In the beta so far, there seems to be several factor that might make battles faster:

1) Raising armies takes a long time. For me to raise an army using mostly the Warfare tree, it took me until about turn 125 to have ONE unit with 10 reasonable troops in it.

2) Don't forget that Warfare has grouping technologies that put more than one troop in a tile. Those same 10 troops were in 3 groups... so, fighting with 3 units isn't going to take long. Big cities only have, what, 1,000 people in them or something? So the armies in this game should tend to be pretty small in almost all cases, if I read the tea leaves correctly.

But this is with current balance and without a mod. For a game that basically advertises immense moddability, the tactical combat system definitely has to be able to decently accomodate most "normal" (meaning, not "Hey for kicks and giggles let's do 10 million vs 10 million fight!) mods.

Partly see above concerning mods, but also consider that right now we're on Tiny maps. The 64 bit version will allow for maps massively bigger than the "biggest" we've seen in any game so far. It's not only possible but virtually guaranteed that on a map like that you're not just going to have 5-6 cities by the end of the game, but 30, 40, or more.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think. Most of my battles in AoW 2 would fit into the 3 minute category. Maybe 5. Sometimes it would go on drastically longer, but it wasn't the normal case.

Most games, even moddable ones, have a target battle size though. I think that many people would be surprised how small battles were prior to modern times. If the population of the biggest city is capped at 1,000, then having battles with 1,000s of troops makes no sense at all. You're going to need probably at least 100 citizens to support one troop.

Is it at all possible to JUST order the Hiergamenon?

Well this is true, of course, but not really what I was talking about. A good battle system, even if "sweet-spot" balanced around the core game expectations of battle size, isn't going to break horribly when a mod reasonably changes that battle size expectation for its own needs. It has to allow for enough natural scaling to accomodate changes.

How small battles were before modern times is not relevant at all to this discussion, however.

In Elemental you can only have 10 units in one army.

Are you sure you're understanding what unit means in this case? I'm pretty sure I had more than 10 units in an army in the beta already.

And how exactly did you arrive at that particular assumption? You do understand that any pending tactical battle "ONLY" happens when the two opposing armies reach what might be called the "critical" engagement range.

Much of the strategy to be employed will have to have been look at or put in place prior to the actual engagement phase commencing. Tactics after that are usually based on what the enemy does.

That should be even more evident considering that the battlefield Terrain to be used will be auto-generated based on where on the Strategic map the two armies meet for said engagement.

As to the MOD side... Once you employ MODS, then the game will have to take place on other than SD servers and as such should be considered SP events amongst willing participants and times for battle length are either voted on, preset by the Server Admin, or thrown the hell out the window.

It will not be a Stardock concern at that point, nor should they ever concern themselves about it during Development. That is what MODS are fcol.

Right now. That won't last.

But Unit size will grow as more and more Army Tech is researched until you could have 10 Legions...

This, my friend, is why we can hit "Auto Resolve" ANY TIME WE WANT. You don't Have To Play Long Battles If You Don't Want To. That's fine. Just Don't take away the ability to play Long Battles for those of us (which I would say is the Majority of us) who WANT To Play Long Battles.

If you get bored half-way through a fight, hit Auto Resolve and be done with it.

The player should be given the choice, period.

I fully agree though that a small battle, maybe 30 soldiers against a couple of monsters, would or should end quickly. I wouldn't even call something like that a "Battle" so much as I would call it a "Skirmish". I don't see how a Army of even 5,000 soldiers would be able to take a Entire City in 3 minutes unless it was a small city with No Walls and only Meager Defenses. It would take 3 minutes just to breach the Walls. Regardless of whether or not the battle continues during the next turn of the game, large battles should take more then 3 minutes. 5,000 men wouldn't even be able to run the length of a football field in 3 minutes, much less breach a defended city and kill everyone inside (unless you use some seriously destructive spells).

Speaking of Spells in battle. I Do Fully See The Possibility of even a Large Battle being over rather quickly if a Sovereign or other Powerful Caster Type of unit was present at the battle. Or maybe even a Dragon. I can see a Dragon killing a few Thousand soldiers in only a few minutes, sure. For some reason though I Can't See how 10,000 Mundane Soldiers vs another 10,000 Mundane Soldiers would end so quickly, unless the battle mechanics are seriously gimped.

I'm fully willing to "wait and see" and "try it for my-self" before I pass judgment though, How-ever by then it Will Be Too Late for Us Beta-Testers to have ANY SAY What-So-Ever in them being changed at this late stage of development before release.

Like I said in another thread the other day, if this isn't Done Right the First Time then Elemental will get Bad Reviews and it will be tanked by gaming sites before it ever really has a chance to get off the ground. No Matter What I DON'T want that to happen and I doubt anyone else here does either. We ALL want Elemental to succeed and be the next Successor to the Legend that is MoM. Even Age of Wonders, though it was a Great Game, didn't quite capture that Magical Feeling that games like the original MoM, MoO, and X-Com had.

Zawath - I don't think that is correct. Maybe we're talking apples and oranges, but I have had more than 10 units in an army:

To quote you:

"Vulcans and Romulans are the same race (technically species but that’s a whole different discussion)."

Too true... Species are creatures that can interbreed and create non-sterile offspring. So actually, since humans, klingons, vulcans and romulans (among many others) can interbreed in this fasion, they are all the same species. They could be called different races, but the term "race" is not a scientific term.

Not sure if the applies to how the marriage and breeding works in this game... can trogs breed with humans?

It's so not true that hitting autoresolve is an option in any serious game. I've played at least 30 TBS games where I've tried autoresolve, and not one of them does half as good as manually playing it out.

Unless you don't care about losing units, autoresolve just isn't a viable option.

Because Stardock servers will have MOD's Turned off.... To play MP Mod's someone will have to run a non-SD server for that game thus SD is out of the rules loop.

Here is Brad's Official take on it for you.

Lets not get into the ridiculousness that is Trek species from different evolutionary lines interbreeding. But as far as I understand, fallen and human can breed to create some pretty hideous offspring.

You should read this thread:

http://quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2277109&postcount=1373

Brad says that armies will be limited to 10 units in the final game.

Terminology problem I think. IIRC the biggest unit you can make right now is 10 soldiers. But that's 1 "unit", even though it consists of 10 troops. Presumably higher levels of tech and larger cities will enable units that have more soldiers in them.

An "army" is a group of units, and there doesn't seem to be a limit on that. (edit - apparently there will be.)

According to an earlier development diary the answer is absolutely.  And the results are (apparently) pretty hidious.

What happens to enchantments when a channeler dies? It would make sense to have them simply go away, but this is a world so full of magic that even after massive destruction plenty of magic stuck around. Maybe there should be a small chance- 5%?- that enchantments stay in place once a channeler dies. It could add a little interest to the game and would probably take very little effort.

Everything looks great! I can't wait for the release date!

Therefore, trogs and humans are indeed "races", not species.

I guess if I'm a halfbreed and started a new game, It would randomly pick from the multiple race tech trees, just like genes are randomly assigned at conception

If you're going to speak for the majority Raven, you had better define "long".

Some of the crazier numbers being thrown around exclude me from that group. It'd require a pretty extraordinary situation to make hour long tactical combat reasonable.

It shouldn't take longer to move 5000 guys to point X then it does to move 50, unless we're dealing with a UI that only lets you move one thing at a time and that 5000 is broken up into 100 units of 50 each. THAT would make battles take a long time, but it would just be tedious.

Far as I'm concerned if you have to spend 30 minutes taking each city, and there's 30 cities to take before you win the game, there's a serious design problem. That's 15 HOURS just to take the cities, not including any time on the overland map or any other combat on the way to those cities. Speaking as a software developer, this really looks to me as a case where users are asking for something without really understanding just what it is they're asking for. If they were actually given that game, very soon the forum would fill up with complaints and requests to make tactical combat faster so people can actually concievably use it.

A game that slow would be unplayable to most people. Even the revered MoM didn't have anything that moved at the snails pace people claim they want.

In Vanilla Elemental, the First Official Release Version, if it's Impossible for me to have an Army with 10,000 Soldiers in it by the End Of The Game I will consider Elemental to be a HUGE FAILURE!!!

I think some people are getting confused with the difference between a "Unit" and actual "Soldier Count". As you gain technology you can Increase the Number of Soldiers in a Unit. I.E. the ability to Arrange Soldiers by "Company". Frogboy never said there would be any hard limits on how many Individual Soldiers there "could be" on screen. Only that there would be a "Unit Limit", which is to be expected in Any Game. We'll still be able to have Massive Armies with Tens of Thousands of Individual Soldiers in them. It'll just take you till Mid or End Game to have the cities, population, and infrastructure to be able to actually field an Army of that size.

People will actually have to work and plan things very well if they want to make that Super Stack of Doom. It won't be impossible, but it won't be easy either. I like that a Lot. Having a Super Stack of Doom is a very viable strategy in any war. It's even used in Real Life Warfare. In a Real war it comes down to having more troops and better equipped troops then your enemy.

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A little Off Topic but still relevant to this conversation: That's why I think if the USA ever goes to war with China we'll lose based solely on Numbers Alone (unless we use Nukes). China is the ONLY Nation on the Planet with the Man-Power to field and equip a Army of over a Million Fighting Men (Russia might be able to, maybe). The US can't do that without re-instituting the Draft. We don't even have a Million Fighting Men Enlisted Now, and that's counting Every Branch of our Armed Forces Combined.