Please allow retreating in tactical battles.

Opposed, for reasons stated in other threads which I don't feel like repeating.

Yeah, there's a lot of very good mechanical justifications for not allowing fleets to retreat. While I suspect most of those can be overcome (Director's tactical speed approach, with significant elaboration, would address a fair number), you'd need more reasons as to why it's worth it.

Some things that would need to change before retreat is even worth discussing:

1) Ship speeds need to be nerfed to hell and back. Retreat cannot work in a game where some units can move 50+ tiles in a turn. Personally, I think that a speed limit of 12 tiles/turn would be a good move for the game anyway, and would make the possibility of retreat worth talking about; as it stands, the very concept of allowing it would be game-breaking.

2) Some means to intercept when it's not your turn would need to be included. Otherwise, Retreat will simply make the same battle happen over and over again until someone runs out of moves. There will be no actual change in the result; I'm just being forced to attack you a dozen times to achieve it.

3) Possibly implementing halt-on-attack. I'll expand on this one a bit more, since I know most players will absolutely hate the idea, but actually, I think this would be a good thing for the game anyway.

Presently, the AI does this anyway, so moving after attacking is actually just a massive advantage for the player. With the insane movement rates players are able to achieve on their ships, it's not uncommon for a mid-to-late fleet to be able to clear out a dozen or more enemy fleets on the first turn of a war, and to withdraw to safety afterwards. This, quite simply, breaks the game.

Halt-on-attack would give us several key improvements:

1) it would make huge engine stacking much, much less valuable. Why bother building a warship with 50 moves when half of the time, half those engines are doing nothing? I'm just making a less-useful warship compared to the lumbering 5-move-per-turn monster with twice my firepower.

2) It would slow down warfare and make it actually take time to best even a small enemy. A turn is 1 week, ffs. It takes me less time to cripple a multi-star system empire than it takes for the average French surrender. I have been in pub brawls that have lasted longer than interstellar conflicts do in GC3 right now.

3) Being able to control space would begin to matter. If I have a fleet that gets half-wrecked in combat, I presently just use the remaining 12+ moves to run away back to reinforcements. My supply lines are basically safe, because I just fly round anyone getting in the way with no penalties. But if my front lines were forced to actually remain on the front lines, being able to bring reinforcements right up to them would matter, and being able to keep a reasonable force in place to protect damaged units would become a thing. 

4) It makes more sense anyway. We're travelling vast distances at multiple-times light speed. Again, every turn is 1 week. It takes time to stop and fight a massive naval engagement. In real life, engagements often takes days, weeks or even months. If we even just say that it takes 1 day to fight and win a space ship battle, that still amounts of 1/7th of your ship's movement; with a 50+ move ship that should be 7 or 8 tiles. This is without taking into account regrouping the fleet, recovering fighters, patching up minor damage etc. Hell, just losing 1 turn to 

These all combine to severely reduce the massive advantage that attackers presently enjoy and make attacking require some actual tactical thought. And it might make retreating actually have some point rather than just being an invitation to micro-hell. 1 attempted retreat per turn permitted, success based on some mechanic (I like the tactical speed idea), if it fails then combat happens, if it succeeds then the attacker loses their turn and the defender moves away 1 random hex . 

This might give us something resembling a strategic war game, rather than the present system, which more resembles a brawl in a playground.

Excellent points and ideas naselus

.  Sure wish SD would comment,  we know more about upcoming invasion changes than we do fixing some fundamental game issues

I don't like the idea of retreating. It reminds me too much of Civ V where you have to battle an enemy unit several times before one wins. A retreat mechanic will have the same effect for GC III.

So? That`s warfare- that`s how war works. War is repetitive. Shoot-kill-shoot-kill- repeat. A possible retreat adds an extra tactical option. Also, there are many ways a retreat can be stopped. Have faster ships. have a tech that knocks out the ships engine. I`m certain the Devs can think of even more ways to make retreat not always guaranteed. But as it is now, it`s just lazy- no one cares about living or saving what they have.

I wish you guys would think first before knee-jerk reacting `No`.

It may be more realistic, but when playing a game, I personally value fun and engagement over realism.

BTW, opinions that differ from yours are not automatically knee jerk reactions.

How about only ships with higher tactical speed and more moves can retreat? Meaning slower ships in a fleet are stuck. Also, neither side can retreat for a certain amount of time after the battle starts. This would actually make stacking more engines better, and actually give a use to having more tactical speed without heavily stacking them.

At the risk of being called a childish knee jerk, thank you, but no thank you.  I won't try to convince anyone and the discussion points have already been made in this thread and others, but I really had to reject the negative descriptions of those who disagree with the OP.  If I hadn't already thought about it a lot and made up my mind, I would probably change it to no thank you just for the opportunity to disagree with someone who wants to call me names for it.

So, if you do get off calling people names, go right ahead...

I would actually be OK with retreating if it could happen after a certain number of combat rounds. Would work better if ships spread out their fire more instead of everyone piling onto a single target.

The 'victory or death' mechanic does operate well to limit the 'hunt and chase and hunt and chase' whack-a-mole that could otherwise result, but... a more reasonable combat system that didn't involve everyone piling into a melee in the middle could give outcomes that didn't involve every ship on one side getting killed.

That could work. I welcome positive ideas like this.

Retreating should definitely be an option, although it should be a difficult process and be some thing you must gear your fleets towards. I think one decent solution is:

1) allow retreating at any time in a battle when the fight becomes substantially one-sided (based on fleet stats). Ie once a fleet reaches over double the power of another. I don't think it matters whether a fleet initiates a retreat automatically or on a players command.

2) Early on in either the military or engineering trees, implement a new technology named something like "subspace jammer", which produces a warp-jamming module.

3) once a retreat is initiated, all ships of the retreating player get a new primary objective - initiate a jump to hyperspace. This should probably take an amount of time - maybe 10-20s? Once this time limit is reached the ship leaves the battle and is placed in the nearest occupyable hex. Part of their new primary objective is to put distance between their ship and all others - essentially they flee.

4) when in range, a ship with a warp jamming module above continually resets the timer of the fleeing ship every second. 

Essentially this means that a faster ship (sublight - aka thrusters) with a warp jammer chasing a slower ship will prevent it from fleeing so long as it remains alive.

I think this would really change the dynamics of fights - thrusters would become much more valuable as they would improve a fleeing ships chances of escape, and allow for specialist pursuit ships. As smaller ships get inherent speed boosts, this would be great for encouraging fleet diversity, rather than just spamming huge ships. Small ships would become very valuable for running down fleeing enemies.

It would also open up a whole new dynamic in the tech trees - better warp jammers (longer range), maybe a counter tech or warp engines that resist jamming, military starbase auras that reduce ability for opposing ships to flee, cloaking (and sensor counter tech) to allow for slipping away from pursuers, etc. Probably would need to give colony ships and transports an inherent negative speed modifyer.

Generally this games combat is too 1 dimensional - with simple scissors paper rock mechanics. Things like this spice up combat a little and allow real fleet specialisation - hit and run fleets, guerilla warfare, etc.

I generally think sensors, jammers, cloaking, sublight thrusters, etc should have a much more important role in combat then they currently do.