Would Action Points work well in this scenario? Units having certain points that can be used for firing, movement, defense, flanking, etc.

LOL! Hope you don't mean Fallout 3! But seriously, one option for ship building may be instead of hitting harder is to hit more often (speed).

Action points might actually rock.

Just an idea that i haven't thinked trough, i think it while i write it now, so bash it if its crap.

In fleet's you could create squadron's.

If fleet size would be 20 ships (not speaking about max fleet size, just for the purpose of this example).
You could have X number of squadrons in there, 20 if you like (your really not wanna do that).

So lets create 3 squadrons:

5 fast ships
5 defense heavy ships
9 damage dealing ships and the 1 "main ship".

You could give orders to your different squadrons between turns. Might be cool idea if the battles would go "real" turns, so the last long time and are not solved in 1 turn (unless of course your killing scout with a dreadnought".

Orders would be like this:

Get in front/back/left flank/right flank/below/on top of this (selected, can be hostile also) squadron.
Keep @ range very close/close/medium/medium far/far (also selection is squadron)
Flank left/right/top/bottom
Focus fire on X squadron
ECM that squadron

ETC ETC.

You could only give one fire command and one movement command per squadron per turn.

Issuing command costs Action points.

Your ships will always autofire if in range, so fire command is needed only if you want to change target.

You press turn, and the battle plays out.

Im not a coder or software developer, so i dont know how much resources would need to be commited on this. But my personal opinion in this would be it might be cool, but i really would not want this to take too much resources from the grand strategy side.

 Also one point to consider is that implementing system like this might give stuff to grand strategy side also: What weapons to build, what kind of ships and fleet compositions to use ? Do i need ECM ? Do i need ECCM ? fast close range or slow long range ? etc.

That said, im still not convinced its a good idea. 


EDIT: one more thing i forgot, the orders do need AP, and the AP would be very limited, thats why you want to have low number of squadrons, coz the more you have the more you would need to spend ap on ordering them around, the AI would never leave fleets to do nothing, but your orders should have some morale bonus or whatever. so you only use AP on most important decisions. 

There does need to be some sort of penalty for stacking multiple fleets on the same hex.  That was a nuisance in GC2, the AI would spam hordes of cheap useless fighters often 3-4 to a tile.

Ya. It's not a very good idea and it was also written kind of poorly on review. I'm basically trying to think of ways that you could add tactical choices into the strategic map. I want more in depth combat, but I don't want a tactical combat system. (I want to have my cake and eat it too.) It's a quandary that I haven't been able to puzzle out in any quality way yet.

Your brain controls fingers, beacuse King Twitch can think faster, make correct decisions faster, hes better not because he has magic fingers.

Something interesting: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0070350

LOL at this thread.  Reminds me of the dawn of computing power.

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if the map had more than just monsters and NPCs, like, I don't know, horses and cows?"

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if we can kill those horses and cows?"

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if we can bbq the meat from those horses and cows?"

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if our heroes can eat bbq?"

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if our heroes got hungry so they have to hunt?  I mean, why give us the ability to kill horses and cows if our heroes never had to eat?"

"Hey guis, wouldn't it be cool if our heroes had to poop?  I mean, all that food have to go somewhere right?  Why don't we make it so that you have to go sleep at an inn to poop, and if you don't poop for a long time, you start to lose health?"

"TOTALLY RAD!"

...or not.  I don't know about the poop part, but the rest of it actually happened (along with "hey guis wouldn't it be cool if your equipment wore down and then broke down").

Megalomania total control/real life simulation (LOL, why do I want to simulate real life?  I have my own) sounds fun until it gets implemented, and then you realize it's just tedium.

It looks like it'll still be "rock, paper and scissors".

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/15/stardocks-galactic-civilizations-3-revealed

+1 For tactical combat, personally I prefer the real-time combat  of Pax Imperia 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ceYoFQbAjpU#t=626) (boy do I wish someone would make a sequel to that game)

No tactical combat was my absolute biggest gripe with GalCiv 2 (next to no multiplayer then of course).

And if you guys do implement it (crossing fingers ) please let there be an option for spectating on allied players combat in multi. Makes that wait for the next turn much more manageable. It gives you something to do while waiting as you're able to give combat advice in real-time and thus you're partaking in the combat a little bit.

Maybe he should have continued reading, because the next paragraph of the article says this (emphasis mine):

Wardell says the customization plays into the overall idea that your fleet, tailored to your particular choices, has a goal, and is good at a particular thing. Maneuverability. Strength. Defensibility. Indeed, Galactic Civilizations III expands on the core rock-paper-scissors system of previous games, but Wardell hesitates to elaborate on specifics.

I like rock, paper, scissors! Napoleonic tactics etc. At least, in a soft-counter way rather than hard-counter... (if that makes sense?). Requires one to use combined arms rather than spamming one unit.

Rock Paper Scissors systems only ever work because there so simple they are impossible to screw up. I would rather see a real system. Calling rock papers scissors strategic or even tactical is inaccurate to say the least. I would prefer a system where I have to think a little deeper then just looking at a my enemies units and building whatever their incredibly obvious weaknesses are. Doing that doesn't make me feel challenged it makes me think I'm playing a game for 6 year olds.

Imagine what will happen in multiplayer with 2 half way decent players. Everyone will just cover there bases and the effects will even out. I observe they are weak to missiles and they observe me building missiles and counter so I change and so on and so on until we meet in the middle and the system becomes irrelevant. That's what happens when you have a system so ridiculously simple.