There's an easy to way to do it: Unanchor your shipyard and send it to the position you want to measure. It's so slow you will only change its position by one tile, but it will show you how many turns it will take to go to the new position. Since it moves at 1 tile per turn, the number is equal to the distance you want . Of course this will only work if the two tiles you want to measure are from the shipyard. If it's elsewhere then, no!

I dunno, I'd be pretty surprised to be able to place them anywhere on the (discovered) map.  For instance, that'd mean I could park a colony ship one tile away from an extreme planet.  Or I could plop a death fleet on an unsuspecting opponent (if I spent enough).  I mean, I suppose it could work that way (and use something like the map editor engine to place the merc), but I'll be at least a little bit surprised if it does end up working that way.

What I suspect will happen is that they will be based out of somewhere and then travel from that spot to the destination you want.  What the mec base actually ends up being tied to (an actual bazaar tile on the map, your homeworld [like many of the other unlocked units given by ideological choices], an improvement built on [one?] colony) is what I am interested in. 

Still, you could be right.  Find out soon enuf.

If you have a ship selected, hold control and hover the cursor over the tile you want to travel to. A small box will display the number of tiles as well as the time it takes the ship to get there. In your situation, you could use nearby ships or build a cheap scout for this. Unfortunately it does not work with shipyards or planets selected.

Oh, so this is where we get to pay for races from previous games that weren't included in the new version for whatever reason 

Quoting dbuchmann,

reply 58

Oh, so this is where we get to pay for races from previous games that weren't included in the new version for whatever reason 

No because you can choose not to.

Except at the end of GC II and all of its expansions, there were 12 factions.  Expecting a brand new game to have ALL of those factions with unique tech trees and ship styles and other things is, frankly, unrealistic. Hell, custom tech trees wasn't even in the base game for GC II from what I understand.  The fact that GC III has unique(ish) tech trees for each faction puts it leaps and bounds ahead of the base game for GC II.

And I keep mentioning the base game because comparing this to a fully expanded game at the end of its life just isn't fair.  GC III has more things in it at is base game than GC II did.   GC II did have a couple of more factions at launch.  But since they didn't have unique trees, it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.  As a side point, last I heard, the road map for GC III will be 16 total major factions (I don't know if this includes the Snathi Revenge or not).  That will indeed put it beyond GC II.

Complaining about this is kinda like complaining about "new/old" factions appearing in the various iterations of Civilizations.  I mean, one doesn't expect all of the features/factions of the last update of a Civ game to appear in a brand new version of the base game of Civ.  Or at least one shouldn't, IMO.  

Finally while I sympathize a bit on the "multiple copies" of the game bit, the fact is, this is a different game.  This ISN'T GC II mk 2 update 3.  It's a brand new game that builds upon the previous ones.  Much like Civ 5 was different from Civ 4 was different from Civ 3.

Frankly if they didn't include more races from GC II that didn't make the cut at the beginning for whatever reason in expansions/DLC/updates, I'd be the one that was miffed.

What is your confusion about tactical speed? It is the ship's speed while in battle. It dictates how fast a ship will reach its target, and so is useful on shorter range ships, while you want to keep longer range ships as slow as possible, as ships do not fly away from each other or maintain distance, they simply move ever toward their target.

More thrusters equal more evasion. 

Yes there is plenty of confusion over ship thrust and I hope it gets resolved in a way that makes it a useful thing to install on your ships. Currently I stay away from it because my understanding is it does nothing in terms of evasion, and the clsoing speed that you might expect to help for say kinetic ships appears negligible to me in the battle viewer.

I think ships should start a little further apart so the range advantage is more noticeable (and thus thrusters become more important), and also evasion chance should be added. The balance point to be aimed for I think is that adding it to kinetic firing ships should be an obvious benefit, while adding it to ships with a wider variety of weapons to be more problematic and situational. So yes I want them on my kinetic ships...but do I want them on my missile ships? Well.....(and of course you have to take opponent weapons into account.) Missile ships battling slow moving kinetic ships should have a clear advantage in battles.

I'll admit not knowing 'exactly'.

I only can tell you what I have observed. If i kit out a tank which has mostly defenses, 3 or 4 thrusters and only one weapon (usually a very fast mass driver) it will have 'evasion' of 50 to 60%. I can kit out the exact same hull and balance the weapons or have only say missiles and no thrusters (since you do NOT want to rush into any other weapon range) and it will not have the same evasion value.  

The tank gets the 'escort' tag.

while the missile boat would get the 'capital' tag.

Nope. Starting position is determined by role. If your role says you start forward, then you start forward. Default roles don't distinguish between weapon types. Missiles are best placed on Support ships, so they start as far back as possible and don't move toward the enemy.

Yeah, my apologies, I misread the post. I did think it was odd that The Sisko (who's game knowledge is usually impeccable) seemed to be saying what I thought he was saying.

Though weapons all use threat, so different weapon damage types (and so ranges) don't change the ship's role at all - which is a mistake imo.

Also, not sure there's a grammatical issue with the use of 'so' there. The 'they' in question refers to the missiles rather than the support ships, so 'because' wouldn't make sense from that point of view. 

I'd prefer having the dead time in too tbh. It's removal may be one of the reasons that the animations go out of sync.