manual battles, why not any?

I am still playing Master of Orion 2 and Birth of the Federation because GalCiv2 has no Multiplayer (hope its in the next Addon) and some more control over battles would be great!   

I like the MoO2 fights where you can control every ship and action. But the BotF is not too bad either. You can give orders and formations.

Well, GC2 has no tactical combat. Besides, if you look carefully, all weapons have unlimited range and can hit any ship. The rule of the automated combat is to fire at the offensive ship that can be fastly killed. 

With theses rules, there is few need to have a manual control over the battle. One case is possible through: if the other side is composed of a fleet of various ships, designated to counter different weapons. if it is the case, your ships may target incorrectly a ship that defend well against your weapons instead of targeting first the ships that may appears stronger but are weaker against your weapons.

I'm not sure if anyone here has ever played Stars! but its what i would like to dub "hardcore 4x". Graphicaly things were rarely ever represented by more than pixels or pictures. Anyways the way battles were done in Stars! (I keep putting the exclamation point there because that was in the title) is that you gave your fleet a set of tactics before hand ex. maximize damage ratio, maximize damage, turn tail and run, minimize damage, etc. There were a whole host of possible options for any given situation. The battles were then played out on a grid. Units moved either as groups of ships or broken apart. They would then fire their weapons manueuver etc. It was much like a turn based board game. The result though were battles that were done instantly no player interaction but had the feel of player control. It was quite interesting. I could much more easily see a system like that being implemented in galciv 2 than a full blown player controlled system.

Anyways just my 2 cents

GC2 has no tactical combat or muiltiplayer because the devs want to focus on other parts of the game, either that or they simply don't like tactical combat.

btw: would be nice to have ships that fire in the direction of the gun not through other ships (belonging to you) or in the wrong direction.

I think frogboy said that GC2 was supposed to be a strategy game.

Thousands of times.

No TC until GC3. No MP until either the second/third expansion, or more likely GC3 (since it's less popular than the trolls would have you think)

There is already a whole bunch of management going on now in the game. For me I am glad I do not have to do the whole starship strategy thing myself. Not that I couldn't, just really don't want it to take from the rest of the game, which it would.

However, I would like to have more options when attacking, instead of just plain attacking. Like IanWorld had suggested. Give us a window prior to an attack, things like:

Hit and Run - Does max dmg for one round and then retreats, if ships have any movement left they can continue to move.
Standard Combat - Stays in for duration
Retreat - Leave after one round if combat initiated by another party

so on and so forth.

I think this would add just the right amount of strategy without making it overwhelming. It would be the same as the Planetary Assault screen that is currently used.

"Star Wars: Empire At War" presents an exceptionally pretty tactical combat, with reasonably accurate LucasArts-endorsed franchise ships in the bargain. I suggest that folks wanting tactical combat should go play that game, and not try to make GalCiv into Empire At War II.

However, that being said, I do like the idea of having individual fleet strategies set up: recon, line of battle, feint, retreat, etc. I kind of think that Stardock is coming to grips with this idea, given how they have evolved the combat system over the various patches.

I'd love to see a compromise system with different weapons designed to target different size ships. For example, researching Quantum topedoes would unlock a missile weapon effective only against Small or Tiny ships as well as a torpedo weapon that could hit only Medium ships and above. This would allow the creation of true fighters and bombers as well as add a layer of strategy for designing large ships. (A nice by-product is that small fighters would more easily be a credible threat to large ships.) It's not tactical combat per se, but it would make ship design more strategic.

btw: would be nice to have ships that fire in the direction of the gun not through other ships (belonging to you) or in the wrong direction.

It is all eye candy, the battle is 'decided' before they show it to you, you can hit the skip button and go right to the end. If you notice the star map will even change before the 'movie' scene even gets started. They just tossed the movie in to keep you entertained so don't be to concerned about range or weapons facing etc.

I like the two main ideas presented here. The most common one is battle planning. The other interesting thing is the idea of having weapons that go on certain size ship that damage certain size ships.

But in all fairness, you can customize the hell outta your ships, so if theyre not doing what you want them to during battles, theres really nobody to blame but yourself. And as far as the weapons go, it taks so long to get to the big ships with the big weapons, then to build the fuckers and have a nice fleet going. Theres a reason big ships are mighty, they are built to be so. I just dont think Id like it if some lil tiny sized ship came up and started blasting away on my Cosmic Destroyer MkIV that it took me 39 tech trees to build right. So I'd have to nip the second idea in the bud.

But in all fairness, you can customize the hell outta your ships, so if theyre not doing what you want them to during battles, theres really nobody to blame but yourself. And as far as the weapons go, it taks so long to get to the big ships with the big weapons, then to build the fuckers and have a nice fleet going. Theres a reason big ships are mighty, they are built to be so. I just dont think Id like it if some lil tiny sized ship came up and started blasting away on my Cosmic Destroyer MkIV that it took me 39 tech trees to build right. So I'd have to nip the second idea in the bud.

Good points. Still, I wasn't thinking of it as a fix to the current system as a way to add some depth to it. I find almost trivially easy to build a huge ship that can steamroller over everything, but fleets of small ships--even ones built with good miniaturization and tech--little more than cheap defense ships, especially once you factor in attrition from multiple battles. It's even worse against the AI; I regularly see battles of 6-9 Small fighters with respectable weaponry vs. one of my big ships where the big ships wins with barely a paint scratch. It would indeed suck if a Tiny ship could take on a Huge ship and win, but a whole wing of fighters ought to have a chance.

I agree with the OP. I played the hell out of BotF for several years for two main reasons: 1. the fact that it was a Star Trek game and 2. the fact that it had tac battles. In these battles you could choose from a half dozen formations that could either aid or hinder your attack depending on the formation your opponent chose. You also would target a class of ship in your enemys fleet [all the destroyers or all the dreadnaughts] or if you wanted you could individually target enemy ships for more control. You then would hit the turn button and the battle would play out in something like a 2 or 3 second real time chunk. Then it would automatically pause and you could hit the turn button again or change your formation and targets.

It was a simple, easy and fast system; and it was fun. Of course you could also auto-resolve, and it would automatically crunch numbers and give a result like GalCiv2 [without the preety fleet combat simulator]. But it was much more fun to control your ships, even in this limited way, so that your decisions could win or lose a battle.

If something along these lines were added to GalCiv2 [added to the existing logistics feature] this game would rock even more than it does now.