For me at least I don't care for 'tactical' combat per se (I'm the God-Emperor! If I'm close enough to personally guide combat I'm close enough to have a lifechanging hyperfusion experience.), but I would like a system for giving standing orders that affected the way automated combat proceeded. Being able to give proper orders, that defenseless ships will fall back, battleships will engage, attempt to salvage a limping retreat, et al.

*THAT* I would like.

Jonnan

I think that is what SEIV did.

That is, one could choose to play with turn-by-turn tactical control of battles, but one could also have them played out according to pre-scripted preferences.  These would be like standing orders one might issue to admirals.  For examples, ships should engage at max range, ships should fire at the strongest ships first, ships should attempt to capture weaponless ships.  Others included specific formation directives, like battle line or blunt wedge.

Those are the tactical control level that I would like, as they can also be pre-scripted for AIs by Modders.

I remember the first large battle I played against a mod race in SEIV.  The modder had scripted the fleet to loose a tremendous max range missile volley right out of the Harrington novels.  I had organized my research around a different weapon type that was stronger but only at somewhat lower ranges.  My point defense was smashed aside as my fleet tried to get within range and the result was gorgeously grim!  I promptly went onto the SEIV boards to congratulate the guy.

Brad and the devs need to remember this article by Brad:

http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/88762

Specifically this:  "...But Galactic Civilizations has always been a strategic game.  It's never been a game about tactics.  It's literally a clash of civilizations.  You're building a civilization and you want to see how it is able to compete against other civilizations."

Please NO tactical battles in GC3...!    

From the ACME Buggy Whip official history (the company shut down in 1922):

"We make buggy whips and buggy whips only."

I disagree very strongly that having tactical battles would detract from the game.

I liked GC2 a lot, but I think it would have been a lot funner had their been a tactical battle option. MOO2 was one of my most favorite games ever and I have yet to find a space based game that does tactical battles like they did. Sure it always made more sense to fight than autoresolve, but I think that there is a way to have both in.

If GC3 doesn't have tactical battles I don't know if I'll get it TBH.

+1 to No Tactical battles.

Okay, let's say for sake of argument that the choice was between HD-quality space battles and tactical combat.  Now, I can see myself becoming tired of using tactic C to beat tactic A, but I can't say the same for watching brilliantly-rendered ships shooting at each other.  Especially when the ships you go up against may have different weapons, may choose different angles of attack, and so on.  You're not going to be able to sit and enjoy the battle if you're pausing and giving your ships new orders every five seconds.

Agree!    Especially if it's a turn based tactical battle set-up.  Can you imagine moving one ship, one square at a time on a grid...?  Boring.  I want a cinematic battle experience.

As I said above and have said before in previous threads on this subject, SEIV allows for pre-scripted choices that do not change in a battle, and certainly not turn-by-turn.

One can establish targeting priorities, formations, preferred firing ranges, etc. and the battle proceeds without interruption to completion.

For example, say one chose to research missiles.  Those might allow greater ranged fire than beams, so the orders could be to try to hold open the range to near the max.

Choices of that sort would still be no less strategic than the current game that lets you create, manage, and disband fleets before each battle and yet allow for a much richer and deeper combat section than simply trying to have weapons the enemy lacks the best defence for while trying to have the right defense tech for the enemies' weapons.

The way you describe it would be very cool, but that's not what comes to my mind when I think of tactical battles.  I would definitely go for a system where you set up choices before the battle, and then watch it unfold in a battle viewer.  

I feel the same way. As I've said I'm not "for" or "against" tactical battles in a vacuum - as mentioned, I don't feel they're appropriate for GalCiv specifically, not 4x in general - but I always enjoy "fleet strategies" like this. I am 100% for this as a feature in GalCiv 3.

A tactical battle system would take money and resources away from the game everyone wants, the game that built Stardock, the game that this community actually likes....  This is where people need to use that saying, "Spreading yourself too thin".

It would probably make the game weaker because of the new design being weak and/or the system not being implemented well (because the devs don't have experience doing this with tactics & such)

I'll always be "Pro-Choice", so you won't hear me complaining if tactics are implemented provided there is a choice to turn them off.

I do, however, miss the ability to subdue and board an enemy ship rather than simply destroying it.  At least let me sift through the rubble after the battle is over and gather whatever intelligence, compnonent(s) and or new technologies that might be there to be found.

Then again, maybe my attack isn't an attack at all.  Perhaps I'm just making a show of force to chase the intruders out of my span of influence.  But that could've been handled even easier if there was ship to ship communication...

I already use fleet tactics before I engage the enemy.  I don't need individual ship by ship tactics; as such my strategies are my tactics.

SK

It should be done like in Gratuitous Space Battles.

In three dimensions there is very little point to tactical battles. everyone can almost always hit everyone so long as they're in range. All we would be doing would be selecting all our ships and targetting the ship with the highest attack: defense ratio. ie, exactly what the game does now.

what is needed is simply more mechanics. make it possible for small ships to outmaneuvre the big guns of big ships, bring in range and rate of fire variation. essentially, give us more strategy in ship design and fleet composition.

finally, make it look spectacular, not like blocks of lego floating through space.

these sorts of changes will satisfy almost all the people calling for tactical battles and more importantly they will result in no advantage or disadvantage to watching the battles, because they can still be perfectly calculated, just as they are now.

Small ships may be able to outmaneuver the guns of large ships for a little while, but not forever.  The advantage of a large ship is being able to have enough guns pointing in enough directions that a shocking hit-to-miss ratio will still allow it to kill smaller ships.  It can also afford to cram in enough defences that in a given round of combat, those smaller ships can barely get the defences down on their own, never mind graze the hull.

Besides, even with such an advantage, small ships will still be at a disadvantage so long as the larger ship is escorted by small ships, or supported by other large ships.  If that's all it takes to nullify the advantage that small ships have, the only time they will be able to press their advantage is against an enemy whose fleets have already been weakened to the point where the large ships have no escorts or support.

I think that the problem with GalCiv is that smaller ships become very cost-ineffective in the later stages of the game.  For example, you tend to see the AI fleeting up frigates rather than fighters when they have enough available and the logistics to make it happen.  If you cram as many weapons as you can onto fighters, they tend to get shot at and blown to bits very early in in combat.  If you put just one or two weapon modules onto a fighter, then chances are you could make a frigate or battleship that does the work of many such fighters, for less bc.

To make smaller ships to be cost-effective later in the game you could make improved fighter hulls available when new hulls are made available by research.  At the moment smaller ships do benefit slightly from improved hitpoints as you progress along the tech tree, but nothing else about them really changes - you can still only load as many modules on them as your miniaturization research allows, the basic hull still costs the same to make, and the logistics required to fleet them remains the same.  The only up-side about fighters is that you can crank them out in a hurry, assuming you don't cram with expensive components.

This fails to consider the many possibilities for making the tactical battle experience richer.  For example:

• Some weapons are powerful, but have limited ammunition.  When do you use them?
• Defensive blockers with tractor beams to keep opponents away from vulnerable transports.
• Facing:  Some weapons could have limited arcs of fire.  Shields could be sectional.  
• Fighters:  Do you kill them before they close with you, or keep firing on the mother ship?
• Matchups: If you and your opponent have a mix of attacks and defenses, how will you maneuver so that your ships with good point defense close with the opponent's missile frigates, as he tries to trap them with his laser destroyers?
• Range: It's more than just "get them in range and fire".  You might outgun your opponent at some ranges, while he might outgun you at others.  If your ships are faster, you get to pick the range at which you fight.
• Boarding ('nuff said)

In a good tactical battle, there's a complex interplay between range, speed, durability, and firepower, with the strategic setting as a backdrop.  Are you making a probing attack to see how tough their new ships are?  A desperate strike to destroy the incoming spore ship before it reaches the planet, even if your entire force dies in the process?

All of these options allow a huge number of additional technologies as well, so that each empire can develop its own fighting motif, and they open up possibilities for a huge amount of flavor.  I'm not discounting the difficulty of writing an AI that can handle so many options, but it seems worthwhile to try.

@ elestan.

good points. regardless of whether or not we'd want such mechanics in battles, it is my experience that stardock so far tend to prefer incredibly simplified (almost suffocatingly simple) battle mechanics (elemental is another great example of this). a system with the variables you describe sounds like EVE levels of complexity (though even that doesn't have arcs of fire), but even in that game a lot of the variables you describe have optimal behaviour solutions that can be calculated mathematically (and there are third party tools people use to do just that). and asking a player "can you be bothered to calc this?" is not a fun strategic choice.

while it is possible to design a system complicated enough to make space battles require real thought, i believe it would have to be more complicated than most people would enjoy, or than stardock would be willing to implement.

this is what leads me to believe that simply adding a few more stats and improving the need to think about fleet composition is by far and away the best compromise solution, because it will increase strategy without forcing tactical battles on people.

My feeling is that the extremely simple battle mechanics are a consequence of not having the time/resources to implement a decent tactical AI along with all of the strategic elements.  But presumably, any GC3 game would be built atop the existing engines from GC2 and/or Elemental, so they'd already have a lot of that work done.  A decent tactical AI is the big missing piece.

I'm quite skeptical that a tactical battle has an optimal solution that could be found so easily.  I believe they just found the optimal solution to checkers a couple of years ago, and we're nowhere near solving even something like Chess or Go that's still very deterministic.  A tactical spaceship battle with hit points and partially random combat results is many orders of magnitude more complex than that.

I disagree.  Master of Orion II had most of these features, and it was made in 1996 (and did very well).

We clearly differ in our enjoyment of strategy and tactics.  I like both of them equally, and consider them both important elements for a good empire-building game.  I'm all for making tactical battles a game setup option, so that those who don't enjoy them don't have to use them.  But just adding a few more stats is not any kind of compromise; it's the tactical challenge that I want, and it's not tactics unless the user can control their ships during the fight.

oooooo... Is that an euphemism?

I mean, I just experienced THIS: [warstory]

"It was in the olden days, when 1 ATK - 0 DEF - 3 MOVE fighters were significant assets, when the world was flat, and the Internet was known as the Horseless Pony Express, when...

My 'fleet' of two of these decided to attack a Drengin fighter which was basically the same (1A-0D-2M) as mine, and both started to 'show him the light', to put it mildly. He returned fire and seemed a bit lucky, scoring as well as I did despite his 1-2 disadvantage in numbers. So one of my fighters was around 5/10, just like his one.

Then, one of my fighters disengaged! It moved away out of laser range, leaving my other fighter at the Drengin's 'mercy.' The bad part is, that the perfect 10/10 fighter was the one who wimped out. :bummer:

Both fighters survived the encounter, but it was a close one. One 2/10 and one 9/10.

[/warstory]

 It would have been nice if the damaged fighter had disengaged, leaving two options to the Drengin: either keep up with the fleeing fighter and get pummeled by the other, or engaging the undamaged one.

I saw a different Drengin design earlier, a small (0A-1D) ship. I thought, "That thing is so useless, useless, yah00seless!" But on a second thought, what if my undamaged fighter had fled in a 2-on-2 and the damaged one had wasted its turns on the unarmed Drengin? That would have been a very humilliating defeat, indeed.

The bottom line is, if there is a maximum range, the game should use it a bit more intelligently, and not let an undamaged fighter loiter around out of range, while its brother is being shot at. If there is no tac combat in GCIII, I'd ask Stardock to remove the max range either, or at least to improve the AI so that all ships stay within range of the enemy the AI picked to shoot at. Whether the Ai choice is good or not, it would at least be better than what it does now.

Or is there a way to mod max weapon range? I could mod them to a really big number then, say, 10x the current value.

~Beast

Anybody remember "Birth of the Federation"? If you have it go back and play a few rounds of combat. Then ask yourself if this would be a good way to add tactical control to GCIII. Combat was played out in 4 different ways (if I remember right, havent played it since '02):

1/2: just like GC2 (you just get to watch or not) 

3:issue orders by ship type (ie, scout, assult, ect.)

4:issue orders to individual ships

The whole problem with making tactical combat "optional" is, again, the issue of balance. In almost every game where this is possible you will do better by playing out a battle in tactical combat then by letting the AI auto-manage it. There isn't always a huge difference, but playing out any battle not overwhelmingly stacked in your favor is usually the correct choice, which means that it's not really so "optional" after all.

I think that making it a game setup option would address that concern.  That way, those who didn't want it could just let the AI run the fights for the whole game the way it does in GC2.

another problem I have with implementing tactical battles, is that because they happen on a 2d map/plane, even if the battles are automatically fought, it will be on a 2d plane and we will lose the cool 3D combat viewer battles.  It will be like watching a checkers game play itself out.

Thing is, though, right now we have no choice but to let the AI do it. If there is an option, then without a lot of effort balancing things - effort I'd rather have devoted to other parts of the game - then letting the AI do it will rarely be a good idea. Again, why I feel like it won't be that much of an "option" at all.

It's different now though, because there aren't any tactical battles.  So the AI is much better at accurately calculating who would win just based on numbers.  The combat we watch in GC2 is just cosmetic (which is fine by me).