For anyone who may care about my two cents in this matter, the following is part of a message I wrote recently to a member of the dev team. I am post it hear because it captures something missing from most discussions of the tactical combat.
I do not share the general opinion that the current tactical combat is broken. In fact, the tactical combat of Elemental is a fair approximation of the vast majority of comparable games. MOO2, the Shining Forces series, the Final Fantasy Tactics series, etc. all used a similar tactical frame work. However, the biggest distinction between these games and Elemental does not involve one side then another or 1dn or even different damage types. While these additions are niceties which could make the game better, the real thing limiting Elemental combat is choice.
The average unit in Elemental has one choice, attack or move. While there are special units which gain more choices - monsters, spellcasters, summons, etc - the generic troop has only this one choice. If you look at galciv2, the same dynamic is in place, though you added depth by using damage types to balance each type in a rock paper scissor manor. What made Final Fantasy tactics so much fun and so very replayable was the variety of things a unit could do or be. As each unit progressed, they became deeper and deeper tactically because more choices of how to approach the battle emerged. If you look at Sins of a Solar Empire, this is the same reason why combat in that game has incredible depth. If you look at Elemental, there is no such thing as a support unit, no combat healers, no buffers, no debuffers, no rooters, save for the special units which tend to make up the vast majority of players core army.
This leads me to another point, the only consequence to a player's choice in combat is a counterattack, but this is only a limited consequence as units appear to have a counterattack limit. Consider a sovereign with a high combat speed and a high mana pool. This unit can spam chain lightning until he runs out of speed or mana, and will more than likely destroy a large part of an enemies force. Now, add to this that he has shards (multipliers working of course), this mage has just become a god amongst men. In most cases, which spell to cast and even if you should cast the spell are non choices as there are fairly limited ramifications to doing so. Spell are instant cast and require no cooldown of any kind. In fact, if a modder even tries to add tactical cooldowns, the game crashes to desktop. While I am not a fan of arbitrary limitations on game systems, I believe that adding cast times and cooldowns to tactical spells would make the casting of spell a much more potent and interesting choice. This would also make OP abilities like Arcane doom much more reasonable if a unit had to take a turn or two to cast it.
After I wrote this I came to release that the idea of choice underlies most of the issues with respect to elemental's combat. Consider that the best/most OP units are the various summons and champions, but why is this? Most of these units have special abilities and even more importantly they have roles to fill in combat. While the sovereign and the champions can fulfill multiple roles, consider the roles of the various summons and special units. Even after the latest updated changed the Vigilant Minion to no longer have arcane doom, the creature still has a role as a defensive unit with its 4x counter attacks. It is these types of roles which make monster fights more fun to fight and why unit v unit combat ultimate boils down to simplistic smash fest between the various sides.
