Death vs. Disablement -- I am the only one who cares.

You could actually translate that into "practical" terms. Consider it takes population to train soldiers.. so if 50 soldiers are defeated in battle, instead of simply having all 50 die and disappear, you could have 25 be dead and gone, and 25 merely "disabled" - i.e. able to return to the civilian population of their home city as a farmer or whatever, but unable to continue fighting due to a lost arm or leg. So it's only a partial loss, you lose the resources and training time invested into that soldier, but not the population spent on him. Not a huge difference from gameplay perspective, but I agree a nice touch that adds to immersion.

Just for clarification, I'm picturing this being part of the screen that pops up at the end of a battle. 25 soldiers killed, 25 soldiers disabled and retiring to civilian population of [City X].

Ooh and you could have the chance of disablement depend on the type of attack that kills a soldier - dragon's breath causes 100% fatalities, but getting hacked at with a sword disables half of its victims (just ruined the seriousness of this topic by picturing Monty Python's Black Knight).

In Dominions, some soldiers end up being crippled and rather useless for other fights. Or diseased, meaning they're probably going to die within a year. You can't disband units unfortunately, so when one has the courage to micromanage thtem, these cripples usually end up patrolling some rich province (or a province where you do stuff that makes the population angry).

I would love to see something like this! by chance have you played x-com, Magic? In that game soldiers have different names which you can change if you wish. if they get shot in battle but did not die they have to get medical attention for a certain amount of days before they can fight again. They can also become unconscious on the battlefield and need to be attended to right then and there or they will die of fatal wounds. 

Each soldier had different stats and would go up in rank as they got more kills. It was an ingenious way of attaching you to your soldiers and making them feel important. Brad has mentioned that x-com is being used as inspiration for the tactical battles and i just can't imagine it without these kinda things

I envision a battle where individual soldiers (or at least the units) each have different traits and can perform differently in a battle. Take for example, when raiding a village. You could move your spearmen in between the houses fighting the peasants for experience, and if the enemy had archers, the buildings would shield you from their arrows. However what if the enemy had fire arrows or fire mages? another layer of strategy could be keeping your spearmen away from the straw huts that will quickly go up in flames because you might lose unnecessary troops and instead vouching for the protection of the small stone wall in that one peasants back yard... maybe your great general got knocked off his horse by an enemy's fire arrow and broke his leg but still lived. He might not be able to fight anymore but Id also love to see an option where that general can be promoted to a seat where his skills can still be used, but thats for a different topic

I think vulnerability was a verry important aspect of x-com. It made the battles actually count and made you balance your decisions rather than just rush into a battle because you know you've got the stronger force. More than anything, i hope that's what they take into account for Elemental.

It worked in X-com because you only had a dozen squaddies at a time. Try micromanaging thousands.

One tactic used in combat through the ages is intentional wounding.  To wear down your economy, I intentionally injure-and-not-kill, so that you have to take care of those soldiers.

In elemental, I'd imagine it working like this:  wounded soldiers still cost you the same upkeep.  They go into a grand total of wounded soldiers, of which a certain percentage of them are healed each turn, and a certain percentage die.  These percentages could then be effected by technology.

Yea ... and particular evil emperors could simply, erm, "euthanize" them ... but with serious alignment repercussions (or bonuses?)

But a grande strategy against most nations, I agree, and forcing them to make harsh choices. Albeit, if cities had happiness it would be easier to hand out "repercussions" for people that act out of alignment.

(also, a broad alignment where nations can gradually change good->N->evil or evil->N->good or Chaos->N-> Law, ect, ect.)

Yeah, something simple like that would be nice. It's just depressing when everyone dies. ALL the time. To a rediculous extent.

Actually, this feature would be very appreciated. I remember running into a problem with Rome: Total War where the population drafted into the military would practically never spring back. Eventually, the cities would end up becoming depopulated. Since Elemental seemse to be using the same system, I think this concept would give some insurance against losing huge populations in a single ill-fated battle.

Dominions almost does what I want it to do. I enjoy that level of detail although I don't really expect it from Elemental. It's a pet peeve of mine that the only escape from the military seems to be death.

Yeah, I forgot about X-Com. I appreciated X-Com and how nervous it made me during a battle, because those dudes mattered to me. Turned based combat has always been pretty hardcore. Unfortunately, I think we've got too many dudes to keep track of individual abilities and stuff, but I like knowing the guy in a particular regiment who got the most kills, and what his name is. It does give me someone to care about in a battle and maybe even a candidate for a battlefield promotion.

I think retiring crippled heroes and generals to cities is a good idea. Very fantasyish. That sort of detail makes me fall in love with games.

Retired and wounded soldiers often were the ones who settled and tilled land. That would also be a good alternative as opposed to death.

I like the idea, actually, but I wouldn't want to use it strictly for immersion.  As was mentioned by others, some should be merely wounded on the battlefield and recover to fight another day and other's might be able to return to the population if they are permanently maimed, but still able to add productivity.

I would like to see "real" wounds : when you get severly hit, you can definitly lose some points in mobility, or accuracy, or hit points, or strength (dom3 has that).

It would be a neat system to have. Making it as complicates as you would like would probably not be practical. But there is no reason why you could not recycle disabled veterans into civilians again. The only distinction is that you can't recruit them a second time.

Assigning a separate injury to each one is something of a pipe dream in a game of this scale.

yea ... you could treat minor wounds kind-a like foot-ball injuries, a soldier* could be out of commision for a couple months while he heals

*-player, hero, peasant, sovereign (sovereign needs 3 turns to heal, a compound shin fracture :p), or 1 turn of rest required, sprained ankle. 20% of our soldier need to take some time off of the battlefield, or else they could over-heat and be useless next game *ahem* I mean battle.

I don't really care about combat, but in a game with EWOM's economic system this becomes especially relevant. Why? Becuase the soldiers you produce actually come out of your tax-paying population, and having them not die and go back to the farm and pay taxes again will seriously affect your income level. I'm all for it, as long as those bothersome RNGs don't get too overpowered.

some injuries are not suited to farm-work, or any sort of work.

Yea, we probably will have too many units to do something individual... very sad  but maybe we can at least see the stats of the commander of an individual unit or just the units themselves could have different stats based on their training, i do like that idea. 

One thing to think about would is that currently any troops drafted out of city population are permanently out of the workforce. In medieval warfare (actually all warfare until standing armies became commonplace in the early modern era) there would be seaons where the majority of the army (i.e all the non-professional soldiers) would return to their homes to work on the harvest.

Without modeling the ebb and flow of marshalling troop numbers (which I would find fun but understand that most people would be annoyed to find their troops beat their swords to plowshares every year), soldiers injured beyond combat readiness are as good as dead in game terms.

The level of abstraction Elemental is using leaves individual walking wounded without a clear reason to be in the game. It's not like Elemental is going to model the various support personnel armies require, non-combatants like animal handlers, squires, "camp followers", chaplains and more.

Personally I would be happy with any level of detail as long as it was consistantly implemented throughout the game.

I think real life figures are that only 20% of the loses would be really dead people, the rest would be injuries, desertions, and so on.

It would be nice to have a "roster" screen where you could view individuals without clogging up the interface. I lobbied to have something like that done for Mount and Blade.

Yeah, I basically agree. I think that having a distinction between those too injured to work and those that can still work but unfit for duty is probably not at all necessary. In the off chance a system like this is implemented, I'd just assume that soldiers who are injured can still do something... maybe be a craftsman or a bureucrat or something.

Well... of course, there are those battles where everyone does die. With %20 kill-to-wounded ratio battle might start getting a little cheap and safe. At the same time, if we're trying to be really realistic we'd have half the army die of disease... which isn't fun.

I agree that for the base game this x-com like model will not work.

I am hopeful that the modding support in the game would be enough though to create a spin off tactical game that did focus on small squad fights.

Elemental: Enemy Unknown

In my mind I picture a setup where the cities are fixed and you are playing a squad of "special ops" units, perhaps assassins or the like. The focus of the mod would be on these small unit fights as they try to infiltrate rival cities (Basically this is a world after a normal game of elemental where one civ has taken over and war is no more, but internal conflict between houses or merchants still exists). The tech tree would be far different and the way you produced units would also change. In such a mod you could really focus on things like injuries and full unit stats.

I will need to see the full tactical battle design and mod support before I put too much effort into this, but I think it could be a lot of fun.