drabhead is of course skeptic and idealistic. That's Fine. I guess what I want to know is how Derek is thinking about changes to tactical and how much better the AI will be at making armies and playing tactical. The most logical answer is that there are too many unknown variables in the development process for the devs to comment.

No, wait.

I can actually agree with your main goal (no game-defining tactical battles) but let's not change history, first. MoM's battles were fun. They had all kinds of races, all kinds of units, animated dead, flying units, invisible units, walls, heroes who could fight with items that you created...  

It's NO accident that they were fun, they had features that made them fun.

Mastroego has an excellent point. It was those FEATURES that made MOM fun. The variety of units and races was really what made the game fun, in my opinion. I've always liked playing different races and having unique units for each race. It's what got me going with MOO, MOM, CIV (to a lesser extent), SINS, etc....

But you can have more complexity to them without making them too long. See AOW:SM Tactical Combat they have town and tower seiges with wall and other obsticals on the Tactical map. Plus they had many abilities that units can be set up with. The TC maps were a little bigger than FE but the battle are about the same maybe in some cases where you have 4 stacks (8 units in each stack) against each other it could take up to 3 or more minutes for the combat which is pretty fast.

AoW:SM had some interesting battles and they were certainly fun. But the AI was easy to cheese with some very simple tactics. Once I learned the cheese, there was no stopping me from winning almost every battle. Unless I autoresolved. Then it was pretty fair. But even that had some errors in it. And those battles take a long time. The game was also only fun on a tactical level. The Strategic level offered very little besides setting up the tactical. That made the AI even easier to wreck. FE has a chance to be better in this respect. 

But Galciv2 did not have real Tactical battles. The one fault of the game

I agree. But I still hope the TCs have a lot of depth in them. Especially if you plan on adding MP to the game.

My favourite strategy game is, by far, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. In that game, the Tactical Combats are really immersive. And though luck has a part to play, the battles are decided by skill and knowledge. What makes them great is the number of variables that come into play. Not only units (including heroes/sovereigns) have many "traits" that make them unique strategically, but there are also a lot of mechanics that force you to use them properly (or suffer the consequences). For example, units get attacks of opportunity, archers have obstacles, terrain and distance penalties, there's friendly fire, etc.

I'm not sure something that sophisticated is attainable right now (though that game is ages old), but I just hope Tactical Combat doesn't become one of those features that are tossed into a game, but then become a drag because it's not well impemented. I'd rather not have it at all.

It would be great if someone of the dev team can take a look at that game. Not to copy it, but to have a vision of what can be achieved in some particular aspects of it.

Cheers!

Which weren't a tactical battle feature but rather a strategic feature that made its way into tactical battles.  That's why I think when people request features for tactical battles they should be thinking of strategic elements and how they manifest in tactical battles.

What about the terrible 18 unit limit for battles? The most defeating and buggy element to battles. It would be better to allow more units in city defense battles so that city militia can matter. I would also like the "cast spell at beginning of battle" to be able to summon monsters. So a summoner can have more that nine units in a battle as well.

Couldn't we just scrap the 9 unit per army limit? I hate the consecutive battle mechanic that results from it. Plus it would make battles so much more epic!

It makes sense to be the max for an army, but it shouldn't be a hard limit. There should be ways around it. Logistics are a good mechanic, but they needs some flexibility. 

That would work for me.

Also, I do follow your reasoning that "nowadays variety is harder" because of 3D models and such. It really is understandable. Yet, we can't solve the problem by denying that variety is good. Instead, I think you should add variety where it's easier for you to do it. Which I believe you stated yourself as a goal... so we're basically on the same page. It's just that some of your comments seem to be dismissing our "dullness alert" reports, and that would be wrong imho.  

I try to not dismiss any reports.  For example, there is nothing wrong with wanting 10 completely different races -- i.e. a sider race, a bat race, a 6 legged race, etc. all with their own weapons, armor, etc.   I want that too.  On the other hand, I also want a 3D engine and high resolution textures and to be able to fully clothe and armor these units.  Unfortunately, that would require a 64-bit game because you can't do all those things in 2GB (just think about how much memory a single 4096x4096x32bit texture takes up. That's ONE texture).

The good news, and I apologize for digressing for a minute, is that this is an area where the PC is going to destroy the consoles when it comes to epic games because within a year or two, games are going to be 64-bit only and at that point, we can have as much stuff as we want.

But I'll just repeat what I've said before, when it comes to tactical battles, we look at MOM as the inspiration.  And most of their elements that people liked were strategic game features that were translated their way into tactical.  No one would ever call MOM a tactical war game. But it's tactical was extremely fun.

Militia and such don't count against any sort of limit.  There is no "hard" limit.  It's just that 18 is the current maximum number that the various abilities give you. A modder could go in and change that to be 50 if they'd like. The UI would add a little -> at the end of the list and let you scroll through.

Just remember, no system will appeal to everyone.  It's always a delicate balance between many different considerations.

This is fine by me as well if we're actually going to see these things. I could probably live without range or obstacles mattering to ranged units or counterattacks and that kind of thing if the battles were in some way made less bland. Sure, I would without question rather tactical battle system was made everything it can be, but I'll settle for 'not-bland' if the rest of the game is otherwise fantastic, which thus far seems to be the direction it is taking.