in the game. (To me a bare number cruncher of strength vs strength is just retarded.) Watching the movie optional of course. I do not like the idea of being able to chose autoresolve and then selecting a "do-over" in tactical because you think you can do better.

If I choose to drop into tactical, units should still automatically carry out scripting behavior, possibly have an "All STOP" button on the interface to make units wait for specific instructions. Or I can let units continue with their scripted behavior and just select specific units and over-ride the script with specific new orders.

To me this would really satisfy all camps, you would not have to feel that hitting autoresolve was gimping you because you could control what autoresolve did. It would give you tactical level control without having to tactically run each battle. It wouldn't be designing two separate systems, it would just let the player that chose tactical an option to go in and insert his orders over the units default orders.

And if someone demands that they have the option to have a straight "number crunch" and then ALSO complains that doing so is shooting themselves in the foot - they should be shot in the foot with a twelve gauge shotgun. They should be shot in BOTH feet.

However, I too am pro-tactical, since I generally enjoy it.   I wouldn't mind auto-resolve for a few versions of the beta, since we could then work the system to not discourage auto-resolve (I usually feel discouraged to auto-resolve because it feels like I'm loosing something)

I would want a "tactical" spell list, and an "auto-resolve" spell list, just because the structure of the spell book would/should be different based on distribution of combat spells.  (auto-resolve might have a spell that boosts auto-resolve rolls.  Where tactical might have several in-combat or field trap type spells.  Some of these spells might have auto-resolve counterparts, such as being able to throw overland-fireballs that damage units as a whole)