Maybe we, as a community, can bribe the Stardock devs to enable the option.  We can order them pizza or something.  Everyone loves pizza... and Raymond, I suppose, but mostly pizza.

What do you say, Stardock?  Eh?  Eh??  How can you resist this flaky crust, these delicious toppings?

Frogboy, you may want to talk to Mr Cirulis and Ms Dembo of Kerberous Productions, They produce a great space 4x game called Sword of the Stars that features realtime battles often lasting 3-4 minutes (and often several fights a turn in later gameplay). They may be able to offer some insight on your conundrum.

I'll weigh in my 2 cents here too. To say I don't feel any disappointment would be an understatement, While I know I will enjoy the hell out of the single player game still, and Will be gleefully making maps for pnp games with the map maker;I did pre-order 3 copies of the game for my and my friends for multiplayer. So I guess I'm a little angry and disappointed by this. Now I understand your position, but understand ours. The difference between those copies sitting unused and being used is a check-box entitled "allow tactical battles". I don't speak for even a majority of the gamers here but I do speak for my group in this - we were looking forward to this because of the tactical battles.Its why we own 5 copies of Sots and 1 copy of Galciv, and why we own 4 copies of AoW:SM.

Again I do understand where you arecoming from in this decision, so all I really ask is please make getting tactical battles up to snuff a priority, or Implement them as optional - ie not the default mulitiplayer setting but an additional option. It will make for many happy customers.

He said "I don't find Elemental's multiplayer in 1.0 to be fun in general." I don't see him mention tactical battles as the cause, just a cause for whiners, lol. Other than special items and the like the TBs would be the same as SP no?

Maybe someone else on their team gudied the multiplayer process more than Brad since he dosn't really like multiplayer in this kind of game anyway?

do you have any sort of logic thought?

if they removed tac battle ofc they do think the mp game WITHOUT tac battles is better

You add absolutely nothing to the discussions by throwing around insults.

As for tactical battles, they were in HOMM, and AOW and there is another series I can't seem to remember. Removing them makes no sense.

I would like to point out one thing. If we had a proper MP beta, this disscusion would most probably never happened. But they did not test MP at all, other then, "can we connect" phase, and at the end they have decided to please people who like to play fast and simple.  

I mean common, this is 4x game. Everyone who decides to play any 4x game does not expect to finish game in 20 minutes. And I am sure that people who play those types of games, play them for their complexity and replayability. 

"We took them out. Yes, in an ideal world we could have made this an option, but anyone who has been on a forum for any amount of time knows that you'd still have people flaming us who found tactical battles boring because while the other guy was fighting some drawn out battle, they were stuck watching it."

Ok now, who you want to please? what game are you making? Do you want to please those who like 4x games and your fans, or those who like instant action and fast gameplay? You have decided to remove tactical battles for people who does not want to play 4x game. And you would rather hear flaming from the fans of the genre? So be it...

I think, you should realise, that elemental, is not suitable for any competetive gameplay. And I do not think it will ever be. For this type of gameplay, you need simplicity(for the balance), and short games.

If you would make something like, wizzard battles(only tactical combat), with given points, which each player can use, for building army and customizing sorvegin, then yes. Something like this can work nicely, with ladders and matchmaking.

It is up to you, do wathever you fancy. Just give us, custom servers, or LAN and I am sure, people will make mods, which will deal with MP nicely.

Edit:

Sword of the stars has done one very nice thing. It allowed anyone to join any created game over the internet (if creator allowed to), and join the game at any point, and also leave at any point. If player left, AI took control of his empire for the time he was being gone. Player could set how AI should act for the time when player is gone. It is really nice touch. 

Battles were done in real time, with overall time limit and if battle was not decided in that time limit, it continued in next turn. Which does not work for elemental. But time limit for every move in tactical combat would be welcome.

Overall SotS is the most playable 4x game in MP, in my opinion.

This is how AoW worked, and yeah was a little annoying at times, but the game always had a switch to disable tactical battles.

Again, I think there are perfectly valid concerns over having tactical battles in multiplayer TBS games, but what I don't understand is why these concerns aren't being left up to the players.

Frogboy addresses why they don't have an option, sort of:

Isn't it just as likely they'll flame on the forums about the lack of tactical battles?  Wouldn't leaving it as an option please the most number of people?  Same goes for quests, and whatever else is being gutted from the MP portion of the game.

I've been watching this games progression for several months now, and I've been looking forward to a replacement for AOW:SM to play with friends. 

Fortunately I usually wait until the last day to preorder just for this sort of reason.  The first hint was the declaration that multiplayer connection worries were being pushed off to a third party service.  Now with static maps and no tactical battles I don't really see a point.

I'm patient I suppose.  I'll just check back towards the end of the year and see how much love the multiplayer aspects of the game have gotten.

I think the problem is ultimately, Brad assumed that the main thrust of Elemental's  MP would be competitive, when really it's just as likely to be casual or cooperative.

Too much Starcraft 2 perhaps?

The other thing I worry about for the MP folks (I'm not one of them) as that the gimped MP will get shunned, leading SD to say "see, people  don't play MP" and therefore not make it work.

That said AOW2 MP was horribly busted, though I think player mods and house rules solved a good bit of the problem.

And most the time the AI battles aren't show in most TBS games. I know they say 16 players, something about 32 on custom servers later, but I don't think the majority of people will play that many. If they do, there could be eenough options to scale down turns like disabling tactical battles and quests.

I'll wait and see what they changed, but I was really more interested (in terms of multiplayer) in playing the single player game with one or two other people, probably co-op against the AI, than in a massive competitive game against strangers.  Hopefully that is still possible without too much being cut out

I don't mind, especially if you can alt-tab out or play in windowed mode, waiting while other battles are resolved if I am just playing with friends.  Though I can see the annoyance both with that and with super-items if playing competitively. 

Yeah I kind of wonder if the tactical battles are being disabled for the sake not swamping the Elemental servers, or because they might lead to game instability and crashes, or some other reason that wasn't mentioned in the original post.

Until we can get custom servers which enable the full SP experience in multiplayer I'm just not sure how fun the game is going to be to play multiplayer.  The problem is some of the changes affect other aspects of the game.  For example, since quests are being taken out, the adventure tech tree will be much more limited and there won't be quest giving locations on the map and thus exploring the map won't be as fun.  This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the maps will not be randomly generated, but will be pre-made "balanced" maps.  Also in this regard, the lack of tactical battles takes away some of the fun of using magic, because much of the magic in the game is cast in tactical battles.

I still might recommend the game to my current TBS group of friends, AoW: SM is getting a bit long in the tooth.  However I would definitely like a more precise run-down of what exactly is and isn't in the MP mode at the moment so I can relay that to them for us to decide (I've already bought the game myself).  So far all I've heard from Frogboy is: No Tactical Battles, No Quests, No Randomly Generated maps.  Can we still create our own race/sovereign and play it in multiplayer?  What types of victory conditions are available, is it just a deathmatch?  Are champions still in, or were they deemed too imbalanced due to the randomness of which ones you will recruit?  Was the Dynasty mode taken out?

You all seem to be overlooking another aspect of tactical battles if they were included in the online multiplayer suit. Griefing. Imagine this. You are forced to watch every battle someone has with the ai, or players. Well imagine the person who finds it funny to drag out EVERY tac battle for as long as humanly possible. (IE not fighting, running away in circles, etc) just to force you to watch their antics. It WOULD happen.