Celebrim
Legend
I was discussing tactics with a young gamer of about fourteen (he had a CCG background and was trying out a miniatures wargame, 25mm figs on an open tabletop) at a convention recently who had the same problem, in that if a game didn't have the tactics spelled out as a mechanical option he was confused by the game. That's one of the areas where I think 4E shows some strength, in spelling things out for players who might not be as quick to develop tactics on their own.
It's very simple at almost any level of the game to be given a set of cards with your character and be able to thumb through them or lay them out and just point to the option that gives you to combination of damage and movement that suits a given situation. The "powers" system parcels tactics into focused and digestable units to avoid confusion during play.
I certainly don't disagree that 4e has strived hard (and with a measure of success) at making tactical combat the centerpeice of its gameplay. I also agree that 4e achieved some success in its goal of being more approachable for a novice. But, yeah, this approach to what is meant by 'tactics' isn't out of wargaming. If you look at a game like De Bellis Antiquitatis or any of its iterations, which I think can be taken as a traditional tactical wargame, the playing peices don't have arrays of different powers.
If you look at war itself, you basic infantryman's tactics devolve down to move somewhere (or not) and shoot at something (or not). At a stretch you might have 'throw a grenade' as an encounter power, but tactics are built out of interactions with the terrain and with the opposing force - not out of combinations of choices between powers.
If you look at sports that are very tactical like basketball, football, rugby and soccer, tactics are built up out of very limited repertoires of legal moves. They are primarily about how players move relative to each other to achieve local concentration of force through surprise and deception.
And yeah, I agree that 4e has had some success at achieving its goal of making the game more accessible to novices.
I also can't help but notice that the conversation is veering toward, "4e is a good gaming system and hears why" I don't even at this point remember how we got off on a discussion of what was meant by tactics (I fuzzily remember it having something to do with people advancing the claim that 4e is much more fun than that boring old game 1e), but all I was trying to say down this thread was that there are aspects of how each D&D system plays out at a tactical level that I like and I sometimes wish I could combine the best parts of each in a way that didn't result in an unplayably complicated game.