I've been playing Battle of Wesnoth while waiting for the patch. The way they handle tactical battles is so damned simple, elegant, and effective.

Their model is:

1. Movement action points are separate from combat action points.

2. If you can move adjacent to an enemy you can attack the enemy with full combat points.

3. Each unit can only attack one other unit in any turn.

4. Depending on the type of unit, its weaponry, its abilities you may have a range of choices to use in attack.

5. Depending on the enemy's abilities, and weaponry, they may or may not be able to counter-attack.

6. A combat phase for a unit consists of the attacker, then the defender attacking until each has used all its combat action points.

So as an example I have a Clockwork Dwarf soldier who is armed with a sword (blade attack type). He has three attacks he can make with the blade per melee combat phase and doing 8 damage if the attack is successful. He has 33 hit points. He is going up against a 25 hit point Dwarfish spear-man who does 9 pierce damage from 2 attacks. They are both out in the open so they each have a terrain bonus of 30% to resist each attack. If an attack is successful it can still be resisted. In the example my soldier can resist pierce damage 30% of the time while the spear-man can resist blade attacks 20% of the time. So all in all the odds are with my soldier. But it would take a number of turns for either unit to kill the other. Another unit near-by is armed with a bow and a dagger. This unit has a choice of attacking with ranged or melee weapons.

So what's at play here that makes this better than WoM?

1. Units have enough hit points to typically survive a one-on-one attack.

2. Attack type is important. If you have an enemy who is weak against fire damage you would try to find a corresponding unit on your side that uses fire as a attack type. Attack types for weapons were added to WoM but never used.

3. The choice of attacks for some units make for strategic gameplay because you can play to your strengths against the others weaknesses.

4. Combat points and movement points are separate.

5. Terrain matters.

6. Proximity to units matters.

7. The game is simple and balanced.

I see it just showed up...............

WHY in (insert your supreme beings name here) name would you want to use anything d20 based?

Lovin' the changes. The game seems much more crisp and clean performance wise - not a single DX error yet. Looks like I can cancel my weekly therapy sessions with the psychiatrist. Granted I'm only up to turn 50 so we'll see... if the DX errors happen again I'm gonna go hang out with Markinn, snort some lines together, and watch Yo Gabba Gabba.

I also love the simultaneous damage. Tactical needs alot more love obviously but in my opinion this was a great step.

Nice work! 

[Edit] I do think the unit build times need to be tweaked down. What feels right, given a game turn represents a season, is 2 seasons for 4, 4 seasons for 8, and 6 seasons for 12 (or 3 for 4, 6 for 8, 9 for 12). Something like that... 11 turns (or almost 3 years) early game to make your first squad is hard to rationalize.

Training times are also a problem. Beyond having glass cannons, I can't train more than a few troops within the first 100 turns. I tried to mod this out but the data seems to be unchangeable in the beta. I understand why this is necessary, but I look forward to some word on whether or not this issue is a specific design element that I have to live with until 1.3 is done and I can just edit it out, or if the devs are still tinkering with how many turns it should take to train 5 peasants. 

My thought is that since they are a very basic unit (man with a stick) it makes sense for 5 of them to get together and train in a single turn, 2 if you really want to push it. With that as the base and each significant piece of armor and weaponry adding 1 turn per person in the unit, you arrive at 5 to 10 turns for your low level resource guards and 20-30 turns for your armored axmen and mounted knights. Then, as you research building to reduce that, the basic units stay pretty static and the better ones will see significant reductions (assuming you stay with the % reductions). 

It is my guess that you guys changed the unit size defaults without balancing the training times and then didn't play a long game to test it. I reach a point about 50 turns in where my 3 cities are waiting for their guards to be built and my 6 heroes are sitting with their hands folded, guarding for another 20 turns. by turn 100 I move my heroes to resource nodes to protect them as I build and wait another 10 turns for resource guards (by then i have barracks in all cities). Then I can play the quests. That is too much waiting. Also the AI is really crippled by training since it always builds the best units. I can pretty much magic attack their one unit and take any city by turn 40.

And for that matter building times could be reduced a bit since their resource cost is a larger prohibition than time (especially with the population feature we now use). 

"Expansion must be paralleled by the means to defend new territory."

-Lord Viticus

Because it has been used for 13 years now (3.0+) and is balanced and working well.

Because the D20 system is a good system.

I personally couldn't stomach 3.0+, WOTC pretty much lost me as consumer  when they broke everything in 3.0(aka the d20 system) .

Although to be fair this tends to be the effect on me when any game maker tries to simplify a well designed but complex system for mass consumption. AKA idiotproofing, dumbing down or "streamlining".

Yea i believe each unit gets their own rolls. However, since a model has 2 hp now as a base, it doesn't take much attack to kill off a stack.

No kidding! I once had a player who actually erased his stats once in a while and inserted slightly better ones. He did this real slowly, just added one at a time so I wouldn't notice. I started getting suspicious when he no longer had anything below 17 on his character sheet.