I'm not certain that ship design will be as big as it should be. It is fun, but the thing that I enjoyed about the primitive ship design that MoO II offered was the fact that I could actually see the results during battle. How I placed guns and modules on my ships effected what I was able to fire and how I was able to turn and which shields needed to recharge. I appreciate that GC 2 has made the weapons research more obvious and logical, but I miss the direct effect it had in combat that I could direct. MoO 2 seemed pretty simple. You had an area to move in and you chose targets to fire at. I'm sure that is hard on the back end, but it ended up being very gratifying when you where able to save your planet from an overwhelming force through clever tactics and ship design. Overall/Regardless, the game still more than makes up for it.

Crobderg, there's been a thread or two dedicated to debating the lack of tactical combat. Of the people that are active in these forums, most think it would take away from the focus of the game and/or throw off play balance. Brad chimed in with saying he didn't like it as well, which pretty much puts a nail in the coffin, in my opinion.

Crobderg, turn on your battle viewer for all battles. You'll get to see how your design tweaks do in actual combat. It's fairly informative.

MoO2's actual tactical layer didn't really add much to MoO2. It wasn't big enough to allow for a good variety of tactics. MoO3's tactical layer is big enough, but it has other things preventing it from being tons of fun.