Terrain in Combat

It would be pretty awesome (and probably feasible) to get some manner of walls in Tactical Combat. The other stuff has been requested and discussed numerous times, and the devs have indicated that is a bit outside of their vision for Tactical Combat in Fallen Enchantress.

I, too, would like to see a game with a more robust turn based tactical combat (LoS, Flanking, Terrain bonuses, etc), but I do think for the sake of gameplay and enjoyment, that game would probably have a hard time doing all the same customization, RPG, or adventuring elements that FE does.

I would atleast like some more interesting tactical combat maps, and some bigger ones, hate every melee unit being in melee turn 1, doing so makes ranged pointless.
More lakes, and more rugged terrain around the edges, some obstacles in the middle.

Heroes 5 and 6 was pretty good to randomly generate a battlefield with few objects on it.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

This is probably a better place for this comment:

Combat zones should have the land from the zone the combat occurs in, along with the attributes of that land. 

A forest gives ranged protection.

A hill gives melee protection.

City walls grant defence bonus.

Outposts grant ranged units a farther attack.

A road allows additonal movement along that stretch.

Perhaps there is a small lake, and you have units that can swim. 

Perhaps you can cast a 'wall', between two mountains, forcing your opponents into a bottleneck.

Stuff like that...

 I do like how the combat maps can have tree's blocking squares, making bottlenecks. Being able to lure the enemy to a bottleneck helps win battles against more powerful enemies. I would love a more robust terrain system, but not at the expense of more development time. 

If older RPG 4x could have terrain that mean something such as walls, gates boulders trees fences, hills etc. I fail to see why FE could not have this as well. I have heard people say that they don't add this for game play reasons yet this game engine is suppose to be great. 

I personally thing the game engine my be too limiting so they ave to use other excuses to explain it away. At least that is what it looks like to mee anyway. Still hope the game turns out great however with a weak tactical battle I don't see it having much in the way of replayability but it is still early.

It ain't over until the Fat lady sings.

While no one wants the devs to sacrifice one aspect of the game for another, limited and repetitive tactical battles (and there is usually a ton of them every game) kind of kills the fact you even have tactical combat.  Perhaps the smart balance lies in doing something (relatively) subtle and random that changes your looks and options.  Different spots that add small bonuses or obstacles (similar to the first game) would go a long way.  And even a limited positioning bonus like flanking and backstabbing (which could be great character customization choices)--the only reason I see the devs not adding the tactics into the combat is they are worried about computer player's performance.  Yet given Brad's extensive history with AI, it would seem a worthwhile goal to have AI take advantage of terrain and other simple tactical moves (like flanking with melee units, avoiding the swampy ground in some of the more clever mobs, and retreating to hills with ranged units).  These would pay off in spades when it comes to a genuine tactical feel.

I think even something as subtle as los for archers would add more flavor. Though I'm not complaining, the feel of combat gets more satisfying  with each version. The early battles before you get good weapons and higher levels are tending to be challengeing.

The problem isn't that they CAN'T implement some of these things, it's that they don't really want to. All of these various suggestions (and there have been many other threads like this) have one thing in common, it makes tactical battles more complicated and often much more drawn out. Afterall, there's no real sense in adding all these things if you can just rush forward and stab your opponent in the face. That's not to say that it would be bad to have long drawn out tactical battles, they, however, don't seem to want this heavy emphasis on tactical combat. Their vision of tactical battles seems to be of quick skirmishes, ones that are interesting enough to keep you playing, but not so drawn out that it ends up distracting from the game... where your strategy can be rewarding, but not have so much strategy that it would let you overcome great odds (that would break the empire portion of the game). That's why they spend time on things like auto battles and auto combat so that you can even skip tactical entirely if you choose (in EWOM, tact was even disabled completely in multiplayer). These two visions just don't mix very well, so you'll often see that "vision of the game" statement in threads like this.

That isn't to say that there isn't room for improvement in the current system, there are a lot of things that you can do to make it more interesting without slowing it down. For example, I'd like some more emphasis on elemental damage/weaknesses.

A more complicated tactical battle would involve way more complicated AI.  It's not going to happen this late in the development imo.