pancakejoe: A bullet to the chest from a 3 year old hurts just as much as a veteran soldier, however, what separates these two is the ability to maintain concentrated fire.
In turn-based combat I apply real-world logic to explain these mechanics. Just because the "turn" is slow, doesn't mean the implementation of your action in the world of the game is slow. By this I mean:
Just because everyone is "standing around waiting for you to shoot them in the face" doesn't mean that is how it actually is coming across in the game-world logic. It's all "active", targets are in motion, you don't have all day to pull the trigger (even though you actually do in reality, in the game, it's not like they're standing around going "man, his shot is taking forever to get off), things are happening that cause these mechanics.
A 3-year old would have a harder time picking up the gun, loading it, cocking it, aiming it steadily, and even then, granted they "succeed" in getting all of that done, they have to contend with their target who is most likely rushing at them screaming "NOO" and intimidating them to a point where they can't aim steady or effectively hit a human 3 feet in front of their face. It makes sense, to me/I seek out ways for it to make sense.
I love your ideas though, a pool of APs for the team to use is great. You could even choose to "break up" the action, instead of each turn resetting the entire pool, you could say "execute now", allow your turn to unfold as far as you've planned, which also allows the AI to perform a certain amount of moves (ratio to how much of the AP pool you've used so far) and then continue on with the turn.
Looking forward to hearing more.
I will also say that I'm a fan of real-time NO pause combat, but NOT fast-action-oriented either. Games that operate like an MMO does, where you have timers and time to choose which skills and spells to use during the actual fight, spaced out in a way that makes the action engaging and player-skill based with no need for twitch (good timing, yes, twitch-ability, no) but no pausing either. Different weapons have different speeds of executing, ability and skill timers, etc.