For me at least I don't care for 'tactical' combat per se (I'm the God-Emperor! If I'm close enough to personally guide combat I'm close enough to have a lifechanging hyperfusion experience.), but I would like a system for giving standing orders that affected the way automated combat proceeded. Being able to give proper orders, that defenseless ships will fall back, battleships will engage, attempt to salvage a limping retreat, et al.

*THAT* I would like.

Jonnan

Brad and the devs need to remember this article by Brad:

http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/88762

Specifically this:  "...But Galactic Civilizations has always been a strategic game.  It's never been a game about tactics.  It's literally a clash of civilizations.  You're building a civilization and you want to see how it is able to compete against other civilizations."

Please NO tactical battles in GC3...!    

I disagree very strongly that having tactical battles would detract from the game.

I liked GC2 a lot, but I think it would have been a lot funner had their been a tactical battle option. MOO2 was one of my most favorite games ever and I have yet to find a space based game that does tactical battles like they did. Sure it always made more sense to fight than autoresolve, but I think that there is a way to have both in.

If GC3 doesn't have tactical battles I don't know if I'll get it TBH.

Okay, let's say for sake of argument that the choice was between HD-quality space battles and tactical combat.  Now, I can see myself becoming tired of using tactic C to beat tactic A, but I can't say the same for watching brilliantly-rendered ships shooting at each other.  Especially when the ships you go up against may have different weapons, may choose different angles of attack, and so on.  You're not going to be able to sit and enjoy the battle if you're pausing and giving your ships new orders every five seconds.

As I said above and have said before in previous threads on this subject, SEIV allows for pre-scripted choices that do not change in a battle, and certainly not turn-by-turn.

One can establish targeting priorities, formations, preferred firing ranges, etc. and the battle proceeds without interruption to completion.

For example, say one chose to research missiles.  Those might allow greater ranged fire than beams, so the orders could be to try to hold open the range to near the max.

Choices of that sort would still be no less strategic than the current game that lets you create, manage, and disband fleets before each battle and yet allow for a much richer and deeper combat section than simply trying to have weapons the enemy lacks the best defence for while trying to have the right defense tech for the enemies' weapons.

I feel the same way. As I've said I'm not "for" or "against" tactical battles in a vacuum - as mentioned, I don't feel they're appropriate for GalCiv specifically, not 4x in general - but I always enjoy "fleet strategies" like this. I am 100% for this as a feature in GalCiv 3.

I'll always be "Pro-Choice", so you won't hear me complaining if tactics are implemented provided there is a choice to turn them off.

I do, however, miss the ability to subdue and board an enemy ship rather than simply destroying it.  At least let me sift through the rubble after the battle is over and gather whatever intelligence, compnonent(s) and or new technologies that might be there to be found.

Then again, maybe my attack isn't an attack at all.  Perhaps I'm just making a show of force to chase the intruders out of my span of influence.  But that could've been handled even easier if there was ship to ship communication...

I already use fleet tactics before I engage the enemy.  I don't need individual ship by ship tactics; as such my strategies are my tactics.

SK

Small ships may be able to outmaneuver the guns of large ships for a little while, but not forever.  The advantage of a large ship is being able to have enough guns pointing in enough directions that a shocking hit-to-miss ratio will still allow it to kill smaller ships.  It can also afford to cram in enough defences that in a given round of combat, those smaller ships can barely get the defences down on their own, never mind graze the hull.

Besides, even with such an advantage, small ships will still be at a disadvantage so long as the larger ship is escorted by small ships, or supported by other large ships.  If that's all it takes to nullify the advantage that small ships have, the only time they will be able to press their advantage is against an enemy whose fleets have already been weakened to the point where the large ships have no escorts or support.

I think that the problem with GalCiv is that smaller ships become very cost-ineffective in the later stages of the game.  For example, you tend to see the AI fleeting up frigates rather than fighters when they have enough available and the logistics to make it happen.  If you cram as many weapons as you can onto fighters, they tend to get shot at and blown to bits very early in in combat.  If you put just one or two weapon modules onto a fighter, then chances are you could make a frigate or battleship that does the work of many such fighters, for less bc.

To make smaller ships to be cost-effective later in the game you could make improved fighter hulls available when new hulls are made available by research.  At the moment smaller ships do benefit slightly from improved hitpoints as you progress along the tech tree, but nothing else about them really changes - you can still only load as many modules on them as your miniaturization research allows, the basic hull still costs the same to make, and the logistics required to fleet them remains the same.  The only up-side about fighters is that you can crank them out in a hurry, assuming you don't cram with expensive components.

@ elestan.

good points. regardless of whether or not we'd want such mechanics in battles, it is my experience that stardock so far tend to prefer incredibly simplified (almost suffocatingly simple) battle mechanics (elemental is another great example of this). a system with the variables you describe sounds like EVE levels of complexity (though even that doesn't have arcs of fire), but even in that game a lot of the variables you describe have optimal behaviour solutions that can be calculated mathematically (and there are third party tools people use to do just that). and asking a player "can you be bothered to calc this?" is not a fun strategic choice.

while it is possible to design a system complicated enough to make space battles require real thought, i believe it would have to be more complicated than most people would enjoy, or than stardock would be willing to implement.

this is what leads me to believe that simply adding a few more stats and improving the need to think about fleet composition is by far and away the best compromise solution, because it will increase strategy without forcing tactical battles on people.

oooooo... Is that an euphemism?

I mean, I just experienced THIS: [warstory]

"It was in the olden days, when 1 ATK - 0 DEF - 3 MOVE fighters were significant assets, when the world was flat, and the Internet was known as the Horseless Pony Express, when...

My 'fleet' of two of these decided to attack a Drengin fighter which was basically the same (1A-0D-2M) as mine, and both started to 'show him the light', to put it mildly. He returned fire and seemed a bit lucky, scoring as well as I did despite his 1-2 disadvantage in numbers. So one of my fighters was around 5/10, just like his one.

Then, one of my fighters disengaged! It moved away out of laser range, leaving my other fighter at the Drengin's 'mercy.' The bad part is, that the perfect 10/10 fighter was the one who wimped out. :bummer:

Both fighters survived the encounter, but it was a close one. One 2/10 and one 9/10.

[/warstory]

 It would have been nice if the damaged fighter had disengaged, leaving two options to the Drengin: either keep up with the fleeing fighter and get pummeled by the other, or engaging the undamaged one.

I saw a different Drengin design earlier, a small (0A-1D) ship. I thought, "That thing is so useless, useless, yah00seless!" But on a second thought, what if my undamaged fighter had fled in a 2-on-2 and the damaged one had wasted its turns on the unarmed Drengin? That would have been a very humilliating defeat, indeed.

The bottom line is, if there is a maximum range, the game should use it a bit more intelligently, and not let an undamaged fighter loiter around out of range, while its brother is being shot at. If there is no tac combat in GCIII, I'd ask Stardock to remove the max range either, or at least to improve the AI so that all ships stay within range of the enemy the AI picked to shoot at. Whether the Ai choice is good or not, it would at least be better than what it does now.

Or is there a way to mod max weapon range? I could mod them to a really big number then, say, 10x the current value.

~Beast

The whole problem with making tactical combat "optional" is, again, the issue of balance. In almost every game where this is possible you will do better by playing out a battle in tactical combat then by letting the AI auto-manage it. There isn't always a huge difference, but playing out any battle not overwhelmingly stacked in your favor is usually the correct choice, which means that it's not really so "optional" after all.

another problem I have with implementing tactical battles, is that because they happen on a 2d map/plane, even if the battles are automatically fought, it will be on a 2d plane and we will lose the cool 3D combat viewer battles.  It will be like watching a checkers game play itself out.

It's different now though, because there aren't any tactical battles.  So the AI is much better at accurately calculating who would win just based on numbers.  The combat we watch in GC2 is just cosmetic (which is fine by me).