For a game which touts the its (excellent) ship designer, and with the level of detail devoted to ship classes, upgrades, and technology to then gloss over the actual tactical combat is a travesty in my opinion.

All I can say is I was really enjoying the other elements of the game, but I find the battle engagements to be unsatisfying and are wearing on my interest in the game.

Also, just because something has always been a certain way doesn't mean it isn't time to evolve. I mean GalCiv was always a square grid too, but they fixed that, and the game is vastly superior for it.

-Mettius

Maybe, but remember this is a TBS game, not RTS. If I wanted an RTS game I'd buy one.

To me the "hands off" tactical battle resolver is an attraction. Degenerating that into a clickfest is just bad design because there are better real-time space simulator games that let you play the captain. And no, "it would be optional" isn't the answer because if the manual commands gave you an advantage then you are compelled to use them or you lose that advantage, and if they didn't give you an advantage then there's no point in having them.

The current automatic tactical battle is a much more elegant and sophisticated way of doing it. You design your ships and assign them their roles, point them towards the enemy, and let your captains loose to do or die as they may. Think of it this way: You are the commander-in-chief and that means you don't pilot the ships or make the tactical calls, nor should you. It's a different kind of challenge.

There's tons of shootemups in the market but very few good strategical simulation games.

Sure, your admirals and captains ought to have a bit more tactical sense but the solution to that is to give them more tactical sense, not handing you the helm. Mind you, I'm not even against retreat being a possible outcome of the battle. Might even be interesting. What I'm against, however, is there being a button labeled "retreat". Your admiral should be the one who calls it, not the player.

After all, he's there fighting that enemy with all the local knowledge while you are sitting in your Oval Office equivalent. Politicians messing with tactical field decisions isn't that popular with the troops so let the man do his job.

This. I don't really think we need manual combat controls or a retreat option. But I would love to see some sort of basic crew and officer management being implemented. Something like the ship's power is modified by the % of it's crew compliment it has, while officers give special bonuses (Captains giving +1 tactical repair or +5 beam range or faster reload for the ship their on; maybe Admirals who give fleet-wide bonuses).  That's in keeping with the whole commander-in-chief thing.

I understand the wish to make the battle system more interesting and I also believe that this can be done without implementing tactical combat. An example are the roles in combat, the player can assign to ships.

However, I think the retreat as described would bring more negatives to the game than positives. Sure, it would be better for immersion and it would be neat if there is a chance for weaker ships to survive. But this also means a lot of extra micromanagement and that it takes more turns to destroy even weak fleets. Also this opens many problems with the retreating ships and what is fair for them to be able to do - like, should a retreating transporter be able to invade?

So I guess my question is: Stepping up from a single battle to look at the big picture, that is maybe hundreds of battles during a game - does the retreat really bring enough fun to the game to warrant the negative aspects?

To be clear, I don't want RTS. (I pretty much despise RTS). I'm also peachy fine without manual tactical combat. But the current state of the battles isn't very good or satisfying as is.

To be honest, I'm not even sure how retreat would work.

The majority of combats where retreat happens are likely to be on the enemy turn, since I'm not likely to press an attack without overwhelming superiority. So what happens? Do you move 1 space back? They can just attack again. And really, this would become very irritating very quickly - I don't mind the tactical combat as it stands (the ship roles actually can make it quite cool, though it desperately needs signposting more in the game since I'm fairly sure 90% of players have no idea what roles do), but fighting the same fight 19 times per turn to push a transport back out of range of a planet would be intolerable.

I actually would quite like to see ZoC for units introduced, though. GC3 maps can be so big, and ships so fast, that fleets need to be able to exert some degree of influence over the space they occupy.

This.  Each person has that just one thing that bothers them, or is missing, or isn't like some other game they like.  The cumulative message from these forum threads is "Change everything!".  It is almost as if actually liking GalCiv is somehow wrong in and of itself.  You become anti-change or anti-evolution, or a video game Luddite opposing new technology.  (a bizarre concept at best)  I appreciate different people having different ideas.  I wish there were a way to say no thank you to ideas without feeing attacked for it and without being perceived as attacking anyone.

Risk is a TBS that has the ability to stop in mid attack.  I like that in Risk.  GalCiv has a kill or die attack paradigm.  I like that in GalCiv.  So, no thank you to retreats.

Frankly, I'm mostly fine with how it currently works.  The existing Roles and differences in speed/range are taken into account, though it's a little hard to see then in the BattleViewer.

At best, I'd like a SINGLE pre-battle option to select which dictates basic tactics:   I.e., when a battle is initiated, you get the "accept battle" screen with three choices:

1. Aggressive tactics
2. Balanced
3. Defensive

The first bumps up your attack (say 15%) at the cost of defense (say double that, or -30%).

The second leaves everything as is.

The third is the inverse of the first.

This could apply to jamming or evasive values, too.  Basically, I want just a simple, one-time button to govern the whole thing.

Unfortunately not till February. I think you are thinking of BE: Rising Tide which is coming out in October.

Guys, I think that we all can think of ways to improve this combat system.  The boat may have sailed however, or the shuttlecraft departed already, as such tweaks would shake up a major proportion of the entire game.  Let's hope enough of you find it exciting as it is now.  (IMO, I think it's needless to say that if retreat options are granted, then items like fighters would be tweaked appropriately.)

Like I might want to see an IN-GAME thorough tutorial explaining and demonstrating how ship roles (assault, guardian, interceptor, etc) affect targeting. What's the decision tree, when your "primary target" has exactly the defense type that blocks 80% of your attacks, while a juicy small hull-size mosquito is right nearby, begging as it were to be blowed up?

there's bound to be people out there who'd love to see the 'logistics' mechanism be further pushed with attacks from adjacent hexes by two fleets being made possible...  Again: something that, if it was not already in the game by now, would probably need to be saved until a future title.

retreat wont work and imo not needed and would be too annoying. What would be interesting and add a little bit of a retreat/reevaluate feel is if large fleet battles didn't result in 1 fleet always 100% being destroyed. I know that is the GC and they would never change that. But it is a neat idea to maybe have a large fight take 2 two turns resolve so there are more decisions and the possibility to move/run etc if you are taking losses etc. As i said it will never happen but i think it would spice up the battle and fleet decisions if you cannot just run around and 1 shot every fleet. And also you would need to have any battle consume all your moves for that turn. Would add more strat to the current game which is just build super fleets with a lot of moves and mop everything up.