Tactical combat has been discussed thouroughly, passionately, and repeatedly.  I am surprised a search did not find a reference.  It is not in the development schedule and is basically ruled as not part of the intended GalCiv gameplay.  It is, however, a great subject for starting bitter arguments.

There is some sort of commanders system coming.  I have no clues as to what it will contain.

I don't think they will have a leveling system for both commanders and fleets.  It sounds like they would consider that redundant.

I am glad to see you give some love to pirates.   Most people seem to hate them.  They spice up my early game.  The AI does poorly with them, but I expect that will change someday.

I like the idea of quests.  I would rather see it used to extend and flesh out the campaign.  I would keep the sandbox strictly sandbox.

I have to disagree about "slightly polished up remake".  I suppose it is subjective, but I don't think GalCiv needed a major re-write.  I like what they have done to expand a successful title and set foundations for several years of growth.

The biggest reason for calling it a "slightly polished-up remake" (although that would be an exaggeration) is simply that there aren't many substantive changes from GalCiv2 that have taken effect yet, and the game is already released.  A lot of the major changes (other than graphical, which are great) are a little iffy to me, and a lot of content from GalCiv2 that I like hasn't been included yet.

Also I would like leveling for ships since I doubt most of the game will be run by commanders (that would be overwhelming as crap if you had as many ships wandering around as I usually do).  Leveling ships means the Enterprise doesn't need an admiral in charge of her to learn from combat and surveying anomalies.  It wouldn't be nearly as substantial, but it would have an effect (slow upgrade of health, accuracy, jamming, etc).

Otherwise, I don't really need tactical combat and getting programming for that is a lot more of a task than anyone asking for it seems to realize (if they haven't gotten around to including everything they wanted before release yet, how are they supposed to build a minigame into the game that needs completely new programming?).  Something at least endless space style where you can give your ships priorities and set orders of combat (or even specific orders, such as which ships for your escorts and guardians to focus on protecting and what types of ships for your assaults and interceptors to prioritize if the default targeting isn't worthwhile in the current battle; say interceptors targeting assaults first or even other interceptors).

Also for the OP, giving commanders bonuses for specific weapon types simply doesn't work since in GalCiv, you usually focus all your attention down one line other than your resource-specific weapons; that would make ships with new weaponry simply less effective than your standard ones, and would take away choice rather than create it.  The tech tree already has enough choices that take away variety that I don't want more (i.e. only getting 1/3 of invasion methods or diplomatic treaties available is more choices but less variety).

no point in have tech trees as you can just trade for all your techs anyway and make a profit doing it. Why research anything?

Personally, I hate Pirates.  But since you can turn them off IDK.  But the combat system is kinda weak.  I, personally, wish it was more like Sins of a Solar Empires combat system.  I thought that was very polished.  GalCiv gameplay with Sins combat would be awesome.

You can't do both and do them well. The AI in Total War is, in my experience, a total joke and Sid Meier's AIs tend to just be given cheat resources until they can compete.

Tactical combat will NEVER EVER be in Gal Civ III. 

It was requested that Gal Civ II have 64 bit, DX 11, larger maps, more features...and thus GCIII was born. 

Comparing GC3 with GC2 is moot atm as GC3 is at v1.03/1.1 whereas GC2 was ended at 2.04 with 3 DLC's and multiple patchs I wasn't playing GC2 at the 1.03 or 1.1 so I wouldn't know how they compare side by side but given time and the Devs previous track record and as I've stated before Brad/Frogboy wont want to see GC3 screwed up (hopefully) so I'm prepared to wait and see what happens and before anyone accuses me of being a fanboy I've had a couple of discussions on the forum with frogboy about things that have gone in GC3 that personally I disagree with Multiplayer/Carrier Module limits/LEP - I REALLY want this gone!.

As I've said on another game forum - You can please some of the people,all of the time and all of the people some of the time but not everybody all the time.Patience is a virtue that can be a lesson in life or a lifetime lesson?

 Failing that the masochistic quote - Give a man enough rope!

I understand and agree with te point being made.  However, some comparison seems valid if you are looking at GC3's growth.  For lack of a more comparable standard, GC2 will have to do.  From what I know of comparison techniques you could easily set up categories such as playability, replayability, engagement, challenge, adaptability, and so on.  Then you get some survey method you can trust and you get data for the categories. 

With any care, you could have a fairly good approximation.  If the AI of GC2 ended up at overall value X. the present AI overall value can be assigned aX where a is some fraction either greater or less than 1.  A later similar study would give us a new "a" and we could see growth or not or how much growth.  It all depends on having a measurement system we could

In the meantime, we all have very subjective opinions based on very anecdotal evidence.  Stardock has some interesting stats, but most of us don't seem to believe those.     If there was such a thing as forum consensus, and if that has any validity in the real world, I would say it puts "a" as a value less than one.  There seems to be some disagreement on whether we should be happy that it is growing or unhappy that it needs to grow.  Underneath that, there is a consensus that it is actually growing.  Given how demanding we are, that is encouraging evidence.

Other than that, you are right.  It is all moot at this point.

I have to say that I disagree with what you are saying.  In my opinion everything that was within the final product of GC2 should be in the released product for GC3.  Anything less is a step backwards.

Well, that's what this game does too, but it also lacks tactical play. I haven't seen any evidence that combining tactical and strategic hurts the AI. Both Galciv and Sins have some of the worst AI I've seen. No offense to these great games, but I've received more challenge from the AI in Master of Orion 1 and 2, which is a far older series that has both tactical and strategic play. Its weird because elements of this old game are still miles ahead of what newer games are capable of.

I don't think its too outlandish to expect a tactical element that can compete with its predecessor from 1993. I mean really. I still play the original master of orion and it still holds up just fine, even against all of its modern competition. I just wanna emphasize how substantial a good tactical combat system can be in a space game. I played galciv2 in all its glory, but the entire game was this massive build up to nowhere. After a couple games I uninstalled it in favor of MOO and MOO2. The real game changer was the superior tactical game.

Moving onto the other mentioned games it depends which series we are referring to. Total War has been hit and miss with each addition to the series, but Shogun 2 has a great strategic game along with a great tactical game and decent AI. Still I think its clear that AI has been a weak point across the entire genre no matter the game title and there has been little improvement that I've noticed since the 90's. The best AI has always come from the modders, which boggles my mind since they have less resources and more restrictions.

Million dollar question: Is the game still fun?

Clearly it is fun for some people. For me it feels like cake, half baked, in a different flavor than I was hoping for, without the cherries I was hoping would be on it like GCII and without any frosting.

The strategic elements are A Ok except the AI can't compete. There is no tactical so all you get is the stats of how your ships fared, since you probably are loading out your ships until they are full with hull space there isn't much to be done to find the best fit/ max advantage so its just shallow, as is the AI. The planet management while deeper than GC II is also meaningless. Some buildings have much lower effects than others, and strategies don't really have a galactic effect they have a global or local effect but that is it.

Even the strategic game would be much better if the AI actually understood and respected a border and it acted like a land border on a 2D surface like on a planet as it is a 2D surface in space. However the influence barriers don't make borders. So there are no borders. Even though if influence barriers were borders the game would be better.

Is it a fun implementation? I don't think so. Fun coms from making choices that have consequences which are clear, and fun comes from being able to have multiple pathways to victory, having victories taste sweet requires the ability to lose something you could control the win or loss of. There is no tactical battle to be spoken of so you can't compete to best somthing here. You can watch but its just borin so you skip it and if you look at the stats you might modify a design or you might just build 2 ships which takes the same amount of time and is no real problem because you are ahead on resources anyway. You are ahead anyway because the only real way to win is Production Production Production. You don't need to research ever, as you can trade for those even with the lockouts in immense galaxies with dozens of races, somebody's turn to trae you something is up. You are able to do this because you have the resources because the other angle is getting colonies ASAP is the fastest way to win. More = Better. LEP sucks, but it doesn't matter because you don't suffer revolts or worlds or invasions you just pay a penalty, which you can overcome easily but simply just having more worlds. The AI simply isn't up to the task of putting you in jeopardy, and the non-existent tactical combat means you spend 50% of your time running constructors to starbases which don't maintain borders, and competing with AI that can't keep up and it becomes less about strategy and more about production which of course you can do better on because all production derives from expansion and multiplication of those efforts over time.

Were influence barriers, borders and effectively handled as such by the AI then you'd have actual strategic placement to consider. If the game was structures to handle constructors much more automatically or just remove the upgrading of starbases via constructors all together it would be so much less of a bitch to build.

Feel a lot more like cleaning my room when I was a teenager rather than hitting the next turn in Master of Orion. You tell me does that sound fun?