I listened to an interview on the Explorminate podcast with Brad Wardell, who I think is the chief designer of the game. He made it clear he's adamantly against including tactical combat. He had some principled reason why he doesn't think it would work, though I no longer recall what it was. I'd like to see tactical combat as well, but it sounds like it won't be happening. 

I think issues like whether or not to have tactical combat are central to the question of "What kind of control does GalCiv (whatever version) want the player to have?"

I've always looked at like this: The name of the series is "Galactic Civilizations" not "Galactic Planet" or something similar. Which leads to the concept of "Yes, you can micromanage and min/max down to this level. But below that level you have little or no control over how things resolve."

ForgottenSlayer's point about "if the feature is there, everyone would use it" goes back to the Planetary Wheel that used to exist in GalCiv3. You could tailor the output of any of the planets you owned to a totally, ridiculous degree and a lot of players spent ages moving pointers, etc to get 500 Production Per Turn (or even bigger numbers!) from their Manufacturing World or whereever.

I think Stardock have given players enough "min-maxing"/scopt to make things to their liking to the nth of the nth of the nth degree with things like the Ship Designer. I get the impression from things Frogboy has said over the years that he's well aware that too much min-maxing takes away from the core of what 4X/GalCiv is.

That said, I think there's a lot more scope to GalCiv combat than just "In Turn 25, the Drengin and Terran fought in the Sol system. In Turn 26, all the Drengin were dead." I've advocated being able to set up fleets like the bots in Gladiabots: "If Ship Health > 25% Then Withdraw", "If Nearest Enemy Ship Health > 25% And Nearest Enemy Ship Health > 25% Withdraws Then Ship Pursue" type logic.

I completely agree.  galactic civilizations is just no fun with out ship to ship tactical combat.  masters of Orion II made it work, you would think Gal Civ could make it work 30 years later.  I am playing gal civ III now, and I find it boring without tactical ship to ship combat, and I will completely boycott future Stardock games until they learn what makes games fun to play.

Oh man, Stardock might go bankrupt!  I'm sure they appreciate the warning.

MOO 1&2 had a good working tactical combat system, but boy could you get bogged down if it was a large battle. But I admit, it was cool and fun.

I'm not sure you want that in GC4. The game is just too big. I definitely would not want to have to use it for each battle.

I do miss the Battle Viewer though.  Currently you just make a big fleet and throw it in there. A great thing about GC3&4 was the ability to design your fleet with roles for different ships, and watch how it played out in the Battle viewer. Now there is no battle viewer, and you don't even have tool tips to tell you how each roll acts in combat.  And if you had the tool tips and assigned roles, you still don't know how your selections worked out because no battle viewer.  Except you won or lost or won with one ship remaining. 

Honestly, I don't think GC4 needs tactical combat.  I do think it needs the battle viewer, and tool tips on selection of the ship role. When ever you get ready to save the ship design, you select a role, but there is no explanation of what the role does. 

Tactical combat shouldn't be a thing in Galciv, but what is important that is missing is a way of learning how effective your ship designs are and how your fleets are performing against the enemy. 

I just want something more precise than the almost binary prediction we have now. I know there is RNG involved, but right now it isn't worth engaging in a battle unless it predicts no casualties / total loss because every battle is fight-to-the-death and quality ships are such a scarce resource.

I can see now that there is no room for TC. It's a shame, but the game is obviously aimed at big-scale space-Civ management.

What troubles me is that, so far, GalCIV just a bit... (whispers) boring? I only joined this forum in 2021 but I am an old gaming fart too. A lot of you obviously go back some years as well.

That gives us perspective. I don't know how many of you have read Sid Meier's autobiography but his big thing was that a game must be interesting and trigger that "just one more turn" impulse.

To date I am not getting that.  Which is a problem.

Quite a few people here have suggested some kind of hybrid TC system, battleview, or "TC LITE" - frankly I would welcome almost anything over and above the present offering which is simply lazy.

I am not for a moment suggesting this would suddenly transform the game - but it would help, because at the moment I rarely click on the GalCIV icon

I mean it seems hilariously simple to me the solution of making battles interesting without completely destroying how long it takes to play a turn, and making it extremely punishing for not fighting battles yourself.

Have them be automatically resolved, but allowed the player to fly one of the spaceships in the battle. So a player might tip a close battle to a win. You don't get the problem of battles taking too long, since the simulated battles never really last more than 60s, and you get a really charming arcade style moment of combat, commanding your survey ship you've have since turn 1 in a battle vs space aliens.

Really what SD needs to do is make two games..

Galactic Civ 4 and leave the tactics out....   It is a civ builder game not a combat driven game...


and then Galactic Tactics where the majority of the game is tactical combat, getting research from tactical combat, that lets you build better ships... to do better tactical combat.   Then people who really really really want the tactical combat can be pointed to a game of tactical combat.

Some kind of combat tactics is all I have been asking for from the get go, so I quite agree. Of course it's a sprawling 4X civ-building game but (as with any game in that genre) combat plays an important role (how else do you deal with the Drengin?)

Rock paper scissors is not good enough.

I think I would buy "Galactic Tactics" if it were ever produced   

I agree. This game is much too large to have MOO style tactical combat.  I remember spending an hour or more on one battle in MOO1/ if I had a clash of large fleets.

Two things guaranteed on Gal Civ forums at least all the way back to Gacl Civ II days:

1) People asking/begging/rationalizing the need for tactical combat, at least once every couple months.

2) Gal Civ creators saying no there will not be tactical combat, and delivering on exactly that.

Happy Thursday!