BFME is a good example of asymmetric game-play while retaining balance.

The good news is they recently hired some of the guys who worked on BFME =D

Vassal states I first saw in Civilization 4 Warlords. Actually I remember Alpha Centari had factions that would surender and still exist but no longer need to be eliminated but I don't remember how much you could order them around. Anyway, having a concrete type of influence on a civilization that I can use is a good feature of diplomacy. Civilization Beyond Earth has the favors system for that. Also, having the whole Apostolic Palace team in Civilization 4: BTS declare war on me. I remember a long time ago in MoO1 or Civ 2 giving gifts to other empires to gain positive relations but it often didn't add up to much as far as I could tell.

One time in MoO3 I was great friends with an empire who I had contact with through two star lanes with a system with a guardian between us. So technically we were geographically close but in practice we were far apart. After I took down the guardian and opened that route relations quickly went sour and we ended up at war. It was nice to see that reaction to the situation and know exactly what caused it.

What might be interesting is if diplomatic relations modifiers were tradable items. For example an empire gets mad a me for building a colony or starbase in their territory. So then 'territory violation' would show up in trade and I could offer something to have them forget about it.

The easiest example is MoO1 vs. MoO2. I liked MoO2 but the simpler combat of the original made it easier to know what effect your designs would have. Like shields were a direct subtraction from damage, but the sequel they subtracted damage but also they were a barrier that would recharge. So in MoO2 you mostly just went with the most damage per space because you would always face the biggest ships with the best shields. I missed needing to watch their defenses and ship sizes to know what would be effective. but not overkill.

I want there to be things that can be countered and that would tip the scales if they aren't. So that a a tech advantage would give me more options to counter something rather than just be a clear overpower situation.

I think you misunderstand what 'immersion' means.

Immersion does not mean you can't have detailed information and useful features. If anything it encourages such things.
It simply means that you can feel that the world/universe is believable, adheres to it's own cannon/lore and in the case of 4X games, that you genuinely feel like you are the leader/ruler of your race/nation/empire.

Take the New Xcom game for example. Gameplay wise it is fairly ok. However immersion wise it is terrible. There are so many things that are arbitrary and make no sense and make it is very hard to feel immersed as the Commander of Xcom.

What??

Immersion doesn't have to take any extra resources apart from making sure the game world and game-play is consistent and makes sense.

What do you think immersion means?? I mean, all the stuff you said you want; being able to zoom out, being able to see the numbers and status of planets and being able to toggle bonus effects are not conflicting with 'immersion'.

As I said, Immersion means that you can feel 'immersed' in the world and suspend disbelief. It is the idea that if the game is internally consistent and the game-play is consistent and not jarring then you will be able to be immersed.

Let me give you an example of bad/failed immersion via the new Xcom:

-You supposedly run a secret internationally funded organisation to combat an advanced alien threat, yet you can only afford ONE transport, and can only put FOUR guys on it unless you buy an upgrade.
-When your soliders fire at the enemy and miss, but the projectile physically goes through another enemy standing next to him, it passes through and does no damage.
-The Aliens posses complete air superiority (due to having the high ground so to speak) yet you choose to rely on satellites as your sole means of detection when ground based radar would be cheaper, safer and more defensible.

That's just a few example of bad immersion. That is when the game-play elements conflict with the game world and logic.
Immersion doesn't mean you have less information. It actually means you should have all the information that your 'role' as the player would need.

So in the context of a 4x/strategy game, it is entirely reasonable to have all the stats and numbers details of your planets, being able to zoom the map out and deciding whether to make use certain bonuses or not. These are all information and abilities you would expect to have as the leader of a civilization/empire.

Immersion only takes extra work in the sense that everything needs to work as expected and make sense.
I'm sure your idea of immersion is skewed if you think immersion demands reduced usability/information.

Fair enough, I see where you are coming from.

I also tend to agree with you to an extent with things like fully voiced diplomacy. It really doesn't add much, I'd prefer a few simple lines, like a couple of greetings and responses that change based on how much a faction likes you.
So I guess we have a consensus about that =D

Much like a lot is lost since The Elder Scrolls started having fully voiced dialogue.

I'm just going to focus on question #1.

My favorite feature of diplomacy in 4X games is forming alliances with computer players against mutual threats. I especially like it when the galaxy is split along ideological lines, as in the GalCiv2 campaigns and some scenario maps. Unfortunately, it rarely seems to work out that way in sandbox games. My major problem with diplomacy in GalCiv2 was that perceived military might seemed WAY more important than anything else in determining the AI's aggression. This led to some pretty predictable dynamics: The strongest civ starts a war with the weakest one, and everyone else piles on until the weak civilization is at war with half the galaxy or more. You'd think the weaker civs would band together for mutual protection, but in GalCiv2 it doesn't work this way. In fact, the AI almost always decides to "help" the one who is already winning. Therefore, one thing I'd like to see in GalCiv 3 is earlier cooperation and coordination between weaker civilizations. 

Another feature from GalCiv2's diplomacy which I liked but could have been executed better was the United Planets. I think the resolutions weren't really consequential enough to pay attention to, except for the dreaded "evil civs only get 3 trade routes", which is really bad for the Korx. It would be cool if you could reach agreements or bribe other civs to vote in a particular way. It would also be cool if the resolutions were somehow contingent on actual events in the game instead of being random. 

Tactical combat is usually a make or break thing for me. If a game looks good, but has no tactical combat I tend to avoid it.

I don't understand why people keep bringing up Tactical Combat.  There's a time and place for tactical combat.  An empire building game like GalCiv is not the place for it.  Tactical Combat is great in a game like Age of Wonders where combat is the primary focus of the game.  City Development, Diplomacy, etc is almost an afterthought.  Age of Wonders III and GalCiv III are pretty much the only games I'm playing right now.  In AOW3 I typically have only 1-4 rounds of combat per turn.  In GC3, it's often closer to 10-12 and that's with the current low player count limits.  In GC2 or Civ V, I'll often be doing 20+ rounds of combat in a turn, more if you're including planet invasions.  Even in single player, Tactical Combat would get tiring.  In multiplayer it would make turns simply impossibly long.

There's tactics games and there's strategy games.  This is the latter.  

The majority of Strategy games I played/play feature tactical combat. An Empire building game is the perfect kind of game to have tactical combat, because it gives those battles context. Total War would be pretty damn boring if it was just the tactical combat. Likewise Moo2 wouldn't have been any were as good as it was without tactical battles.

The point is I want to use those ships I designed in battle.
Also, you don't have to make tactical combat enforced. Total War, Moo2 and lots of other games have an 'auto-resolve' combat option. If I outnumbered an opponent I would often auto-resolve.

So Tactical combat might not affect you, but there are a lot of people who want it.

The point is to have choice, I like my strategy games to give me the option to control battle.
There are lots of strategy games that feature tactical combat; why should combat be given less focus than development, diplomacy and research when it is an important part of empire building?

IMHO, tactical combat is not a good fit for GC3 because the ship designer is (already) too abstract.  GC* has made the game-design-level commitment to float high above the tactical level.

• placement of components has no tactical effect
• components are never damaged
• hull shapes have no effect -- hence ship design is free to be artistic -- and that's always been GC*'s hallmark
• damage abstracted as "hp"

Most tactical combat systems borrow ideas from Starfleet Battles (using graph paper for those lovely checkboxen):

• each ship component has its own damage-absorption/hp
• [SE3] Every component is 1 unit.  All damage is in integer quantities of 1 unit.  Damage knocks out components 1-for-1.
• [SE4] Every component has actual mass in kt (kilotons), and effective mass vs. damage in kt (which may be higher).  Damage is in kt.
• [SE5] As SE4, but with richer variation between actual kt and effective kt.
• 2D layout of components matters
• [SE3,4] not implemented.  Ship design is a flat list of components, in no particular order.
• [SE5] Ship design is a 2D layout.  Boxes are marked Outside or Inside.  You choose where to put stuff.
• It's actually 3D, with 3 levels per hull, but the 3rd dimension is irrelevant in combat.  Combat is Khan-like: "Captain, this game engine's thinking appears to be two-dimensional"
• [SE5] Inbound hits from the "left" will punch through your left Outside components, then your Inside.
• [SE5] Corollary: If bombarding a planet clockwise, and you fail to dodge one salvo and it knocks out your portside engine + gun ... turn 180 and orbit ccw to hide that nasty hole (N.B. Smaug forgot to do this step -- dragon AI sucks that way)
• [SE5] Corollary: avoid putting engines + point-defense vs. fighters in your rear boxes.  Think about it: if the pursuing horde of 22 enemy fighters (which are faster than you) pierces you from behind -- what do you want them to hit?  If they knock out an engine + point-defense, then you're even slower with less kill-capability, which is a positive feedback loop not in your favor.  This is the kind of design-fun you get with tactical combat.
• [SE*] Satellite layer transports must (by definition) fly into asteroid hexes/squares to launch robo-extraction satellites for remote resource mining.  Some asteroid hexes damage you on entry.  Before shield tech, you need some damage-sponges in front.  Solution: cargo bays in front, engines in rear.  Don't risk your movement capability, or you might strand yourself, which is just embarrassing.
• ship components are partitioned into layers, from outside-in
• [SE*] shield points, then all armor (regardless of their 2D layout), then Outside/external, then Inside/internal
• some components have region requirements, e.g. "must be external"
• racial or techs allow layer-skipping, e.g. shield-skipping, ignores-armor, damages-only-X, etc.
• components have capability-degradation policies
• [SE3] No bridge = movement reduced to 1 square/turn.  No life support = movement 0.
• [SE4,5] simple binary: 50%+ effective kt = fully operational, 49%- = knocked out.  Also inherits [SE3].
• ship kill defined as: all components destroyed
• [SE3] ship "hp" is shields + number of components (at 1 "hp" each)
• [SE4,5] ship "hp" is shields + sum of its components' effective kt
• Corollary: ship crippling (without killing it) means you leave at least 1 component alive.

That's just the ship-design and component-level effects of tactical combat.  On top of that, you also need:

• "tactical battlefield" mini-game mode
• tactical control of ship movement and facing

RPGs do this, e.g. there's "party mode" where you wander the map with only 1 abstract icon for the whole party, and "combat mode" where you pop everybody out into 1 square/hex per character, and move them around individually.

The whole package goes together: component layout, component effects, tactical mini-game.  Again, I think the (wise) designer must commit at game-niche choice time to compete within the tactical combat game niche or not.  It's a vast investment in design and implementation effort, which you can't just shoehorn or retrofit into an existing game.

And even in tactical combat games, you still need a "Strategic Mode Hurry-It-Up-Don't-Bother-Me" mode to auto-compute or fast-forward through the foregone-conclusion dogfights that aren't worth your attention.  That's a whole other can of worms, which SE* failed to solve.  The same bad AI tactics that let you win tactical fights also ensure that you can't trust its fast-forward mode to win for you.

• [Whimsy] My idea of "lifting the level" here means: you teach the tactical level how you prefer to fight tactical combats, e.g. the policy of "move into gun range, fly catenary to remain in gun range and just outside his gun range, shoot him with everything until he's crippled per this definition, then untarget all guns, back off, and wait out the clock" = P3-bite-yer-legs-off.  Then instead of a vanilla "Strategic Mode" option, you choose your policy: "Do P3-bite-yer-legs-off".  And the Tactical Monitor follows that script, hopefully almost as efficiently as you would.  And yah, that does amount to a kind of automatic programming, where the tactical monitor looks over-your-shoulder and transcribes what you do into a kind of (Turing-complete) script language ... like an uber-advanced version of recording a keyboard macro, but far more intelligent.
• Corollary: (All) tactical combat games are incomplete without this(!!!).

Ergo, even I'm not eager to force-fit tactical combat into everything.  Even abstracting it away, there are sufficient interesting game-time decisions at the galactic level to fully occupy a human player's attention.

The points you made are moot however. Tactical combat does not require that components can be damage or that hull shapes should effect anything.

Galciv can easily keep abstracted hp's. Not all tactical combat in strategy games requires the level of detail in Starfleet battles.

Older total war games had a single HP for each man in a unit, with only exceptional generals or elite units having more than one for example.

while tactical combat in Moo2 did have component damage, there was no grid placement for components, the only direction based stuff was if you shot at the rear of a ship you tend to hit the engines, and shields/weapons had 'arcs'

Whats the point of having artistic ships if you never get to command them in battle? That's how I feel. It's also why I haven't bought a Galciv game to date. (played Galciv II on a friends PC for a while, so it's not like I've never played it)
I want the empire management to extend to fleet actions. I just don't think combat should be underdeveloped and deserves just as much attention as expansion, research and diplomacy.

I love how you quote my post but don't seem to have actually read it.  Total War is a combat focused game with an empire building aspect.  GalCiv is an empire building game with a combat aspect.  Different gameplay focuses.  Moo2 is pretty much the only game EVER to manage to combine these two aspects well.  That said, even Moo2's tactical combat was pretty limited compared to newer tactics focused games.

If all you are looking at is the numbers then either you don't understand the point of tactical combat or the games you play don't have very good tactical combat.  Plus you are ignoring my whole point about multiplayer.

And I can't think of a single game with tactical combat that didn't sacrifice something in return.  Legendary Heroes and Age of Wonders (both of which I play and enjoy) are both perfect examples of this.  Both have solid tactical combat (AOW better than LH in my opinion) but the empire building aspect of both are far less in depth and on a far smaller scale than games like Civilization and GalCiv.

You somehow seem to have read my post as "I don't like tactical combat".  That's not the case, there's simply some games it wouldn't work in.  This being one of them.

Know how I know you don't know what you're talking about?  Unless all you mean by "Tactical Combat" is watching your ships shoot each other and maybe picking targets occasionally then no it's not.   Gilmoy just tried to explain this but apparently his point was missed as well.  True Tactical Combat is more than just watching your ships fight and choosing who to shoot at first.  It's making use of terrain, exploiting enemy vulnerabilities, and building an efficient army.  GalCiv does not have any framework for that in place.  There's no strengths and weaknesses, it's a simple build X upgrade to counter Y upgrade.  All races and ships are on even footing.  There's no real support/spell casting functionality, both of which are key to tactical combat.  You don't necessarily have to take it to the level Gilmoy talks about with component damage and weapon facings.  But you do have to have way more than we have now as that's not the type of game they are trying to design.

It would be great if we lived in this magical world where developers could include every imaginable feature and have it function 100% perfectly and done in a way so that it plays exactly like every single person wants but that's simply not possible.  You can't make a fundamental change like shifting to tactical combat without it having a negative effect on some other aspect of the game.  Time is money and implementing GOOD tactical combat is a huge undertaking.

Lastly, anyone who suggests that having an "auto-resolve" button magically fixes it for people who don't want to do tactical combat hasn't played enough tactical combat games.  I have yet to play a tactical combat game where the AI does even a remotely good of a job of playing as a human which means when playing multiplayer you will either have to do tactical combat or you will lose.  AOW and LH are again a good example of that.  Unless you have completely overwhelming advantages (and sometimes even then), you will have to manually play it out.

I actually haven't found any problems with "Immersion" in GalCiv so far.  I've seen this word bandied in the place of "polish", "flavor", and "cinematic narrative" so far in the thread, all of which are different with regard to semantics. 

Most 4X games rely on a pretty low maximum of lore details and alternate narratives.  I count this as a point in their favor, since I've played D&D for over 20 years I think these things have their places. 

Just seems that a lot of these discussions are devolving toward a common point: "If you can't do it well, don't include it", which is probably a vague response to a request for specifics.

Basically this.