Really?
You can burn *a lot* of mana in tactical battles. Like easily 200-300 per battle. And a 1/2 stack of heroes can have a battle every turn, or every other turn, without much difficult.
I can easily burn through 600-900 mana clearing out one of the store areas with "epic" creatures.
I am okay with the Channeler system in MOM, but I think that the current system makes it difficult to perma-nuke all the time. Many battles *should* be fought with melee only, with your casters in reserve in case something goes horribly wrong. When you get to a major battle, you'll burn through a boatload of mana and have a flashy fight.
For a suggested source of material, I'd like to recommend the Black Company series of novels. The "Ten who were Taken", or the mega-mages of that mythos, spent a lot of time in melee for normal-ish enemies. Magic was reserved for desperate times, or for really large battles, or for mage versus mage battles. Those became really flashy, with both "strategic" and "tactical" magic used.
I've only put in about 10 hours so far in the beta, however, I've not seen mana production in excess of 50 per turn.
Quoting Sarudak, reply 9I think what you don't like about it is the very thing that makes it an interesting mechanic that forces difficult decisions...
It is very much not this. Once you get into the midgame, you have functionally infinite mana for tactical spells unless you're wasting mana on the (useless) overpriced strategic level spells.