I think you are reading too much into the tactical battle comments.

I believe he just wants to point out that the battles should not take too long, not be overly complex and one should not be able to rule the world just by being great at tactical battles alone. If it was possible to win battles against far superior enemies on a regular basis, then the rest of the game would have no importance. You need to gather good units on the world map to win tactical battles. 

A good gamer will win a battle against the odds on a regular basis, but not against any enemy all the time.

Hm, you may be right. Reading what Brad said again, I can almost convince myself that you are.

Ah well, what I said essentially still stands albeit with a much heavier emphasis on the reserving final judgement until such time as these additional changes are revealed. The worrying point in the statement above -- which has been repeated in another thread; I think the voting one although I unfortunately didn't see it until I had already cast my vote -- is the reluctance to add additional complexity to the system. This I would assume would also cover things like dealing with counterattack for first time a unit is attacked per round and other such things which increase the need to think about what you're doing and when with whom.

I don't wish to suggest that a player should require some sort of mystic codex to understand the workings of the tactical battle system, but some additional complexity would be muchly appreciated and highly engaging. If it is going to stay in a state much similar to the current; don't bother.

This is starting to feel like what we experienced a year ago. Your plate fills up and everything slides to the " Short Fix" side of things.

The game is looking good, do not lose focus this time !!!. Windoblinds or whatever can wait. Screw this up and I know you lost one forever. all aspects of your software business will receive my greatest scorn !!

How much are you willing to play with the lore, now that you have hired fantasy writers? I was one of the people that feel the races need to be more distinct and different. But honestly, that goes beyond abilities. The races, especially for the kingdoms, all look the same. It is boring and difficult to tell them apart. I wish you would strongly consider redo all of their art, giving them things like different height (dwarves, gnomes, halfings), pointed ears (elves), tails, body types, and whatever you can dream up. This could also extend to race specific clothes. For example, the Ironeers, as master smiths, may have armor that looks different from Precipine's faction.

I realize this may be difficult, since you have already published books about this world. But I think making a good game is more important. Is this a change that could be considered within the scope of your "design principles"?

Interesting...

Though tactical battles are already a part of the game I don't want to play because it's broken right now :/ 

Tactical battles should help you win Though, you can't either be a master of strategy without any tactical skills, killing main armies of a player in tactical should be an open path to victory. But if you still have the possibility, without any armies, you should be able to reverse the current of the strategic play with powerful spellif if available to you ! I.E. Making the path to your main city inaccessible with walls of earth (I still hate the stupid create mountain spell !) or by teleporting the army back to their own capital, making them much weaker to be able to defeat that marching city, etc. same for computer player.

I'm curious as to what will be done to balance both strategically and tactically.

Differencing the races can be done in many different way and again, curiosity come over me when I think about what will be done.

Finally, city management... Well, I really don't know why should city management change that much except including a "food" resource and poeple starving / working better following the amount of food available, I don't see what else can be done? Maybe extension of the territory ? I don't know, city mangement seems pretty good, what's hard to manage right now are the different research trees, because as of right now, I dont see how anybody can win without first spending a lot of seasons in the city building tree, if you don't expand that research, you just go nowhere by focusiniron magic or warfare only... Maybe it's my playstyle, I don't know, but managing the research trees is way too hard without researching city developement :/ I feel like you just go nowhere by researching warfare or magic only and it's too hard! Shouldnt the player be able to make a choice and stick with it until the tree is complete ?

In master of magic of course, you dont have that problem, you have spells to research and it stops there ! In civ, as far as I remember, didn't play civ for decades, you have one giant tree and you just research following a Path. Again, in ascendancy you have one giant tree and you go one way or another but most the time you come back to research Smth you would like to have for your race to advance. In SOASE, the research works very well, many trees, you build stations to unlock them and it's totally possible to go one way or another without worrying too much about the other tree if you have a good playstyle following your research... But FE... WOM it was easy, magic was useless so you could just forget about researching magic, never succeeded anything with it anyway and when I tried it was WAY underpowered and useless even with the patches... Is FE the same ?

Here I feel totally lost :/ you're just forced to go in city management tree and stay there for a loooong while before thinking about going to the other trees. I don't know, research is an aspect of the game I just can't seem to master at all... Unless its the city development one.

Anyone agree ? Or can anyone help ?

The reason you pick tactical battle now is if you wish to use magic.  I wonder if the AI follows the same rules.

Do you plan on adding a lot more monsters, goodies, spells, etc or is most of that already in?

Will there be Steamworks support for this game too like the Sins: Rebellion?

Excellent information, particularly enjoyed reading about where YOU (B.W.) stand.

I'm not liking what I'm hearing about the Tactical battles. They should be just as important as the Stratigic part of the game.

My big problem with tactical battles is how Auto-battle plays out.  Brad is kind of confusing me.  he doesn't want the tactical battles to decide the game.  I get it.  So, can we make the auto-battle work more intelligently?  I don't mean my soldiers act brilliantly on their own, but simply the auto-battle follows some basic rules, like putting ranged characters in the back and having them less likely to be attacked.  Right now, the autobattle doesn't take into consideration a number of things, it seems.  So it becomes unsafe to send lightly armored mage units or champions and archers into an autobattle as all the attacks focus on them, and one at a time until killed, even though it's not likely in a real tactical battle for the ranged units to be targeted first.  

I agree with Lord Xia, play a battle in AutoResolve and you lose, play it out turn by turn and you win. 

As for the AI in battle - why does a lone Champion insist on continually casting slow (Slow, Slow, Slow, then move to attack) when being hit by archers at range. Better to close and eliminate the archers that suffer deaf from many piercing arrows. 

AFAIK this game is going to be excellent.

I've said it many times before and I will say it again, getting updates from management on a product is quite fun and getting the Presidents view on it is just WOW.

Thank you for all the updates and on your personal views. I just love it.

Now for the meat...

Tactical battles atre a must. I do not think we should flip out because of the comments on this thread. I remember how the battles were when we first started the Beta test and now they are even better. I think Frogboy means that this is not a game about tactical battles it's a strategy game. I have a feeling the tactical battles will be lotsd of fun without being the center of attention. I find them quite interesting already and he confirmed that they are going to get more love. I do not see what all the fuss is about. They will be interesting just not the #1 thing. As it should IMO.

I think you guys are on the right track. Keep up the good work.

All hail

I second that!!