In order for strategy to proper develop in a game it needs to have more than just terrain modifiers on combat like high ground advantage and defense in forest.

That kind of system aren't enough for complex strategies to arise.


As a solution I propose to have multiple key gameplay elements added ;
-The ability for melee units to make moving away from them difficult ; once 2 units are at melee distance, if the player want to move away from the other melee unit there is going to be a stat based probability that determine the chances that the unit will effectively escape the other unit.
-Spells ; AOE spells or single target spells, that each have pros and cons to being used or else. Example : "Cavalry charge" : the cavalry unit charges through a unit, attacking it while moving through it. Or "Rain of arrows" : the range unit makes arrows rain on a large surface in order to attack multiple units at the same time but deal reduced damage.
It could even be Minetraps or even the ability to build Fortifications on the battlefield !


- A morale system; each units additional to their health bar have a morale bar, when morale bar gets low the units have debuffs, when it's at zero the unit will disband and leave the battle to reapear severly injured on the map. Morale would get lowered when taking damage or when victory seems impossible ! Like huge army numbers or a very scary unit like elephants !

We can be very creative and it doesn't need to be 100% realistic as long as it adds strategy it's always nice.


This last idea is hard to implement but It is an interesting one and could change the whole game strategy ; make it like in Endless Legend in which after 6 turns every units go back in army stacks but rather just freeze the battle for the next turn, meaning that next turn the battle will continue with units being at the same positions as before. (If this last one get implemented it means we also need a way to make units escape the battlefield, like a tile on which the units can leave the battlefield and reform army on the global map, that would lead to interesting scenarios)


That's all that I had in my head for now, I hope I didn't wrote all this for nothing and a dev will see it :)