Suggestion: Battles

Cool! I would love to see more tactical battle planning, so long as economic micromanagement can be reduced significantly. As far as that is concerned I would like to see more macroeconomic policy tools and fewer "build this factory on this tile" tools.

Not sure that I fully agree with your suggestion, but I do strongly agree they need to do more in GC3, but haven't considered fully what  iwould like to see.

I support the idea of Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3 battles system.
Quick battles, lot of possibilities, lot of fun.

I even suggest to extend it to the invasion ground combats.

Yes, I want to be able to send 50 legions of Sardaukar to Arrakis

Sounds cool but I honestly don't see it happening for release, unless they have already planned on doing something similar to what you propose. Maybe for an expansion though?

I would like to see ground battles played out stratigicly over multiple turns on the hex based planet maps e.g. troop movements, zone capture that sort of thing.

Anything that is tactical is welcome be me

Perhaps the 3D map idea suggested previously could form a part of this. It is unrealistic in terms of tactical planning to ignore the fact that planets are indeed spherical. Furthermore, the 3D map would allow for planets of a different radius to be used; for example, heavy gravity planets could be larger than normal planets and could have degrees of heavy gravity rather than just plain "heavy gravity"

We're talked about Tactical Combat before here.

There's a couple of major drawbacks:

(1) Assuming that it's a turn-based Tactical Combat (e.g. "chess with spaceships!"), resolving a single combat can be VERY time consuming. So time-consuming, in fact, that it's worthless for multiplayer. All multiplayer games will have to have auto-resolve turned on, and bypass TBTC completely.

(2) A basic TBTC setup isn't terribly hard to implement, but that's unlikely to satisfy the people who really want a TBTC thing in the first place. As your wishlist shows, people want a whole bunch of additional "realism" features, and that's a whole lot more coding and and graphic work to take into account.  Don't forget, you have to have all those "realism" features added into the Auto-Resolve portion too, otherwise, AutoResolve Combat and Manual TBTC modes produce radically different outcomes, and that's something that will *very* much piss off the userbase.

(3) An AI which will fight effectively in a TBTC is VERY difficult to write. The AI for the AutoResolve combat system isn't much more than a number cruncher, and doesn't really need to take into account much more.  An AI for a TBTC needs to be *at least* as complex as a good Chess program.  That's several orders of magnitude different in effort.

(4) If you get into 3D combat desires, well, that's virtually an entirely different game wrapped inside of a 4X.  Think about the effort it takes to write something like Homeworld, then imagine having to implement maybe 50% of that to get the kind of 3D TBTC people want. 

Basically, it's not simple to add. I could see it being a future Expansion Pack (it's far too complex for DLC) and people having to cough up $25 for it.

But the bottom line is that it's not an intrinsic need for a 4X to have a TC mode.  Plenty of people will buy GC3 without the TC feature, which means it's not necessary for the initial version. More people would buy it WITH the TC mode, but I'm pretty sure it's not economical to wait for TC to be implemented and delay the whole game to get that extra audience, especially since most of them will buy GC3 WITHOUT the TC mode, and separately buy a TC pack later.

Money, dear boy, is a factor.

(HoMaM3 isn't a 4x, and Civ 5 doesn't have any sort of TC mode - the bonuses are for position and such, but the combat resolves just as GC does it)

For the reasons discussed in the other thread on using a 3D solid to show the Planet View instead of the 2D map, a 3D globe is a very bad interface/UI.

A 2D map can get you everything you want - larger planets can simply be shown by using a flat map with more hexes.  Eg. rather than a 5x9, show a 6x12 or 4x6 or whatever.  Or heck, do what we do now - the max size of the planet map is 5x9, but you only fill in significantly fewer number of hexes than that, so the different "size" of the planet can be shown already.  E.g. a "small" planet can be represented by a 3x4 matrix (not all filled in), a "medium" on a 4x6 matrix, a "large" on a 5x7 matrix, and a "huge" on a 5x9 matrix, all superimposed on the graphic space we already have.

Tactical considerations work just as well on a flat map done properly - a simple projection map gives you everything you need in terms of spacial positioning, distance, etc.

And I'd love to get into more sophisticated "rating" of planets by various characteristics, but that's probably for an Expansion Pack to add in. I don't think it would be very hard, and we've already had discussions around changing how terraforming and individual races deal with planetary types; e.g. differently than the flat 0/50/100% model used for all right now. 

Tactical combat draws in people who would not play otherwise, considering how small the maket for TBSs is, it should be well worth whatever the cost.

not many people use MP anyway, not as many as would use TC as I've been lead to believe, not with the empty lobby, people like to play by themselves most of the time.

I would love it as a expansion, and I hope they realize the opportunity to have more happy/new fans and make some money$

I find it nice how you are stating facts. But odd how the demand for a "real" tactical combat TBS has been so high and yet untouched. TBSs are alot of boring screens to alot of people and RTSs are just about non stop fighting with little else. I really hope SD takes TC and TBS eventually, me and my friends have always wanted such a thing.

Again, thank (sgiving) you trims2u for impartial post.

DARCA

I want a game with tactical combat. It would be fun.

Well, considering that on a round map one would be able to wrap around the planet, I don't think that a flat map would be able to take into account this real-life consideration.