Think M002 battles set to auto. The computer fights it out we watch. The intention is for fleet battles to look good and be more involved than watching a stack of ships just go pop on the map.

Stardock dont want the game to come down to how well you control your ships against an AI opponent, instead the focus stays on running an empire and your admirals run the battles for you.

I'm dying to see what it will look like!

At least, is the battle visible (like auto in MOO2), or a result is just presented to us ?
I mean, what's the point of customizing the appearance of your ships if you can't see them ???


The main interface confused me (which is like being in a cockpit) I guess. And in the beginning I thought that
you fight battles from within your ship (which I thought to be extraordinary) !!!
OK, I must say that I was a little disappointed when you told me that the battle will be "auto" and I shall not be able to destroy them from within my cockpit , but if we can at least watch, then it's ok. After all it's a strategy game, not a shoot-em-up arcade.


But imagine... Customizing your ship's hardware. Customizing your ship's appearance. And finally, flying it in the battle
(I don't mean just controlling it like MOO2 - I mean flying it, being inside the cockpit and shoot them in a dogfight).
Would this be COOL or what ?

Well, the implementation would be a little difficult I guess, but I think that all these programmers would definitely find out a clever idea to do so.
Perhaps in Galactic civs 3 ???
(I would like to hear STARDOCK' s opinion for this)

At least, is the battle visible (like auto in MOO2), or a result is just presented to us ? I mean, what's the point of customizing the appearance of your ships if you can't see them ???

The fleet battles will be shown in what stardock are calling a "scene view" while single ship engagements are done on the map like in GC1 (but much prettier). Here is a quote from the last Dev Journal about it written by Draginol:

Probably the biggest and most complex feature we've been working on is the fleet battles screen and fleet management system. It's not in Beta 3 at all but it will be part of Beta 3B. Beta 3B will only be available to a handful of beta testers so that we can nail down problems as we progress to beta 4. The fleet combat is really slick as you get to watch ships battle it out in a full screen view with Star Trek like battles. I have to say, it's definitely the most impressive "action" stuff I've seen us do before. There's about 2 months of effort into this feature. How that feature evolves will remain to be seen (depending on how much time we have). We want to stay away from having players control the battles in any way since most people won't want to do that, they'll want "auto" but that means having some "AI" do it which will never be as good as a human player (as long time MOO fans know). Hence, we don't want the overall effectiveness of a player come down to how good they are at tactical battles. Galactic Civilizations is a "clash of civilizations" games. Not a clash of tactician skills.

Sounds good to me, and very much in character for the game.