Despite this, the auto resolve manages to lose the entire army in fights I don't even lose hp.

Well, the truth is that tactical combat never really was the main focus of the Elemental series. It was always designed around the idea that it offers quick and moderately tactical decisions but that the overall army strength is the deciding factor.

The focus is on the civilizing of the wild lands and on empire building in a heavily customizable sandbox mode. For all its neat gameplay concerning tactical battles, Eador does not offer that.

Eador can be played as LH - just choose a big shard with lots of opponents and have fun (i also find a campaign too long).

I agree with OP - LH tactical battles are not so fun, but devs always made it clear they do not want to put too much emphasis on it. I cannot really understand this approach - all this cool self-designed troops and straight forward-no challenge tactical battles with no way to enjoy your power ... Also in Eador auto-battles are actually pretty good compared to LH.

The be all, end all of LH tactical battles are directly tied to your heroes development & gear, and strategic map control (mainly on resources so you can build better troops with more bonuses or upgrade existing ones) and obviously, shards upgraded. Any tactical spell that benefits from shards power increases exponentially with the number of shards your empire / kingdom controls. Those dictate the outcome of battles more than "stronger armies" can do.

Sincerely how many times did you beat that deadly / epic enemy with just a medium / strong army because of previous mentioned factors? Spells do affect the outcomes of a fight and are one of the most important aspect of LH (which is good and completely in theme with the game universe).

Comparing the tactical battles between different 4x games is not really a way to show that LH has a bad / undeveloped tactical combat. Some games main point is tactical battle while they lack severely in other departments. Other games have balanced 4x elements.

Civ5 battles are not really engaging or super tactical, higher number of troops / tech / promotions wins even with a bad general (like moving your artillery in front line). HoMM never had engaging battles, especially with latest series 6 (which to me personally was a huge disappointment after 5), all it had going for it was the anime feel of creatures and their animations. Endless space tactical battles are really on a very low level of depth, but they still serve their purpose as far as combat goes.

Can everything be improved? Obviously. How much does this add to game value? Look at Baldur's Gate (1&2) the battles weren't anything to write home about, but still were good enough for their purpose yet didn't hurt the game pace or feeling at all.

I have no problems with LH current version of tactical battles, but I won't say no if they decide to make improvements that are meaningful and add something valuable and not just clutter the tactical phase with unneeded "fancy" stuff.

i am sad when luck of design, and polish is confirmed this way: "it was not in the focus"

If it was not in the focus why we got:

-self designed units,

-so many armor and weapon types

- trait tree for the heroes

These features are only usable in tactical battles, but right now you dont need it, you just have to click on attack the nearest enemy and win...

Yes, the features are only usable in tactical combat. The thing is, you don't have to manually control them and can simply use autoresolve, which was by the way the only method of combat when War of Magic had a multiplayer mode. Once, when we were young. You can play the entire game without ever going into tactical combat at all.

I understand that tactical combat in LH is disappointing if you are into complex tactical battles with formations, flanking considerations, terrain modificators, etc. LH is not about that, because adding all of these things will shift the focus of the game and will make combat much slower and harder to get into if you are not interested in it.

We seem to get quite a few people who compain about tactical combat in FE/LH

I really think there needs to be a disclaimer somewhere.

"FE/LH is not empire total war"...

Threads like these are what inevitably happens when you open the floor to the entire internet.  You get some good ideas, some bad ideas, and a lot of ideas that have nothing to with anything.  Most of it is garbage.  Even the best of the good ideas are probably not going to be useful or take you in the direction you want to go.

And, inevitably, you get people who are sure, absolutely 100% sure, that they could design a better game in their sleep and implement it over a weekend or two.  It's pretty obvious that all you need to do to make LH the 2013 game of the year is X,Y, or Z.

Edit: to add, there's value in all user feedback.  but a few people saying "I like a feature in game X better than a comparable feature in your game" is not very interesting.

Despite the disagreements about the quality of other turn based strategy games it seems everyone agrees LH tactical fights are meh.  

Saying this is ok because other games have boring fights doesn't make LH any better.

Reading this thread and the fact ppl defend the current state of the game by saying X or Y wasn't part of the development focus prompt me to be blunt, game doesn't shine in any way, every aspect of it is damn boring after 40 hours. 

Customizing units is a great premise but the reality is the upgrade options are boring, + 1 to armor, + 5 armor + 10 to armor, etc. No reason to mix units, no reason not to use the best tech, 1 option from one end to the other.

Customizing and nurturing heroes is another great premise but it also becomes boring soon.  Current hero trees are maybe better than what we had in war of magic or fallen enchantress but is still full of meaningless or boring stuff.  To my experience the classes with most impact on the game are mages and commanders and that's because both classes can buff the armies or the civilization. 99% of the game they are there just to gain xp and pass their turn, the last percent represents the tougher fights vs dragons or wildlands bosses when they stay out of the way and cast buffs/debuffs. 

Research tree also has it's flaws, some of the bonuses gained are completely useless/too far in the tree to have any impact. Ratios for example, camps of asok, dragons, first aid kit, braided belt, first two types of bows , touch of darkness, boots of the spider and i'll probably find others that I never used and won't make any impact on most games. Btw, commander's administrator 3 talent that reduces unrest by 10% in all towns doesn't stack with other administrator 3 talents (or doesn't work at all ). 

Same thing with towns, settle every available spot, repeat roughly the same build order for the type of town. The only reason to alter the build order a bit is to get scarce resources.

Same thing with monsters and quests, all so damn repeatable and eventually boring.

Besides these game also has other design decisions I'm not really fond of: essence and the fact it limits the amount of buffs a town can get, the fact the towns don't gain bonuses by extending in additional tiles, the fact the towns are defenseless on their own (nope, militia is not a defense, not even for a fortress, not even in late game, both monsters and other factions will take your town easily, even without loses), lack of fantasy troupes under player control (except worthless summons and occasional beasts) .

To end my rant, game had potential but in the end doesn't deliver and the launch date is too near to see anything getting "in focus".

This!!

You are missunderstanding me. I play elemental from the beginning and i love the game, i just want better tactical battles, more challange, fixed heroes trait tree.

I dont want autoresolve battles, i want play them. And as Anelyn said i am actually dont put a single point on hero specialization tree, dont using any armor, only the first basic spear and some traits, and i am already steamrolling the scenario with my 1st basic unit. And i did this in normal game on expert level too. And this is a problem.

I really like what they did in heroes vi: you can autoresolve any battle and if you're not happy with the result click a button and play the battle yourself. This saves so much time end game when the army is strong enough to wipe most of the enemies but the auto-resolve occasionally loses some troops. 

I am sorry, but in this case you wasted so much effort with the creation of the swarm mechanic, the weapon abilities, the tactical abilities of heroes and the tactical spells.

In my opinion the game has evolved from a strategical game (WoM) to a strategical AND tactical game (FE and especially LH) and this change is amazing, because it makes the game much more interesting.

Low level monsters could automatically flee and be removed from the strategical map like in Kings Bounty: Armored Princess.

Before asking for mods, did you actually try to play on any setting higher than hard for both world and AI? The challenge is there, and is in all aspects of gameplay. 

Tactical fights are not meant to be a game inside the game and last for an hour "So yeah I played today LH for 4 hours, managed to settle a city, build 3 buildings and clear 3 lairs near my city, tomorrow I shall explore a bit further to the west."

On higher diff levels you can't autocombat or steamroll through monsters even at end of game when you have all upgrades, you can still die easily (and not because of stupid lucky crits or some BS). You don't click and win, you need think, pay attention to initiative bar, hp and position of your units and enemy ones, what abilities you have on CD on troops, and when will they be available again. Is not a smack smack arcade by far, you hit 1st he hits 2nd who hits hardest wins.