DozerOnTour

Why not clone Gratuitous Space Battles for use as the space combat engine? (Yes I realise it's been suggested before). In GSB, you can set policies for your fleet before you begin (to tell damaged ships to fall back, or for ships to shoot the same target at once, fighters to stay close or chase etc) but you have no control once the battle begins. You just watch. If you don't want to watch, I'm sure that a modern PC could accelerate a GSB-style battle so it takes place in a few microseconds!</

That's strange. I have GalCiv2 Ultimate, on DVD, and I could launch the three campaigns from the in-game main menu. I started with the Dread Lords campaign. The first three missions seemed to be 'research planetary invasion, then invade one planet'. The fourth (might be counting wrong) seems to be 'research planetary invasion, but get invaded by vastly superior forces before you can invade the one planet that's your objective'. At that point I gave up.