I wrote a post with possible options for BE mechanics on the previous page, I think you missed it. It's just some decent ideas from various games that I played before.
I have 50 posts per page setting so I did not miss the post

Other than that, it still possible to make something like this, I personally think that it will be easier to code. It has rows too, and you can even move characters between those 8 positions below during battle. There is also a list of actions on the right side (order depends on agility).
It's not easier to code, it's exactly the same in coding difficulty.
Problem is that I dislike this setup, for some reason I always thought of it as inferior to what we've use in Jake's BE.
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Otherwise I am really beginning to appreciate Jake's BE, there are too many options and things both small and large to consider, far more than I've imagined. Still I am leaning in favor of our own BE setup so we can have exactly what we want with the minimum effort. Maybe even in the future we can add moving about engine as well.
I want it to look more or less the same as Jake's BE, at least that's what I am working forwards to at the moment. With better effects and more options obviously.
Ok, so Your suggestions:
Now let's talk about BE, or rather what kind of options we could use there to make it more interesting.
- Rows. That's a classic FF feature that may or may not exist in some parts.
It has who variations:
1) Characters in the back row deal two times less damage with weapons, but receive two times less damage from weapons too. Thus it is for mages only.
2) In the back row you can only use ranged weapons (or magic) and can only be attacked by ranged weapons (or magic) too as long as the front row is not dead.
1) I want new BE to work in this way but for the sake of the future, we should set range for combat items from 1 - 6. Maybe in a few years I can come up with a kickass move about design as well. It's not that much harder but it requires a lot of work in terms of resources.
2) Maybe... other option if to allow "active skills" like shielding. I think that my option is better but prolly harder to work with.
- Spells and mp. In many games they don't use mp as a number, they use it as a set of castings. Like, at level 30 you can cast two lvl 3 spells, three lvl 2 spells and five lvl one spells per day.
Of course magic is more powerful there to be useful enough.
Sounds complicated, we\re not going to mess with it now but we could add levels to spells (as in character below level x cannot learn the given spell).
- AP, action points. Right now we use another FF system with those bars. There are games where characters use AP in battle, and we already have AP!
Every turn you get all AP you have and can spend them on combat actions like attack. The more powerful skill you want to use, the more AP it needs.
I conciser this to be a bad idea, AP in PyTFall are not the same as they are in those games + it adds sh!tty and confusing logic to the battle (at least it's the way I see it now).
- In some games you can change active party members during combat, not 100% freely of course. Like, 3 active party members and 2 reserve ones.
This is just logic. I dislike the idea for the initial version. Also I do not wish to mess with 3 member team logic either. Problem is that this is not an RPG game where BE gets half the job done so we can't afford this kind of stuff.
- Skills for weapons (maybe close/ranged) and magic, like our sex skills.
If you've meant seduction/confusion skills, that I am all for it. Multiple skills for the weapons I cannot see at the moment but maybe it will work.