Hehehehe, i suggested the possibility of retreating back in Galciv2.

The problem is that retreating is just too unrealistic,, no armed forces ever retreat in real life, so why would they put such an obviously unrealistic thing in this game??? (extreme sarcasm alert by the way)

Well what you are doing is posting your opinion and then adding a link so you can have the last say and no one will disagree with you here, nice trick!

But nope. My answer is that plenty of other games have made various different forms of retreating work, this is fact, end of argument. The only valid question is weather or not it is worth the investment of implementation, that i don't know?

Instead of just asking for the ability to retreat you could propose a possible implementation and analyse it for (potential)problems and maybe propose solutions for those or alternative implementations. Also you should just ignore realism and focus on what would be good for the gameplay.

GC3 is my first turnbased space strategy game so I can't think of anything right now but other people have mentioned possible implementations but most posts lack a more in-depth analyse.

Edit: Thought about it for a bit and my suggestion would be:

1. You can only retreat before the fight starts.

2. Only ships with higher thrust and movement than any enemy ship can retreat from the fight, the rest has to fight like normal.

But then there is still the problem of how the retreating fleet is moved on the map.

3. The ships that could retreat are move in some way ^ and the movement points are take from their next turn, when they have no movement points left they can't retreat anymore.

No in battle retreat because it doesn't make sense to allow for in battle retreat but no other tactical control. So that wont happen unless the rework the combat as a whole.

Not really, he's pointing out that implementing it is more complex than just 'can it be done', and then pointing out half a dozen threads where we've discussed it in great detail, looking at the pros and cons and feasibility of adapting GC3 to work properly with the mechanic. This is also pretty much how any serious debate on any given topic works; when pointing to a conclusion you reference how you came to it.

Yes. Lots of other games have also implemented first-person combat. Does that mean the only valid question regarding whether it should be in GC3 is 'is it worth the investment of implementation'? Likewise, I hear that the FIFA series has managed to introduce a fairly impressive simulation of football into their games. Why is this absent from GC3? Or is this line of argument critically flawed?

As a whole, this forum is not overwhelmingly hostile to the idea of adding retreating into the game. But implementing it requires more justification than 'other people have done it so it should be in', because as things stand it'd just be adding more micro to a game that's already dripping in it. That means that while the end result is still likely to be the same (you kill the enemy fleet), the effort of achieving it is made much higher for not serious benefit.

I don't know what your talking here??? To me, it is a perfectly normal part of human existence to observe and learn from what others have done, especially if its 'relevant'... relevant, relevant, relevant,,, to what you are doing,,, OBVIOUSLY.

If one want to see why retreat ability isn't generally part of the games, all one has to do is check out the tv series named Battlestar Galatica the new one, to see how unfun that would be. Its very very difficult to destroy ships that's unwilling to fight you if they have FTL capabilities. Cylons try to wipe the humans out but that tiny group of 60+ ships just retreated every single time the cylons engaged unless Cylons engaged them in very small numbers only then the humans fought. XP

Retreating wouldn't be that hard to implement. 

Just needs some chase down mechanics, and new tech/devices that prevent warping away (retreating). Maybe in the jamming tech line.

But if that one scout was armed with lost technology that let it obliterate whole fleets.... The laughter will soon turn into screams of terror.

Why? If you didn't want the battle and you had enough movement points to end your turn beyond the enemy's reach, then you should have ended your turn somewhere beyond the enemy's reach.

Moreover, this game already greatly favors the aggressor; it does not need to compound that advantage by making it so that if the aggressor screws up by leaving ships within the striking range of potential threats (known or not) that the aggressor gets to get off scot-free at little cost to the aggressor's mobility. With even the speeds of the ships that the computer uses, it's already reasonably likely that interception attempts will only be possible for a turn before a strike fleet or invasion force reaches its target, even if the aggressor doesn't use all their actions every turn. Making many of these interception attempts quite likely to fail even without the involvement of actual battle fleets screws the defending side over even more than is already the case.

My experience must be completely different from yours, because in my experience it would appear that the ability to execute a strategic withdrawal on the opponent's turn is not a common feature of turn-based strategy games. The only TBS games I can think of off the top of my head that allow me to execute a withdrawal at the strategic level on the enemy's turn without first fighting an engagement are all in the Total War series, and to be perfectly honest I do not consider that to be a positive feature of that series. I would also point out that the ability to make a strategic withdrawal is already in the game - you do, after all, have the ability to move your units as you choose on your turn, and if you choose to do so you can withdraw your forces rather than leaving them in more exposed positions.

I would furthermore point out that if the decision to withdraw is taken when the opposing forces meet, the withdrawal is much closer to being a tactical withdrawal than a strategic withdrawal, especially since said withdrawal would probably only involve the unit attacked and not directly cause the withdrawal of any of the other units of the same faction in the same area.

To be perfectly honest, I am not terribly concerned about chasing down fleets when I'm the aggressor and close to winning or conquering a region, though that is still something worth caring about because it's far less risky for my fleets to hunt down individual ships or small fleets before they can group up than it is for me to destroy those same ships in a smaller number of larger fleet battles. It's more when I'm trying to defend that I care about having to chase down fleets; the aggressor already has a significant advantage in this game due to the very high movement speeds attainable and does not need to compound that with immunity to losses due to poor ship placement at the end of a turn. Stopping a high actions/turn fleet before it reaches its target is bad enough when it cannot save five or ten of its actions to tell your intercepting forces to go bugger themselves five or ten times before your intercepting forces can force a fight.

There is also the issue that the computer (or the player, if so inclined) could stack up a large number of individual units (whether ships or fleets just large enough not to be able to combine with one another) between me and a target, which I will then have to push through, wasting a number of actions equal to the number of fleets I have to push through or to the number of extra tiles I have to move to go around them. If these ships aren't destroyed when I push through them, the computer can do the same thing again and again and again, on the next turn and the one after that and the one after that, or on some future turns, or even on the same turn (depending on implementation; after all, under current mechanics it isn't clearly a good idea for retreating ships to leave the tile that they had occupied, as there could be other ships belonging to the same faction in that tile, which means that the attacking fleet cannot necessarily occupy the tile which the retreating unit had occupied, and if the retreating ships do get to move back a tile but the attacking fleet does not move into the attacked tile the attacking fleet now has to spend two actions to reengage; scattering the units on the tile occupied by the retreating unit is also problematic since one of the ways to protect a valuable but weak unit is to stack powerful units on top of it so that those units must be engaged to attack the weak unit, and it introduces conceptual issues if a fleet that retreats causes everyone else to run away but no one cares when a fleet in the same location is destroyed).

Also, just because one of the win conditions for the game is to conquer my enemies or otherwise acquire their worlds does not mean that my war objective has to be conquest. I play games to have fun; if the Drengin Empire declares war on me but I don't want to end the game yet, chances are that I'm not really going to go all out trying to conquer the Drengin Empire and I may well be satisfied with just wrecking their military.

Oceanic navies historically didn't fight in the middle of the open ocean - more on that in a second - but instead fought at or around objectives. Meeting engagements occurred when one (or both) fleets were patrolling and looking for a fight, and even those were usually near ports, coastlines and choke-points. As navies moved from sail to steam (and then from guns to aircraft and missiles) the engagement range got longer and battles moved out into the open sea because the scouting range increased. But typically a naval battle occurs in response to one fleet attempting to carry out a mission and its opponent responding to that.

So I think what we need is a three-part solution. First, change the invasion mechanics (probably coming soon) to require more than just one super-fast cargo hull with one transport module on it for success. And secondly, instead of permitting retreat from combat, permit an interception. It would work like this for both the human and AI player:

A fleet begins its move. Once it enters enemy sensor range, an enemy fleet (or fleets in sequence, not together) may move and attack over a distance equal to 1/2 its movement allowance. May - not must - depending on how the AI (or the human players) evaluates the chance of success.

And thirdly, change the AI so it doesn't put lots of ships in orbit around every planet. This allows you to smash them in detail and actually makes the Ai think it is strong when it really is divided and weak. A few tiny or small ships to hold off a lightly-escorted transport is fine - but for the rest it needs to build good, fast warships, assemble them in fleets and invade or intercept.

I still have not come up with a satisfactory solution for retreating, I'm geting closer but there are still unsolved problems.

However I have fleshed out a suggestion for interception and a similar mechanic in my suggestion thread under the Denial of Area Section.

In contrary to Director's suggestion there is no evaluation of the chance of success. Any hostile inside the area will get attacked, so you better be sure you want to activate that mode. With all the exploits in the current battle system, the ai wouldn't be able to judge the chances correctly anyway.

Hm... There's one thing I'm wondering about: When do you guys want to retreat, in what kind of situation?
Because in my opinion if you have a fleet in the range of an enemy and you don't have enough movement points to get out of their range on your turn why should you be able to get away on his turn.
If the problem is moving a ship that then reveals an enemy and then you don't have enough mp to get away I have an entirely different solution that doesn't involve a special retreat mechanic. Simply make a gameplay option that makes ships stop their movement when they reveal an enemy, so you have to reaffirm the movement order.
If instead you park your ship somewhere with leftover mp and tell it to rereat, in case of combat an enemy enters it's sensor range, to someplace you selected, that would also be reasonable.

So my imo those two would be implementable without causing problems: Reaffirm move on enemy reveal and Retreat on sight (to a predefined location)
This would require no changes to the combat mechanics because if you want to change them you might as well completely overhaul them, which would need a lot more work.

Thanks John1979 for sparking this idea or at least make me think about it from a different viewpoint, which then lead to the above train of thought.m I'll add those two to my suggestion thread.

Pop ups are not good imo, they break the flow of the turns, which in singleplayer might be no problem but it's one in multiplayer.
Look at it from the other side: You're the attacker and you attack a ship but then you need to wait for the other player to confirm. In a turn based game where turns can take a long time, the other person might not even be paying attention cause it's not his turn... It would also break a possible play by email system which in people like to use in such a game...

So I would rather stick to solutions that don't require popups for players other than the one who is playing his turn.
In my suggestion the ship retreats when an enemy enters its sensor range, but if the enemy has enough movement points to catch up with it and still attack it, there should be no way to escape. So this would not help with ships trying to join up since they usually they used their full move on their turn and a ships avoiding a battle when it can't even move on the map would be very silly.

And I don't understand why you insist on making your choice on the enemy turn, it's not consistent with any other mechanic. I'd rather have a consistent system based on sensor range and decisions made on your turn.