Tactics are important for keeping the AI from doing stupid things.
In the early game, it's best to just set party members to the generic presets they give you, like setting Allistair to Defender, Wynne to Healer, etc. But later on, when you've trained some of your party in talents that are outside the presets, you'll need to create your own, especially for the mages.
The presets themselves aren't that bad, especially if you set the person to auto-level (the game picks skills based off the tactics preset you set). But on harder difficulties, most people tailor the teams more precisely than what the generic stuff offers.
Tactics is also helpful when setting up ambushes. Using doors or narrow spots for range attacks (using repulsion glyph), you can setup mages and archers to Ranged and make sure your tank is set to Defense. Some places it's incredibly beneficial to do this, especially in the dwarf campaign and Denerim.
Later in the game, it's best to setup focus fire tactics too, so you take down enemies faster. I typically setup my offensive mage to pick the weakest enemy for damage spells after paralysing/horror/etc. the biggest enemy. The defensive/healer mage can be set to attack the same guys as the offensive mage, and you can setup yourself to help the tank. I've found it's always best to kill off the easy enemies first. Later on, you can sometimes kill more than one at a time using area effect combination (fireball, blizzard+stonefist, nightmare+walking bomb, etc.)
Anyway, it get's complicated only because it's helpful. You could easily play the entire game without touching tactics on normal difficulty, but you'd probably die a lot more often.
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Originally Posted by Christmas
Maynard - The WCS Guy 
