Numbers and numbers with some numbers

Dude this is exactly what I wanted to hear! Hell Ya!    

If you can have auto resolve battles and if you want it to be like Total War combat this is gonna make the game amazing! More people will buy it. My friends liked GalCiv 2 but when it came to combat, they didnt like it and that is why they didnt buy it. They loved the customization and pretty much everything else(except a few little other things). But with this news they probably will get Elemental!

Ill come back with some thoughts on builders and roads later got class.

Keep it up! 

Just make sure you avoid the 10 minute load times the battles "Magic: Total War" would inevitably have. IMO long load times are the biggest disincentive to playing battles in that series.

One thing I would like to know: will it be possible to make soldiers pretty much invincible against standard enemy grunt units? Like in Dwarf Fortress when a single adamantine clad soldier takes out an entire seige of goblins or orcs and is capable of doing so until they die of old age.

Why is a wheat tile permanantly more special than a regular farm tile?  Couldn't the wheat seeds be transfered to other farm plots to increase their production as well (since well, that's basically what farming is)?

Quick idea:  Perhaps the wheat tiles could instead be 'extra-fertile' land, that happens to be growing wheat in case you didn't already have it.  Once you get wheat for the first time, a small production bonus could be applied to all farms (instantly or after some number of turns delay).  However, the original 'extra-fertile' land still has a natural larger bonus for just that tile.

This post makes me happy, except of course for the section about resources. I'm really excited for Magic: Total War combat!  

I'm not looking forward to finite, discrete resources sans storage. I would rather Civ IV's resource system than that, and that's saying something.    

re: roads

i take it that only sovreigns can found cities. i think it might be interesting, to have the sovreign sort of plant a flag saying 'let there be a city here' and then the nearest city to that flag produces a settler which will plod at a slow pace towards that flag. while plodding towards it, it will create a 'trail' level road in its wake. the settler makes the city. it starts growing and with it, the road will gradually imrpove from 'trail' to 'path' to 'dirt road' to 'gravel road' etc. 

this will all happen automagically but there should also be an option to produce workers to speed up this process OR to make a new road to whereever the player wants.

OT: are there any options to assign military units as 'rangers' do guard a road and its users vs caravan ambushes etc? i dont mean just stacking a unit with a caravan, but assigning the unit to a specific stretch of road, so that any conflicts that take place on that road will always involve that unit as defender. its a bit unrealistic to have that unit everywhere on that road at the same time, but i think it would save a lot of headache, as having it actually patrol back and forth would be next to useless.

How about roads building automatically? When a city is founded it will try to link up with the nearest cities, then with the biggest ones (because that's where the trade happens) and then, finally, with whatever is left. Construction speed could depend on some sort of wealth-stat (or Prestige?), or cost money (which can be adjusted with a slider). As your empire grows, so would your trade routes, with the best empires having the most impressive road networks.

I think the current system of having the roads built automatically(once the decision is made to build them) is fine. I assume that at some point they will actually look nice. When it comes time for eye candy you can have a road crew doing goofy stuff like dropping boulders on their coworkers toes, lots of guys standing around watching the one guy work, etc.

 One suggestion on roads is they could just be built organically. So the first time a caravan heads to a nearby city it takes longer as there is no road. Maybe after five caravans it becomes a path, and after "x" caravans it becomes a road?

Bah, dumb idea, I don't know let me think on that a while.

I LIKE what you say about armies, sounds like there will be some real variety of significant choices. I think my biggest concern so far is that everyone seems so dang afraid about losing a game, I want significant important choices and both bad and good consequences. I do not want to be able to fire up the game first time and win on normal difficulty! (I want to win on beginner, but AS a beginner even that should have a hint of a challenge. For me, winning on normal difficulty should require a well played game and understanding at least some of the "subtle nuances" of the game.

I think you should qualify your statement on Magic: Total War. While you STATED that it was in terms of the SCALE of the battles, I guarantee you that some people are going to read that and say "Cool! Battles are going to work like Total War but with spells!" And that would be fine if that is indeed the case. I just think it is important everyone not read things into your post (Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)

edit: I present as exhibit A, most of the posts that were posted while I was writing mine. There is now an expectation that battles will PLAY like Total War tactical combat - something you never said but I knew would be inferred.

Why not just have soldiers build the roads? It worked for the Romans.

I personally prefer this method too, but with perhaps an exception.  Trails pop up organically where trade is happening, but cap out at efficiency at a fairly low level.  After this point, you can select an existing road and decide to pave it with stones, etc.  There might also be an option to upgrade all roads that have reached "worn trail" status automatically when you have an established merchantile empire.

I would hope certain quests might attract people too. If I do quests to be the "really good" or "really evil" then it should help attract "really good" or "really evil" heros to my kingdom. But I like what we got so far.

How about sea ports? Traditionally having a Sea Port or major River port is even more important than road access for trade.

I'd be curious to hear more about what kind of role seafaring is going play the game?

By "Auto Resove", does that mean we can still watch a battle play out?  I know lots of people don't want to micro an entire battle, but still, also don't like just a "Defeat" sign after they click on Autoresolve.  And if there is any possibility of any type of "turn based" option that would be such a releif (I have 2 friends that love the Civ/HoMM/AoW battles, but can't stand the TotalWar type, so I'm very worried that they will pass on this game, as may others like them).

How about a little toggle or check-box near a place where you want a road, which, will put a set amount of people to slowly autobuilding the road (10% of the population for example).  You can build all the roads you want at the same time, at a great cost to your city production then.  The roads could improve over time possibly (Trail > dirt road > stone road > magic road?).

I am very excited by the statements made by the OP .... hurray!

For the record, I am of the type that usually plays out EVERY battle (unless its really, really late game and its a particularly boring war-front)

Everything is sounding pretty good so far. 

Battle Options:

1. Instant Resolve (army 1 and army 2 meet, one is destroyed instantly).

2. Auto-resolve. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and plays out automatically).

3. Player resolved. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and players can give orders. At any time they can have the computer take over to resolve it).

Tactical battle options:

1. Weight of action.  This determines the consequence of each action and determines how long battles will last.  Effectively, it determines how...decisive each action is.  

2. Speed. 

The idea is for battles to be able to be controlled by players at all times so that they can make battles that last less than 1 minute or as long as an hour all depending on their options without it feeling like a click-fest.

Now you can see why this is going to take some time to nail down in beta.

Automatic things would be a bad choice : with something as improtant as caravan, I need to be able to draw exactly where they must pass.

Then a simple system would be that you don't create workers, but just draw the roads.

Some rules to avoid strange things : a road MUST start in a city. It can end wherever you want. You can still create automatic roads between cities.

How to create a road ? Just click on the "build a road button", choose the city where it will start, then draw the waypoints. The computer would automaticaly calculate the paths. So you could cretae a well detailed road if you want, or just put 2 or 3 waypoint to avoid that nasty forest from your city to the resource.

Gameplay-wise, it change a thing : resources don't have to be in a town's range, but we would need a way to take resources without having a town in range. At the moment we can only build mines if we build the town next to it, or we create a line of buildings to the mine. Why can't we just put a mine and create a road to the nearest city ?

So, we need a way to create roads where we want, not just automaticaly.

Really awesome features.  Being able to toggle any of those features on and off during a battle would be even better.  Started with auto-resolve but your units are being especially tardish?  Shut it off and take matters into your own hands.  Winning the fight, ready to leave mop up to your captains, but want to be able to step in if they start bungling the effort?  Turn auto-resolve on, but toggle it back off at your whim. 

Heh, I like this idea Soldiers could build tile improvements in general, not just roads... Like forts, watchtowers and things like that (if such things make it into the game).

Chalk me up for automatic road building.  Plop down a city and it automatically works to connect itself.  I really like the idea of roads being somewhat organic (ie, dirt trails from enterprising entrepreneurs), which can then be improved upon by dedicating extra money from within the city. 

I dislike the worker route and hope it is avoided - it just has never been fun in other games (MoM, Civ4). It also always seems like every tile is covered in road by the end-game from a flurry of workers, which looks silly and defeats the purpose.

I like auto-resolve, but it would be nice to have some options as to how the battle is auto-resolved. If I really want to throw everything at the battle, a "no-retreat" option would be nice, or if I had a hero or elite troops, a "protect valuable troops" option. The thing I hate about most auto-resolves is that it is only useful for battles that are completely lopsided. This might sound silly, but if I just click "auto-resolve" and lose in a closely matched fight, then I blame the auto-resolve and either get frustrated with the game or just stop using auto-resolve, even for fights I'm uninterested in. If I had some options that had a meaningful effect, I would blame myself for making the wrong decisions, and the auto-resolve could be something fun instead of a "mop-up" button for minor, one-sided battles.

I'm in this camp, I hate when roads cover every inch of the map. It doesn't make any sense to me. In a game which covers incredibly long timespans those roads should be swallowed up by nature anyways. Higher levels of trade might automatically afford a road upgrade if the tech has been researched. The road upgrade might move units slightly faster and give trade bonuses (i.e. Caravans move 2 spaces instead of 1)

I'm fine with soldiers building roads as well, but maintaining those roads should cost money. Since presumably they're being used to move soldiers rather than commerce they're going to be expensive to upkeep. If you don't pay the money for upkeep then the road should decay after some turns and not provide a bonus. Some turns after that it should disappear from the map entirely.

If you can have multiple routes between cities then I'm going to want a choice of which route my caravans take.

I recently tested out caravan attacks by placing cities on either end of a troll swamp recently. The caravans will get attacked even with random AI movement. Its how I found the "caravan retreating" bug. IN a regular game you're going to have problems with road routes being cut off by random hostiles or enemy territory and need to move them manually anyways.

This is always a delicate balance. Make the auto-resolve player friendly and the player is tempted to overuse it and get bored. If you make it too unfavorable or risky then the player can't afford to miss any battles and then gets bored with repetitive battles.

Scrap all those. I'd like to see battle options work just like Gal Civ 2, with the added ability to take over in the middle as you're watching along

Yeah, that sounds messy and needs work. Might not be so bad once you start getting something coded down to look at more.

Would be possible something a la Heroes V? In which you had auto-resolve but when presented the results, you could choose between accepting them or play the battle yourself (and try to get better results), ignoring the results of the auto-resolve..

being able to ignore auto-resolve results kind of sounds like its delving into the area of too player-friendly.

maybe if you could only do one such "cheap auto" once per 5 turns or something ... or if it were a spell.