ES doesn't have tactical combat. All combat is auto-resolved, except you can play ability cards to try and influence it a bit. It's nothing like real tactical combat, which is where you control ships individually.

Well said. This is exactly what happened in Shogun 2. The Nanban Trade Ship, if played in manual combat, is among the strongest ships you can build in the game (and also a trade ship!) and can easily beat several of the non-Nanban ships. When you auto-resolve, it's undervalued and loses far more often than it should.

So you either wind up having to build and pay upkeep for more of them than you need in order to auto-resolve, or you have to do an awful lot of very boring naval combat (you don't actually  need to do anything in combat to use them, most of the time they can win by sitting still and shooting things with cannons).

There's games where tactical combat fits pretty well, but it's the focus of the game. This is not one of those games.

The problem is too many don't understand the difference between Strategy and Tactics.

Its like brining Dominoes to a Chess Game just because the Board is the same and expect it to work with the other guys chess pieces ..... duuuh

Lots of games out there where JoeTheOne dives out of HyperSpace yelling "Die you Swine" as he fires the latest beam weapon through clenched teeth, incinerating all before our perspiring hero - or crush's the bad guy from inside the latest Beam enhanced LandCruser.

GalCiv isn't one of them and never will be - end of story.

Well said, and enough said.

You contradict yourself their. In the first paragraph, you say that popularity does not equate quality because people cannot tell what is quality. But then you say in the second that if a game sells well that it is quality.

I personally found ES to be a thoroughly underwhelming game. It was simplistic (the expansion fixed some of the issues but not all), and I was never a great fan of the card system.

SOTS1 had a decent tactical combat, and the ship designing was unique, but it was a game that was combat-centric.

I think that the best way would be to have something like Gratuitous Space Battles where you could deploy your fleet as you saw fit and that deployment would have an impact.

It seems as they are very different views of what "tactical combat" actually means in this thread...

As others have noted, auto-resolve is useful for those battles where it's so one-sided you're guaranteed to either win or lose (and therefore it's not worth taking the time to play them out manually).  In those situations, the auto-resolve function isn't really going to do any worse than the human player. 

If tactical battles are implemented, everyone is forced to be tactical. Frogboy claimed they will keep the tactical battles to a minimum, which means there must be some new tactical features of GCIII that are tactical, but it isn't the main focus of the game pretty much.

Why?  What's stopping people from simply choosing to auto-resolve if they wish? 

Because either the Auto-resolve is better than you at tactical battles, in which case it would be most efficient to always Auto-resolve, or worse than you, in which case you should never auto-resolve.

Try that for 200 planets on the largest map and see what happens .... if you do, there is little point having it as its all back to square one with the AI deciding and therefore having to be outside the mainstream results for the game.

The closest we will get is including Carriers inside Fleets, and building into the Fleet Battles the fact that carrier based fighters are there affecting the result by providing local Fleet Protection. It sure as hell will not be JoeTheOne diving on the nearest battle-cruiser zapping the Bad Aliens for the Glory of the Galaxy, Brad has stated very firmly that individual fighter actions are not on the cards, and never will be.

Its a Strategy Game, not a Tactical shoot-em-up. Brad has stated very firmly it will never become the latter on many occasions  - to say the least - ever since planning for GalCiv II started, let alone GalCiv III.

Last but no means least, the coding for the Alpha has already happened, we shall see what we shall see when the Alpha comes out in a couple of months - going in circles prior to that achieves squat.

Not really. It depends on how accurate the auto-resolve is. If it's within 5%, it's probably "good enough".

I personally loved movie clip part it was always great to watch your designed ships engage in battle, I think it was one of core elements of galactic civ and I really hope they keep it and perhaps implement some future where you can manipulate outcome while watching video! This is not fast paced game and never should be this is turn based strategy I never enjoyed solar sin empire it was to action orientated and way fast paced for my liking. The core of GC 3 is the economy, building and watching your ships wreck havoc on battlefield while you think your next move and manage all your planets

At first I found this statement very puzzling, because Dominoes isn't played on a board of any kind. So I think you must mean Checkers, as Checkers is the only game I can think of that is played on the same kind of board as Chess.

Oh yeah! I forsee movie clips of the battles that will leave us breathless of excitement. 

What are you on about we already have auto resolve in game as is.

We have auto-resolve that is not optional. My point is about how idiotic it is to think "optional" will ever work out to actually be optional.

Read it again until you understand the point.

As I said, it really comes down to if they put in an auto-resolve, how accurate the auto-resolves really are. Some mods I've seen for some games make them pretty realistic.

That is covered in my post. If auto resolve ends about as well as you could do it yourself, why bother ever doing it yourself? Everyone will do the first few for the novelty factor, then skip them for the rest of the game's lifespan for the sheer convenience of it - i.e. a feature not worth the developer's time to put in.

If auto-reoslve is as good as a player is, there's no reason for a player to do it, because the only outcomes are "as good as auto resolve" and "you screwed up, so it's worse than auto resolve".

If auto resolve is worse than a player, at some point there's fights you will have no choice but to play out, or lose when you could have won by playing them out.

This is all academic anyway as this game does not have tactical battles. The decision is already made.

But there is always the challenge. If everyone tells me that I can't fight the battle better than auto-resolve can, then I want to try to prove everyone wrong.   <--- Pure human nature.

I'm still banking the combat will be akin towards MOO3.

Except, ya know, shelled inside a good game.

This is my hope as well -- both parts. 

People are also purposely misrepresenting conflicting "wants" in the combat systems. It's amusing.