The tactical battles are continuous turns, i.e. pseudo realtime. It should play just like Baldurs Gate or the Total Wars games. See Design thread.

Design elements of Elemental discussed

One thing I should mention about the tactical battles that isn't clear in the screenshots is that they're continuous turns. They're not like HOMM. The player tells where they want their units and uses the space bar to pause the action to give new directions. That way, we can get much more interesting battles.

aLap, I think you more or less missed the whole point of what Sins did and what Elemental is going to do

I have to completely agree.  I've recently graduated college and joined the 'real world' and found that it's difficult for me to find several sequential hours to spend playing a game (especially compared to college!).  PBEM would also give me a chance to releive the good-ol' days of playing strategy games like HOMM with my Dad and Brother despite having radically different schedules now.

I've always liked how Sword of the Stars did multiplayer, that is all the players do their turn movements simultaneously when everyone is done they all hit the end turn key and then they sort out battles in sequence, some of them being autoresolved some being fought, and players getting to watch other peoples battles play out if they have the right intelligence techs researched.

Thats the ONLY part of SOTS that I liked...

One other issue with multiplayer- that really was a big problem in Age of Wonders.

How will Stardock balance out units that are much stronger in tactical combat then fast combat?

This WILL happen, and might also be a concern for single player.

Well one possibility is that auto-combat actually simulates the full combat, all AI controlled and then reports the results. I recall this being mentioned by a dev a while back, but whether I'm remembering correctly or even if that'll make it into the final version, who knows. The upsides are it largely eliminates this problem (except when the AI has poor utilization for certain units) and lets you watch a replay of the actual fight if you want; the downside is it might take too long to calculate.

If that's not the case, don't expect an answer to your question. What kind of answer would you expect? We don't know if units will have special abilities, we don't know exactly what stats and such there will be, or traits. They can't answer that question without telling us nearly everything there is about the combat system, and even then I think balance is often just a matter of fiddling around.

I'm certainly not a purist, and like when developers succeed on pushing a game genre forward. I saw a possibility with multiplayer, that's all, and I hope to see an innovative spirit with Elemental in one way or another. If not... I'm sure that we'll still have a good game to play.

The problem is there are two layers to Elemental. There's the strategic campaign map, and there's the tactical battle map. You can have different engines for these, but it's somewhat difficult to have 2 engines for the same thing, which is what I'm trying to get at. Multiplayer and single player are not different games, ultimately they still run on the same game engine. Doing an option for turn based and another for real-time is essentially developing 2 engines with AI that can work under either.

I understand your point, though I was thinking more on a modding perspective.

By introducing a "cheat" in the movement cap (I've done that for fun in Civ IV and Gal Civ II) with a limited number of elements in play and mod-like changes, in theory a "real-time" result could be obtained for a new form of multiplayer experience.

EDIT: further clarification.

I guess the main problems lie with tactical combat. But if they are solved with hotseat without requiring to change too many times users, PBEM should be workable

A nice update to be sure.

Anyway, I think it would be nice to play against friends for this title however such a feature would surely be an x-pack thing in my mind.

Uhh... Spartan, multiplayer has been planned for Elemental from the get-go, and even with the Demigod fiasco they haven't threatened to remove it...