Battle Tactics Online

#1 I've thought about games like this in the past. I think the primary question for online play is how do you ensure adequate pacing? Although I will say that playing a single tactical battle online is much more feasible than playing a 4x game like Civ or MOO.

When I've approached this idea I've thought about from the standpoint of say Warhammer tabletop games or Magic: The Gathering. Basically you can spend a *lot* of time offline at your leisure building armies, testing things, etc, but the actual game itself is fairly short. (Each individual play at least)

This is also the model of all sports. Practice, make trades, etc all year long, but play only once every couple of days only during a certain season.

Basically you want the game to be involving, but the online part of it can't be that time consuming, at least not in large chunks of contiguous time.

I would also think about (I will say this with every competitive game) ways to ensure an even playing field between 2 players, either by reducing the role of stats or making matchmaking responsive to that goal.