I just never been keen on auto-resolve features. And I am a little disappointed about tactical battles being only 3 min. Seems like a lot of time and dev resources went into this auto-resolved/3min feature.

Also to meet a 3min goal I am assuming strategic options and complexity in tactical battles had to be removed to meet such a time limit. So I must ask. Why we need tactical battles? I am thinking of HoMM here. Yes some skirmishes were over in mere minutes but some could go on to 5-10min? 

Hopefully the auto resolve feature is poor and a player would never want to use it knowing that they could still eek out a victory if they played smart.

The battles in Master of Magic were also pretty short.

Problem is, how do you have multiplayer if a battle can take 10 minutes+? One guy has 4 of these battles and the other two have zero... 2 guys sitting around and twiddling their fingers for 40 minutes? Not going to work.

I found the "RTS" idea interesting, but can see why it didn't work. What I'd like to see instead, is turn based but with a "chess clock" sort of option.

1) at the start of the game, a setting is picked between fast, medium, and slow battles. Fast battles give something like 1 minute on each clock + x seconds for each unit over y units total in battle. Medium could be something like 2 minutes base with more seconds for x and y. Slow might start at 5 minutes base.

2) When someone's clock runs out, they automatically retreat. Also, they can't attack again that turn (or some such to stop them from jumping right back in again).

This, along with battles that don't impact other players being able to be fought simultaneously (like in Civ IV), would allow downtime to probably be kept bearable.

Does a chess clock water chess down? Answer: no. Brad makes good points about why Gal Civ was not and should not have had MP. One problem is that it's hard to team up when you are on different sides of a galaxy.

On the other hand, I ONLY play Civ IV multiplayer these days. It rocks and catering only to the SP people would be a pretty big mistake with Elemental... in my opinion of course.

I've played 1,000s of hours of turn-based games, and having an adjustable timer (which should be able to be turned off also if destired) would take nothing away from the game play whatsoever.

I agree... since they have chosen to include it, they should to it well... Doing it halfway isn't going to many anyone happy with it.

As he pointed out, there IS a substantial cost to SP by going MP... just the realities of economics.

Ultimately, however, I get the feeling that Elemental is more about providing a toolkit (at this point). Much can be grown from that toolkit, but having a toolkit focus is largely about providing flexibility and power to the tools so that both SP and MP modules can be make that are terrific.

...also note that we all know that autoresolve ALWAYS sucks. I've never seen one work even close to well, so that just isn't a solution for anyone beyond the most casual forms of play.

Blasphemy!!! Words like that will get you Lynched around here, Wallie.

The ONLY thing holding GalCiv2 back in my eyes was the LACK of Tactical Battles. If GalCiv2 would of had Tactical Battles I would have said it was even better then MoO2...

With that being said;

I agree with you in that I'm not a fan of "Auto Resolves" either, but, Frogboy has stated from the Start that the player will be given the "Auto Resolve" option at Any Time. This is for those people...who Don't want Tactical Battles or who just don't want to do them All the time. Even I my-self may Auto Calc a battle every now and then if it's a completely one sided victory in My Favor. The only way I would never, Ever, use Auto Calc is if it cost me Troops that I could have saved had I commanded the battle My-Self.

The "Unit Threshold" is there so people who Do Not Want Tactical Battles can set the Threshold so High that Tactical Battles almost Never Happen. If you Don't Want Tactical Battles, You Don't have to play them. Most of us however DO Want Tactical Battles. In fact, if not for the fact that this game has Tactical Battles I don't know if I would have bought it or not. The Tactical Battles are a BIG DRAW for me to this game. (that and it being a upgraded, re-made, MoM)

According to Frogboy the Player will be able to chose to end or "Auto Resolve" a battle at Any Time, whether it's on turn 1 or turn 10 of a battle.

Please, DON'T PUT ARTIFICIAL LIMITS Into the Single Player Tactical Battles. For Multi-Player All the Battles could be Auto Resolved and I wouldn't care, but, for my Single Player Experience I WANT MASSIVELY LONG BATTLES ON A EPIC SCALE....PERIOD.

@lswallie: Please, Don't take that as me yelling at you, I wasn't. I just Really Want Epic Battles. 3 Minute Battles are Not Epic.

And MoM was made HOW LONG Ago? This isn't the early 90's or late 80's...and this Isn't MoM. MoM was a Masterpiece, but it was quite limited for it's day. Honestly, Elemental blows MoM out of the water in Every Way-Shape-and form. If they would have had the technology we have today when they made MoM I'm sure MoM would have had better battles.

Eh, not to mention that you control a couple of units in MoM compared to EWoM. If I go to battle with 6000 units against 10.000 units...well that battle should last MUCH longer than 3 minutes. Now that I think about it, I don't even understand that how could a late game tactical battle last for a few minutes? What if I've got 200 unit groups in my army for example? [Ex.: 100x10 and 100x50 units]

I'm dying to see tactical battles! This will make or break my buddies in buying this game (the only reason why they didn't get GalCiv2).

Am I the only one who thinks this 3 minute thing is a goal for a typical battle, and not some hard cap? The way a lot of people are writing it's like at 3 minutes the battle will end. But that would get pretty annoying with large armies ("sorry, next time you battle you can move the other half of your units").

You can attempt to design a system that encourages battles to keep moving without a hard "sorry combat's over now" clock. For that matter the time limits could just be turned off entirely in single player, since if you really want to spend 10 minutes analyzing your next move for some reason, why does the game care?

For multiplayer I know there was ideas like the time bank, but you could also go with a "movement clock", where you get 15 seconds per unit to do something with that unit. That'd force you to act and keep things moving, but the time scales up as your army grows.

That's actually how Sword of the Stars did it. It was easily possible to have a "battle" last over 10 turns because you had a few hundred ships in your fleet and you were attacking a planet with another few hundred. And it would cut you off when the time limit expired. Obviously the defender could repair everything during his turn, and if his production was high enough rebuild some ships for each new battle - while the attacker couldn't. It was a horrible, terrible, stupid system

But yeah, nothing Brad said makes me think it's a hard cap (which I pointed out earlier to another poster too). Honestly, I don't think they actually did a test with thousands vs thousands battles to see how long it would take. I imagine for 3 minutes they mean a much smaller fight - but we'll have to wait and see how it works out. It has to scale somehow if it's not a hard timer.

another double post. Someone send a repair crew!