The thing is, that I want good and deep tactical when the battles matter and well done auto-battle when the fights are not important or very one sided.  But when the shit is Battle of Badon Hill, god damn it I want to play a deep tactical battle.

Holy twisting of words

I have to say, I agree with this completely. And I've never understood this response:

Because isn't this primarily an AI issue? But, then again, there are lots of things that I don't understand, so...

If memory is the only issue for adding more clothing options and such, I suggest making a dlc after the game launches for $5 that adds a bunch of this stuff with a disclaimer that it only works for x64 with 4+ GB of ram.

I often use texture packs and such for games like Skyrim, and while hopefully modders will pick up FE and add some stuff I wouldn't count on that so having Stardock make it would be nice. 

OK, I understand the design concept that you're trying to pull across. For instance, in Age of Wonders I would consistently pull off amazing tactical maneuvers that would allow me to decimate two stacks of eight orc warlords with just a tiny handful of summoned units (these moments I remember fondly); however, I would also defend my cities with placeholder ranged units and fend off huge raiding parties that should have easily crushed my small defending force (these... I remember less fondly...). You are trying to reduce/eliminate these moments if possible. Gotcha. I am ok with this.

Still, I do not believe that the current tactical system is "fun" yet. It was fun the first couple of times in my first game, but the novelty wore off quickly. Rewarding unit diversity (a strategic concept) and astute usage of a small smattering of passive abilities/active abilities (a tactical concept) would improve the current system greatly! Right now? I roll around with one stack of melee units and mostly archers. I also throw in a champion/my sovereign in order to cast some spells to break up the tedium. There are tactical considerations in the current system, but they are limited to melee zone of control (a good concept and one that should be kept), initiative (which is in need of some major tweaking) and spells (the current selection of which could use a little "beefing up"). 

I would sacrifice deep strategic tactical combat (a la Age of Wonders) for a fun, flavorful system. Not easily, mind you, but I would support that decision. Still, it needs to be more varied! Variety, variety, variety!

I would also like to second the notion of a previous poster in this thread: Please let us (the beta testers) know what you would like us to focus on. I am hopefully not speaking just about myself here, but I want to help you guys succeed with this game. 

When I play this sort of 4X game, I think my main interest is in producing interesting units that do interesting things in battles. If the battles are not fun in the long term, for whatever reason, then the game will not hold my interest.

Master of Magic has battles that I still find interesting; the small number of stats interact in an interesting way, and specialising in any of attack, defence or hit points, and the varying numbers of figures and the small number of special abilities work very well.

At the moment, I'm not convinced that this is true of Elemental. High defence can never be high enough to stop all the damage. Range doesnt seem to matter. One doesnt have to think much about how to hit things without being hit back, especially with most units not being able to counterattack. And once units level up, their hit points grow disproportionatly compared to their attack, so there is no risk of them being killed except when fighting things with vastly superior attack.

That philosophy there bugs me a bit. What I would suggest is that strategic advantages provide some sort of tactical benefit, in terms of a buff of some kind or debuff on the enemy, perhaps morale? A disheartened enemy is a defeated enemy. Though I would still allow for some kind of rallying cry that can be used in the heat of battle to at least give them a fighting chance. Not always, mind you.. Perhaps a special ability from a skilled commander? Anyway, that pretty much solves the whole issue wanting to have cool and in-depth tactical battles, and not having to worry about the AI being crushed because someone just happens to be really good with the tactical side of the game. Imo.

I do get where you are coming from though. As I am an avid fan of the Total War series, and I can't lose to the normal/hard AI on that if I tried. I have won battles that should have simply been crushing defeats, just from the sheer economic/military power of the nations I was against. However, I can chalk most of that up to a predictable move that the AI will always, always make. They take the shortest path to victory, if your gates are down, they will simply rush into the bottleneck and then.. Be crushed by a barrier defense of pikes and flaming arrows. And that tactic has worked in every Total War game I have played since Rome. The only AI that haunts my dreams, was that of Galciv2... Vicious, aggressive. Painful.

First off, thanks very much for this "Fallen Enchantress - BETA FAQ" post!!  As one of the early responders noted, it is very gratifying to see this much continuing information and feedback, being provided on a regular basis, by the design team and company president.  I am very much enjoying this Beta-testing experience.  I am now up to about 30 hours of game-play; since I was first eligible to download the Beta on February 23.  I have a very good feeling about this product, thus far; and I am very much looking forward to its continuing evolution!

As to the question of the importance (or relative un-importance) of tactical battles, I would like to register my views/vote.  (And incidentally, I know we are not really "voting" here.  In fact I strongly support your position that the game -- in its final iteration -- should reflect a singular view, of a single individual (Kael), or at least a small, disciplned, design team.)  

But, getting to the point, I really think you are headed down the best road, with your current approach.  I like having BOTH auto-resolve; and the ability to sometimes get messy with Tactics.  I am probably using auto-resolve about 60% of the time; and personal direction about 40%.  Which route I take depends on a myriad of things, including: complexity, number of units involved, relative importance of the battle, perceived odds, relative balance of magic versus arms, time-of-the-day-or-night I am playing, how tired I am,  etc. 

Given that I might go either route, I would like the outcomes to be roughly comparable, a majority of the times, either way.  I have no problem with a Superior Tactician being able to do slightly better than the auto-resolve; but I would rather not be FORCED to be enmeshed in every last tactical detail, in every single battle.  I would rather not see this game become 70% tactical battles, versus 30% strategy and overall game content.

It sounds to me like you have adopted a good approach; and I trust you will work to strike a proper balance in that regard.  I don't mean to be a Fanboy here, but I really think that you have chosen (and enunciated) an optimal direction.  I understand that many months of development, and refinement, remain.               FE is genuinely good, getting better, and I think it will end up great!   

Some solutions to the problem of having tactical battles have too much impact if they become more complex (not a necessary consequence).

1. Have a large number of random tactical battlefields. When a unit attacks another, one of these battlefields is picked. Some of the battlefields might give an advantage to a certain kind of troops, others might give the same kind of troops a disadvantage while again others makes the battle fairly even no matter what units there are on the field.

2. Don't allow very small armies to go into tactical battle with much stronger armies, have those battles play out automatically as a defeat to the weaker side. In this way, you will reduce the risk of a very skilled tactical player being able to gain a huge advantage by somehow exploiting (and in my mind, if this kind of thing is possible, there is a flaw in the tactical battle system in itself) the tactical game.

3. Competent AI is extremely important if the battlefields become more complex. Kiting enemies or sitting on a hill and shooting down a bunch of stupid enemy units that just rushes forward is obviously a recepy for disaster if one wants to avoid having the tactical layer overshadow the strategic layer in importance. Suggestion: hire an experienced AI programmer for tactical games, check out the guy who's made X-COM. He can't be up to much these days.

If the AI is smart enough, a player should reasonably not be able to gain too much of an advantage by winning tactical battles, a goal could be that a relative strenght of 10 to 3 always ends in a loss.

It seems kind of like a wasted to shy away from having complex tactical battles when this is an area that's been largely overlooked on army level when it comes to computer games. If the battles are reduced or kept more or less the same, you end up with a game that's a half baked CIV clone combined with a half baked Age of Wonders.

Another obvious way to make this game different from CIV is to have VERY different factions in the way they play, sadly this is not something the devs have managed to accomplish.

I've seen this elsewhere but I'll say it again because it's fun: People like MOM except when they don't like MOM.   Classic games work because they achieve that rarest of delicate balances.  What made MOM's tactical battles fun is that they achieved that balance.  That is what we're going for as well.

This is similar to our view as well.

It's what you bring with you into the tactical battle and how you use them that should matter.  Not whether the player has figured out a trick to decimate massive numbers of opposing forces making players feel like they need to play out every battle.

The biggest problem I have in tactical is that the AI does not see a hero mage as a necessary unit for an army. They also have trouble putting together one deadly army that can defeat me. I think it is because they see all the armies near each other as one unit. Still needs some work. 

What's funny about this?

On the issue at hand: Creating a balanced experience in a game like this is a core component, but i thought we were discussing if a complex tactical battle system necessarily means that the a player can abuse the tactical battle system and win the game, even though the player completely screws up the strategic part of the game. I don't really think there are any decent arguments for this being the case. If you think the tactical battles are fun right now (you also thought war of magic was a great game at realease) then good for you but as an objective, unpaid observer i'm telling you that they kind of suck.