Synchronous Turn Based Tactical Fighting Game

Hello!

I have been dreaming of this game for a while now, and decided what better time to create it than now and what better forum to get advice and insight from than here!

Concept:
At its heart this game (code named Azurite) is a synchronous turn based, grid based, tactical fighting game. I have always loved final fantasy tactics advanced and fire emblem, but have always lost interest due to the speed of these games, one turn after another. Much like frozen synapse, turns will take place at the same time.

As for units, my goal is to have a large amount of different types of units for different play styles. In many turn based tactics games, special abilities are few and not very interesting imo. I plan on expanding the concept of special abilities to allow for almost anything. Think dota2/league of legends style abilities.

And finally for the battle field. I am hoping for a very interactive and changing play field. Positioning will be key to wining fights and army selection will matter a great deal based on the terrain. Some first thoughts I had on terrain interaction are fires. Trees can be set on fire and this fire will spread.

Tech:
Currently I am using a entity system style architecture written in c++11 inspired by t=machines series of blog posts. Its basically like component based design, except with with another layer of separation between data and behaviour.

For rendering I am using the super minimalist, super awesome next gen graphics engine Horde3d.

Graphics:
I not sure how this game should look. Currently I have been using very simple models with a black outline, bloom, and some (screen space) ambient occlusion for nice lighting. I am searching for a nice simplistic style, inspired by minecraft and ascii games. If anybody has suggestions or ideas to try let me know :D.

Some quick snapshots:

Currently I have no ideas on what to do for unit models (shown as a box in image 1).
Status:
The entire project is open source and can be found here. A warning though, this is a personal project just for fun and as such the code could be in better, more documented shape.

The base framework for the game is more or less done and currently I am starting to polish and flesh out the ability system.

Thanks for your time :D
Any ideas, advice, criticism, and comments will be greatly appreciated.