For me, in GalCiv 3 was the battle viewer one of the most important features. Why? It was the result of my work. I have researched technologies, created my own ships (with the incredible ship designer), builded a big fleet and now i want to see my ships in action. This was a little bit like a soccer game. Will my strategy work? Which ship will destroyed? Will i win? and so one.

So, it will be ok for me to see the battle on the main map. But only if the fight is as detailed as in GAlCiv3. And one of those details is that I can click on a ship and see the shield and hit point during the fight.

I got a chance to observe the battles currently in 0.60.  You have to zoom in on the fleet before you start a battle.  I can't say I like the change if this the final product.  These 0.60 battles aren't worth watching in my opinion.  I'd much rather have the battle viewer as it was in GC III.  The new graphics for the ships are so good and it's a shame if we'll never get to see them zip around one another firing lasers, bullets, and missiles.  

I think, if you will be developing a "battle viewer" on the screen, it should be perfected in the "battle view arena".  Right now, things are barely different than before.

I'd much prefer the "Pirate Alliance" be fixed.  It is far more important than visuals to me.

Yes ,we need a battle viewer cause actually some people would like to see the whole battle taking place.

Yes please keep the battle viewer.  I find it really helpful to see the battle play out to see which weapons and defences have been effective.

It is also entertaining to see the ships you have so carefully designed  perform in action.

During your turn, if you clicked on a tile that a battle took place in would it be possible to zoom in on it and see a looped recording of that battle? Would it be possible to see ships that you designed fighting in that battle?

Would it be like watching a battle in SOASE where you have full control of the camera and can select and zoom in/out of whichever ship you want?

I know there won't be tactical battles that you can control in GalCiv 4 but I think it would be fun if you could watch the battles and control the camera zooming in and out, turning and panning the camera as you wish. You could do this in GalCiv 3 but I found the camera controls wonky and I couldn't watch the battles the way I wanted to. 

Being able to watch the battles would be a great opportunity for some battle chatter from both sides. If you are clearly dominating the enemy then the battle chatter would reflect that e.g. "We caught them with their pants down". 

The battle chatter would reflect the personalities of the species involved.  

At the start of the battle there would be a broadcast from both sides, the side initiating the engagement would broadcast first. 

If you are fighting an enemy similar to the Borg from Star Trek, at the start of the battle you would hear something similar to the infamous line "We are the Borg, prepare to be assimilated, resistance is futile". 

If you are fighting the Drengin they would tell you how puny and pathetic you are and that they will crush you like the insects you are etc.

It would also be great if the battle chatter could give you an idea of how effective/ineffective your weapons/defences are. 

When hearing battle chatter you'd also hear background effects that give you an idea of the health of the ship e.g. battle chatter from a ship at full health will be clear with some muffled weapons fire in the background. Battle chatter from a heavily damaged ship will have much more interference with sounds of explosions, decompression and screams in the background (unless it's Yor, the Yor don't scream) 

If a ship is about to be destroyed you'd hear battle chatter like "power core going critical!". 

This is probably beyond the scope of GalCiv 4 but it would be cool if you could zoom right up to the bridge of a warship and see the crew in action. Or watch as a mass driver punches a hole in the side of your ship causing that section to decompress and you'd see the venting of atmosphere and crew! 

Will debris persist during the battle? It would be cool if an energy beam carved a ship into two and those pieces floated across the battlefield.

Same.  I thought I was alone in asking to keep it

Implement the idea you just proposed then ask what players think about it a month later because we all know that the next patch or update might take a while since all of them do. 

Give people time to check it out, to provide feedback.    

The player should most definitely have the OPTION to be able to see every ship in a fleet when a battle occurs no doubt about it regardless of anyone else's opinion.  That's just what Gal Civ has evolved to become, it's a part of the game.  This is one main reason why there's a 'SHIP DESIGNER' in the first place, the battles are the test field to see how those different designs perform.

However, some battles hold more significance during the course of a playthrough, than others do so the 'quick battle' should always be on the table as a choice.   

 What if the player could ZOOM In on the battle hex on the Strategic Sector map and it expanded into another hexed instance with all the ships on both sides represented? 

Battles could be turn based instead of real time.   There's a game called Interstellar Space Genesis by Praxis games that does it this way and it works.  It's rudimentary because it's an Indie developer but I believe that Stardock could really bring it to the next level if this was the chosen route. 

What I'm saying is if we are looking at a stack in a single hex, what if when zoomed in to a fleet battle that hex expanded into a bunch of smaller hexes on a smaller scale representative of that larger single Sector Hex,  with all the ships on both sides shown on that zoomed in fleet battle hex in the context of a new instance of many hexes on a different scale.   

IF that could be pulled off or implemented in a seamless fashion with no loading screen, just a seamless transition, imagine how cool that would be.    

The special effects of combat if done in an impressive way, and they aren't half bad even on the strategic map, just brief and very tiny in this Alpha right now, (thus my confidence in Stardock to actually pull it off),   could carry the idea and the game itself to the finish line very easily. It would be an asset to the process of 'getting it done' as it were.  

To be perfectly honest the real time battles in Gal Civ II and III are sort of sloppy.     What makes the 'real time' battles cool in Gal Civ II and III are the special effects.  When ships fire a weapon, when the weapon hits, the deflection of shields, maybe chunk of armor being blasted off of a ship by a missile or kinetic round hitting it, point defense hitting a missile in mid flight to the target and so on and so forth.   Special effects in Gal Civ 2 and 3 carry those 'Real Time' battles but in the case of a turn based situation, it would accentuate it. 

Imagine this, a stream of rounds, a turn based burst if you will,  flowing from a rotary kinetic weapon hitting the armored plate of a targeted ship and it starts to glow red before it disintegrates, sending metal particles into space visible for an instant,  under the onslaught of the stream of dense exotic metallic rounds just before the targeted ship explodes.....cool idea ain't it?   

What if each of those rounds contained an explosive tip?  (Tech Tree upgrade). 

I think you should keep it, this game is FAR too impersonal as it is and getting rid of even the cinematic style battles will just make everything more.... clinical, sterile even.

Also, not to sound pushy, but it's been 35 days since your last news update. Any chance we're getting another news and/or content update at any point before Thanksgiving?

Everyone has  dif view. Just give us the option(s) to deal with it.

I really like the ship editor that GalCiv is known for. So that's the fundament from which to tackle this question, in my opinion.

The question is how we can still keep all the time a player spends in designing his or her ships relevant in the game?

The battleviewer wasn't very interesting to me personally, but there also wasn't an alternative to viewing my designs in glorious battle. So the first few battles I often watched, but as the game went on I started to ignore the viewer.
Not ideal whichever way you look at it.

If we can replace the viewer with battles fought on the map it will have to be with enough details with regards to visual fidelity so your work in the ship designer is not for naught.
It's also about relevance to a game mechanics perspective, however. As others have pointed out, the battle viewer also functioned well as a 'tactics analyzer' and so this would have to be reflected somehow on the galaxy map instead.

Options to skip them, or at least not let them take too much time, are also important. Its easy to see where mop up fleets would become annoying if you need to watch every battle play out. Also, late game with lots of fleets might become tedious if players need to watch all battles. So some form of skipping them must be present.

In the end I wouldn't mind getting rid of the battle viewer if there is a nice replacement for it, be it in a different or more streamlined form like on the galaxy map.

But I would be very dissapointed if battles would be reduced to textlogs or similar. It would totally kill my enthousiasm with using the ship designer.

So we've decided to have an AAR option where players can review battles that occurred which includes an updated battle viewer.

We're going to be delaying the beta as a result.