Tactical combat should involve fleet formations, which concentrate firepower and are counter by other formations like a Rock-Paper-Scissors effect. The ships should have firing arcs for each weapon as this establishes formation tactics as well as detection and ECM/ECCM measures to prevent or facilitate engagement of the enemy. First detection is crucial in actual combat since first strikes are 96% lethal. Each ship should have a detection range in combat for weapons which can be degraded by enemy ECM and ships should posses some type of Tactical Data System which enables multiple ships to control and use other fleet assets remotely(i.e. Communications, Command and Control become important). However, Fleet intelligence should be paramount in tactical engagements, with Combat Patrols, fighters, bombers, and escorts. Imagine if you will, a combat patrol from a carrier is enroute to its designated waypoint and passively detects an enemy. This information is relayed to its carrier with a base percentage change of success plus/minus any degradation due to ECM/ECCM derivatives. If successful the carrier (CV) assigns 1 fighter wing the mission to seek out and identify the target (i.e. is it a ghost caused by enemy ECM, space debris, or sensor malfunction, or a picket acting as a decoy flagship. If an enemy target is positively identified then information is relayed to the fleet and a picket engages the target using data from the fighter wing. If the target is an intelligence asset marines are dispatched to capture the target (instead of destroy it with a picket) with a percentage chance of successfully boarding and capturing the vessel before the crew can scuttle the ship. If successful an enemy technology is aquired. If unsuccessful the crew has managed to self-destruct their ship resulting in the loss of the crew, ship and marines. Typical intelligence assets are flag ships like carriers or battleships, not pickets - the smaller escort ships which compose the fleet. This type of detection based combat enables undetected vessels to escape engagements and withdraw if the battle is going badly. Typical detection ranges far outpace weapon guidance ranges due to the varying levels of power required. Most weapons are guided remotely to their destination until they come within range to actively aquire the target. Hence fleet fighter battles will usually determine tactical success or failure by allowing the victor freedom to locate and destroy/capture vulnerable enemy targets. In situations where insuffient assets remain after engagement to locate and destroy enemy ships a window of opportunity opens which allows the loser an opportunity to escape.

Hope none of this is redundant. Also, don't misunderstand these thoughts and think I don't like the game. A continuous string of suggestions and constructive criticism starts to sound like badmouthing after a while ...

In GalCivIII tactical battles should be optional, not required. Sort of like Birth of the Federation, except if you choose to let the computer handle the battles the computer needs to be capable of making good decisions. Also, separating the control/don't control and view/don't view options is a must. So you should be able to choose whether or not to micromanage your battles like a fleet commander, and ALSO choose whether or not to watch the battle play out regardless of whether you're in direct command or not. As mentioned before on this thread by someone else, ability to prioritize targets is a must. Specifically, even a player not micromanaging battles should be able to order their fleets to destroy Spore Ships at all costs, or take down capital ships even if that means the fighters escape. Remember that running from an enemy shouldn't be a given thing; you don't always make a clean escape when you turn tail. More diversification within the three weapon areas would be good, too. ONE VERY IMPORTANT SUGGESTION: I have not played all, or even a majority, of the strategy games on the market. But all the ones I have played tend to make the same major mistake -- they do not take into account the simple fact that ships become less capable of functioning if they are hit in the right places. In real battle, it sometimes pays to shoot for the other side's engines. Other times it is better to blast their communications. If ships are sometimes disabled or inhibited by enemy fire, firing at multiple targets with intent to damage becomes a feasible option. If ships instead retain full functionality until the moment they are destroyed then it generally pays to forget spreading damage and focus fire on single ships in order to decrease the amount of damage that can potentially be done to your ships. I'm probably dreaming here, but what I would really like to see in GalCiv 3 is a game with a simple yet complex engine and brilliant strategic design similar to GalCivII combined with the ability to perform tactical battles nearly as in-depth as the Starfleet Command games. And as long as I'm reaching for the sky, why not add the intricacy and depth found in most parts of Birth of the Federation? Manage to do that without losing the ability to effectively play on either the micro or macro scale, and you should have a game that every kind of gamer except first-person-shooter fans would enjoy. Then you just have to be careful to make every facet of the game excellent -- don't make yet another jack-of-all-trades game where you can do a little bit of everything and nothing more than just that little bit in anything. To me, the ideal game is neither one that emphasizes one aspect nor balances all aspects. Rather, it is the game which emphasizes all aspects. Such a game ought to act like a Saturn V rocket; lifting off the ground and soaring continually upwards to as-yet undreamed heights of enjoyability and retail value. Of course, such a game would probably be really expensive, but if truly achieved it would be worth dumping a whole year's-worth of video-game-buying money into. Quality over quantity.

I guess what I really want is a game that gets as close to being a complete simulation of reality as possible. I don't mean graphically, though good graphics are fine. I want a single game that can go from the level of individual people (RPG-style) up to multiple universes with different laws of physics in each. Science, psionics, and magic all fair play. Multi and single player, and the ability to not only choose between but take things like empires, universes, and characters from the one and jump with them to the other at will. Real enough to properly simulate the in-lab combination of argon and HCl, unreal enough to have a dragon eat you right out of your lab coat a minute later.

Looking back, the last part of this post is pretty unreasonable. It necessitates the existence of a few things we don't have yet, like a Theory-of-Almost-Everything. Still, if there's any game developer with the slightest chance of managing such a feat before I die in sixty years or so -- correction, before my grandkids die -- it's Stardock.

I'd rather not see a pure MOO-type tactical sub-game in GalCiv. At least make it optional, and not at all needed to win battles.

I would like to see tactics chosen and applied in the fleet battle view though.

I posted this is the wrong place so here it is again...

I have a solution to the tactical combat problem.

If you go with the current 'invasion' technique i.e. you click a form of attack then there is a prescedent in an online game i played a few times. They had a superbly simple setup where you design your ships (as do we) and then when you want to attack you get 4 (four) choices...

1. regular
2. board
3. scout base
4. board base

Now obviously these aren't relevant but I like the concept of the first two for ship to ship attack and I think the second two could be modified to fit ship / starbase attacks.

The idea I love most about it is the idea that you can comandeer the opposision ships but if you attempt to do it it will weaken your forces, presumably because they have to focus on sending troops into enemy ships and trying to comandeer them. At this point your 'soldeiring' skills come in to play i.e. ta kwan traing centres, couyrage etc etc.

anyway, it would be a fun element that shouldn't screw with the general gameplay to much. I also like the idea because as you get to the late stages of the game and you are winning (hopefully) the game becomes a bit dull as you just clear things up (mop up whats left of the enemy(s)). Well I have always thought that in a real combat situation (space or otherwise) a force that is exspenentially (sp?) weaker would resort to guerilla tactics. This would mean that they could train in geurilla tactics specifically to steal your ships which are far more capable. I know that once I build my best ship (Regel Empire Class) I am unstoppale. But if the AI ever got their hands on one of these ships (I donate them occasional for kicks) they can do some real damage back to me.

Warmest regards

VanCam

PS. big big big fan of the game.

PPS. Imagine the possibilities of enemy AI comandeering your starbases. and the action would work so well... step 1. attack as per normal step 2 choose board base step 3 watch usual video of attack step 4 9should the prior attack be succesful) choose how to attack / board the starbase... (a) crack troops (b) Psi troops (c) General Infantry (d) crazy mutant dogs that have been bred for combat etc etc

I like GC2 but I'm rather disappointed in the fleet battles. There is simply no room for creativity or "leading" your fleets and there should be. Something as simple as setting fleets to fire on certain ships first, or to run away if a specified amount of ships are lost, etc, wouldn't be difficult to build AI for and it would add a lot to combat.

I'd also like to see more randomness in combat. It looks to me like fleet composition A vs fleet composition B will always result in fleet composition A destroying fleet composition B with fleet composition A taking X losses every time. A lucky shot, a heroic act... seems there is room to make things more dynamic in combat.

Tactical combat needs to be everywhere! Assaults on starbases, ship to ship, planet to ship, army to army.

Ground combat should include aircraft. It should also run on the ship weapons/defenses style. If an army relies on lasers, you equip your army with shields. Some customization of the types of units you put in your army.

Throw away transports: Transports shouldn't be throw-aways. You should be able to send the troops down in pods and "refuel" the transport with more troops. This would make large assault ships able to invade and not be throw-aways. Same thing with spore ships, except they use how many spore modules they have on them. If you have two modules, you can invade two planets.

Constuctors: The constructor/starbase relationship sucks, sorry to be blunt. It’s a real pain to slowly churn out a constructor and send it away. I know you counter this with waypoints, but it could be *so* much better. Instead of using one-use-constructors, you could make constructing like asteroid mining. You could send ONE constructor and slowly upgrade it. To make it easier on micromanagement, you could have a list of modules to build (Much like the governors). If you really want a starbase up and running quickly, you could task more constructors to the starbase. You could also boost the process by diverting asteroid resources to the starbase.

Shipyards: You should be able to have starbases make ships. How long it would take would depend on modules you build on it and diverting asteroids to it.

Starbase Battles: These are lame. The way starbase battles work is the starbase has three weapons it slowly fires every minute (Literally with large fleets). The star base basically works on DL's old style of combat. Every ship shoots one ship at a time. In DA, every gun can target a different ship simultaneously in one turn. It should work like DA's depending on how many upgrades you put on it. If you put every gun on the starbase, it's going to be one heck of a cookie to crack. Just watch you fighters be gunned down by the lower weapons and the doomrays take out the big ships. Ofcourse you operate the starbase manually and designate each weapon to fire at a certain kind of ship. This would make starbases ALOT more challenging. Starbases should aslo have the ability to have ships dock in them, like planets. The ships would be repaired and they would also defend the starbase.

Future Combat: I think arcs should be implemented. This would make ship building a little bit more challenging. You could also have defense arcs so you could decide where to make your ship the strongest. Now, for strategy. I like in DA how every gun targets a different ship. You could take this further and designate where the guns will shoot. No more auto-fire, if my little raider wants to shoot the transport and ignore the big ship, so be it. You should also be able to retreat from a battle. If you are getting kicked, or you want to cut your losses you should be able to do it. This also works well with hit-and-run tactics. I mentioned defense/weapon arcs and if this were in the game you could flank the enemy. You should be able to put ships in formation to counter enemy tactics.

Ship/Starbase/Asteroid Invasion: You could have the option to tractor-beam a ship and board it. This would also apply to starbases and asteroids. I'm sure this has been said before, so I won't get into it.

Key Areas: If Space combat was mor indepth you could fire at the ships vital systems. EX: Warpcore(Or any power souce), weapons, engines, life support, troop/colony modules. You could aslo have a variety of Warpcores/engines/life support/modules that would have different defensive strengths. (Or you could have the real expensive one that is really tough to take down)

Awesome, if this stuff was in it everyone's strategy would be different. Plus, it would make storytelling more interesting.

Say, I have an idea that'll merge tactics and strategy. It'll involve some suspense of disbelieve, but too bad.

Alright, firstly, the game maps will be made quite a bit larger, with much more distance between planets and stars and other solar systems. Then, it's essentially permanent tactical combat. Each ship can always shoot, essentially, or pull off whatever special moves you want. That way, you can always reinforce battles, always do hit-and-runs and more complex tactical maneuvers, and battles won't last a turn anymore.

It'll be like those SEIV tactical battles, but on the entire map. Why do this? Because having seperate tactical battles, to be honest, is pretty lame and too time consuming. This way, battles just happen, and happen anywhere, and the flow of the battle can move as new ships arrive. However, because it's likely that more ships will survive battles because people don't like to die and eventually retreat, ships should either be slower to build or have less hitpoints, so either players have less ships, or enough ships die to keep balance.

Then, ships also ought to have their own morale meters, just like planets. If your ass is getting whupped bad and tons of enemy fighters are just flying towards you, eventually, you're going to surrender. This could add new use to the courage ability, as courageous races' ships wouldn't surrender easily.

Finally, I don't think targeting seperate ship systems should be much in depth. As it happens in GC2 games, I usually have dozens of fighters even in medium maps. I can't bother selecting ship systems, I should be able to just select one of my ships and order it to target one of the enemy ships in very few mouse clicks. That's really the key to making tactical battles work. You need to let players maintain a good deal of control over the battle, but let them do it so fluidly it's like playing an RTS.

This way, battles will be just as easy to manage as in GC2, but they'll allow for more flexibility.

I agree that maps should be much, much, much larger. The galaxy is HUGE! Much bigger than the gigantic map. The gigantic map shuld be just one sector.

Say.....What if just normal games worked like the campaign? You could select each sector and observe it. All the sectors would have different things happening at one time. The difference would be all the sectors add up to make a real galaxy.



Wow, I thought of the same thing a couple of moths ago. Touché!  



I always wanted Galciv2 to be like Starfleet Command II. Just the battle part though. I just want to command my flagship personally and vaporize the heck out of the enemy ships.

Naw, I don't think you get it. See, it's like a giant tactical battle, that's why the map has to be much larger. So you have more room to maneuver. Ships can always use their tactical maneuvers out in space--on the normal map. There are no seperate battles, it's all handled on the same map.

Like homeworld, except bigger.

Exactly, it's like turnbased homeworld.

We could also have the planetary combats take years as they would in real life.  \

Sorry, there needs to be some tradeoff for the sake of gameplay, however...

I liked the suggestion of target prioritizing. Let the players select what choice targets are a priority in combat, so even if the player fails to take it, he/she may do more harm in the end and make the next attempt much easier.

How about a semi-tactical combat system? Two of the largest complaints from the MOO crowd are that the combat viewer doesn't do anything, and that combat is basically nothing but sit there and watch your two fleets kill each other. Just adding one layer of depth could make a big difference.

Imagine this:

As your fleet approaches an enemy fleet/your transport arrives at the enemy planet, a window pops up saying:

*************
"XXX has engaged Enemy XXXX"
[ ]Auto Combat
[ ] Use Combat Viewer
[ ]Tactical Combat

I think the following would be fantastic in GC3:
Real time tactical combat.
Initialized when two ships are in adjacent sectors. The player would be given an opportunity to move any of it's ships towards the battle, if they have movement points available, the ships would be delayed from entering the battle based on how far they moved and their max speed.
Ships would start off facing the direction they were traveling.
Starting location would be near the middle, equally far from eachother and the retreat line.
Rotational 3d. Limited Y axis. X and Z axis would be essentially unlimited, only limited by the comparable ship speeds between the hostile empires. A circle would surround the exact center, 0,0,0, drawn on the Y=0 plane.
A enemy ship trying to retreat would need to cross the circle and if it's speed in greater than all player ships it would leave combat, successful retreating to a sector in the direction it retreated. If it's slower than a player ship then the player will receive a popup reminding the player that they can allow it to retreat, by pushing a allow retreat button on the GUI. If the player chooses to not push the button, thus not allowing it to retreat, then the player can chase it with it's faster ship until the enemy ship is either faster than any player ship, it's destroyed, or allowed to retreat.
For a visualization, play SE5. SE5 tactical combat is different, however you will be able to better understand my idea if you view SE5's combat.

Greetings,

I subscribed to this forum though I'm not really a GC2 player. I've been shown it by a friend and had a chance to try some of its features. I must admit that seing that combat resumed in watching a type of video where you do not have any control made me stop the game immediately.

As a MoO fan ( both 1st and 2nd episode ), I'd like to summarize what comes to mind immediately by reading this post :

1. Players who play alone do not request tactical combat. Since playing alone resumes to playing against an AI, tactical combat is never really exhilarating because AI's are crappy at playing. They can be cheated ( like they are in most games when you increase difficulty ), but remain dumb and thus tactical combat remain motly uninteresting ( there are exceptions as when you play Impossible in a Huge galaxy, you have to sweat to regain what has been granted freely to the AIs ).

2. Players who play in multiplayer need the tactical aspect of the game maybe more than they need the economical aspect. In fact, I believe than a well advanced game of MoO2 becomes boring at the economic level before than at the tactical level where large armies where used in combat, because of the multitude of planets to check every turn ( at the end, you build quasi everything in one turn, and have 20-30 planets ). In opposition, large tactical battles dont happen every turn but rather once each 20-30 turns and most of the time, defeating such a large opponent resumes to him withdrawing from the game because he cannot defend himself anymore ( and certainly not attack ). Knowing this fact ( which can be countered with a Logistics approach as read in this post ), I'd have to say that amongst the maybe 100 MoO2 games I played over the Internet, maybe 5 of them have lead to this status, because players preferred to play the economic part of the game rather than the tactical combat part. For the other 95 games, I've seen people attack me when I had from 2 to 6 colonies and with armies ranging from 7 frigates containing each 4 missiles to 1 battleship containing a single technological breakthrough that you cannot counter with your actual tech level ( neutron canons agains lvl 3 shields is lame ). So in fact, the large battle problems quite never occured...

To me, what makes a game really impressive and heartpounding is :

1. You cannot save and reload while in multiplayer. So each of your decision has a consequence, in short, medium or long term. This is not applicable in single player : reload enough and you'll find a solution. If not, take a savegame which brings you further back and you'll know what your opponent will play ( Where's the challenge here ? ).

2. Tactical combat : having the best weapons is not always the best choice if the game is effectively designed and gives you enough meanings of defeating an adversary with even a slight tech level advantage, provided you play better than him, or maybe uses his ships weaknesses. In MoO2, I've seen Titan Ships totalizing 9000 HP shot down in 1 turn by 2 frigates ( 30hp each ! ) : first one wears off the shields with an adapted weapon ( plasma cannons ) then the second making it explode with a single missile made EMG which had 20% chances to hit right in the core of the ship, thus making the thermonuclear motor explode, you loosing the ship and others not far to be damaged. This is only an example, and MoO2 had many of these technologies that could save you from an opponent which bet everything on HP and size. In fact, you had to permanently adapt to your opponent's fleets designs in order to beat him, and you could have mind blowing battles engaging no more than a few units ( the way this game was meant to be player in multiplayer i think ).

3. Diplomacy offered an interesting way of balancing the game amongst human players. While the game lacked options it gave an interesting approach of what can be done to save a desperate situation. Thus in a game where a player was coming to crush me ( he had 3 times more planets than me ), another player summoned me and gave me exactly the right technos to counter the attack, not to win the battle but rather to have the ennemy win at too large a cost, or maybe retreat with less power than before, making him vulnerable again to his fiercer opponents.

I must admit that I still have not found the game that could replace my love for MoO2. I've tried many but no recent game has made me change my mind. What I see now are very well made games, all very graphic and professionnal, but none do fill the voidness of my research.

What I'm looking for is a 4x space strategy game that I could play in full when I connect in the evening from 8pm to 2-3pm max. I dont want neverending games where you have 200 turns to wait before anything happens. I'd like to be able to connect from the game to a server that would inform me of the games about to start, enter the game and play.
Once in the game, I'm as interested in the economic part which is really a part you play alone, alongside with other players, as in the tactical part where you see if you made the right decisions in your economic and tech research against real opponents and not AIs.

To my knowledge, the only game responding to these criterias is MoO2. I regret it
I see I'm not the only one thinking that and the game has kept his afficionados. It has become hard to play for a lack of support, merely no modding available ( though I've managed to find how some of the mechanics of the tech trees and weapons can be modified ) and furthermore because its multiplayer coding uses IPX and needs Kali I to run.

Despite all this, I believe people are still considering playing it alone if no opponent can be found so I wonder if people like me should gather and play our favourite game until some game studio decides to grant my ( our ) criterias.

If some of you were to be interested by such a gathering, I'd be willing to create and maintain a Website which could help people find each other, set-up internet games ( which is still possible ) and play the greatest space game of all times.

Simply post a response to this topic saying you're interested and I'll come by regularly to see if enough people are interested ( say 5-6 at minimum would be nice ).

MoO2 rules ( in my humble opinion ).

Sorry to break your theory, but I don't play multi-player yet I would really love a tactical combat layer. Nothing too complex, but more than Firepower of Ship1 + Ship2 + Ship3 vs Defense and HP of target.

The simpler the tactical combat system, the better chance the AI can make adequate use of it.

If we are voting then I say nay to tactical ship combat in the I-move, You-move format of MOO and others.

A thin layer of tactics, pre-programmed only as fleet doctrine, to be watched on the battle movie, would be ok IMHO. Tactical match-ups that might give a weaker ship a chance to avoid a hit, or increase the damage of a hit would be cool. The tactics would be tech researched of course.


Ground combat could use some semi-tactical thought though, since its rather boring. Still no I-go, you-go miniatures model, but maybe something like a chess-Tic Tac Toe hybrid. The idea would be that the system worked simply on piece placement (think Go, i.e. deploying pieces rather than moving them as digital miniatures) rather than simulating shooting.

So not just Tic Tac Toe, but also an element of chess conflict in that I might place a pawn to try to score a 3 in a row, but the opponent might place a rook from his reserve pile on my pawn to eliminate it and take the spot. Losing a piece would then cause a loss of my total personnel numbers like in the current system.

The turn based aspect could be simplified even more. Say make it like Battleship, where the first turn is hidden deployment turn, and then the second turn the action is revealed. Except on the first turn, the whole force is deployed. On the second turn, any overlap conflicts are resolved Then Scoring say a 3 in a row on the colony center would be a critical victory. But failing that on the third turn, the battle would then get random like it currently is---a linear exchange.
The current tactics system could be converted to the tic tac toe formula, with the effects and destroyed planet tiles being resolved on the second turn.

To make it even more interesting, the Tic Tac Toe field could actually be the planet map, and the squares could have actual dominant terrains that would favor some units over others. So my jump pack infantry might be moderately strong everywhere, but my super-heavy tanks would only excel on plains, and be hurting in swamps or mountains. The net effect being to decide who would beat who if placed on each other.

My reason---just to have a more detailed army---with tanks, etc... like MOO3.

There is a certain point past which the game moves away from TBS to TBT (Turn-Based Tactics). At this point, you may as well play a game like Front Mission or Disgaea. I like GalCiv because although combat is an integral part of the game, it is not the only part.

If you ask me, there's no need to create a whole new combat engine, just to add a couple of enhancements to the one we have (target priority, ability to retreat from battles, limited battle length).

For Tactical Combat, there are only a few things I would like:

1. The ability to choose the priority list individually for each one of your ships to shoot enemy ships in a certain order.

2. The ability for faster ships to be able to disengage at will. They get moved to a neighboring parsec as a result.

3. The ability for slower ships to disengage if the faster ships choose not to chase. They get moved to a neighboring parsec as a result.

4. The ability for the player to choose the priority order in which starbase modules attack enemy ships.

5. The ability for military starbases to be able to shoot at any enemy ship in their influence radius with what are currently ship-assist weapons.

I quite like this idea:


The players role in this game is that of an emperor. You may be the commander in chief of the military but you're not the leading flag officer of every single fleet.

I'd like to be able to make some decisions regarding how combat is dealt with but I don't want to actualy control my ships in a real-time fire fight because such a thing would quickly get tedious, as so many people have pointed out in various places.

Inncidently, has anyone ever played Imperium Galactica 2? I bought GalCiv 2 (In my frustration over the fact that that game wouldn't work on my new computer.) because it looked similar (Most notably with designing ships). IG2 was real time but, assuming you weren't playing a multiplayer game, you could change the game speed freely. Combat (In space, above planets and on planets.) was controllable but the only real important decision that was ever neccessary was 'Retreat'. Retreating was often messy though...

I thought what some of what I wrote in my first post should be located here (below the line)

MOO2's flaw was one side getting to attack first killing the other side, yada yada yada but for the most part i think we can all agree, MOO2 was simple, and it worked for it's time, hell i think it still works.

i like to see realism in games and i hope the people at stardock try to implement what i wrote.

i'd also like to say that in games like medieval 2 total war, lords of the realm, etc, i always "AUTO CALC" the battles. i don't want to play starcraft or C&C, i want to run a galactic empire simulator. but the ability to tell my ships to "engage the enemy behemoth" OR the troop transports first or launch fighter/bomber wings against capitol ship X would be a very good thing, as well as retreat.




-----------------From my First Post Below-------------------------

maybe i'm too biased towards MOO2 still being my fav but I think a system where:

all weapons damage shields first
all weapons damage armor second
all weapons damage structure (hitpoints) third

with the exception of ecm tech having a chance for missiles to miss completely is more realistic.

anyways, this enemy ship with approx 70 shields and 5 guns or missiles destroyed my 3 ships with 50 lasers and 5 shields each(or something like this, it was months ago)

it makes more sense to me that my 50 lasers should have worn down that 70 shield in 2 shots minus the shield regeneration rate per second leaving my 2 ship to partially hit armor while the 3rd ship hit all armor on the first attack roll. this leads me to another point about massive numbers of low tech ships VS 1 high tech ship. This is why MOO3 was poor as 5 of my lower tech task forces were wiped out 1 by 1 by a more advanced enemy task force. i am not a fan of fleet limits and i know i would have won had my 5 fleets been allowed to engage the 1 enemy fleet at the same time.

fleet limits make the game all about TECH and not about strategy so to win the game the startegy is all the same. design and build a better product, it does not matter if your second generation ships outnumber your enemies 4th generation ships by 22 to 1, you're going to lose, not lose in huge epic battles, but be wiped out completely in equalized 10 versus 10 combat.

in case you're confused, here's an example:

gen 2 / gen 4 (tech levels)
22 to 1 ratio =
220 ships to 10 ships

the battle should be 220 ships versus 10 ships

with fleet limits the war consists of 22 battles of 10 versus 10
-strength in numbers doesn't apply so we have the generation 4 ships kicking the tar outta the gen 2's meaning that the gen 2 civilization has no chance in hell so give up and start again.

This may have been suggested earlier, but I didn't read all of the above posts and don't know for sure.

Planetary invasion should be much slower, not the 'click to win' deal it is currently. I think you should have to conquer a planet one improvement at a time. This would make planetary invasion both expensive and time-consuming, and invading a class 30+ would make for some really epic battles. It would also make it more strategic, such as the enemy relocating troops to defend certain high priority areas like starports. Meanwhile, the invaders are also trying to conquer said starport, so that they can easily land reinforcements on the planet without worrying about orbiting ships. Farms could help by slowly rebuilding armies, factories could raise the invader's soldiering bonus by providing weapons, and research facilities could lower the enemy's soldiering bonus by rendering their tactics and weapons obsolete. Planetary defense stations would be far more valuable because they would be helping out in many battles, rather than just one. Farms would be immensely important, since without a large population, there would not be enough soldiers to effectively defend a planet. Planets would have to be built with more balanced improvements, since a technological capital with lots of research facilities and no starport would be very vulnerable.

Anyway, that's my two cents...

If Galactic Civilizations were to mate with Battleships Forever and have an offspring, that game would own the world. Seriously, it would be like Galaxy: Total War!

As Far as tactical combat goes, i would be happy if you just got some defensive options akin to those you get while invadeing!

I fail to see how this would require a massive rewriteing of the AI or the core game content.

In the most basic form I would be happy to get the ability to use mini soldiers as a defender if I had the tech, heck if I was evil and only cared about keeping the planet I would also like to be able to use gas warfare or tidal waves. Yes it would devastate my planet, but it would still be my planet!

In the little bit more advanced form the soldier reach branch will bring about some unique defensive techs to chose from. For example the use of nuclear missiles, gurilla warfare etc.

This way there would at least bit a bit of tactical combat, and invasions would perhaps even become fun, since as they are now... well I dont got a nice word for it but I guess boring covers it nice enough!

For a future sequel I would like that the term soldier is defined, and each planet can have a set % of its total population as a garrison. And only these troops can be used for defense and invasion. This combined with more sofisticated tactical choices, like wether or not you want to go for complete genocide or if you want to just pacify or enslave the civillian population. And for really outdoing it, make the option that ground combat will take more then a week.. because frankly planet scale wars with billions of troops and civillians would take way longer then a week even with complete air domminance etc, only if orbital bombardment is included could a planet be leveled in a week.

Thanks for reading this, hope it sparks some interresting responses!

Battleships Forever was interesting, but I'm surprised you've heard of it. Most people have never even heard of Game Maker (the program that game was created with), much less something created with it.