My strategy isn't very sophisticated. I build a lot of tiny hulled fighters so I attack with overwhelming firepower. Arm them with missile weapons so they can shoot first and kill the enemy before they can fire back. I win most battles with these fleets.

The only thing that seems to weaken them is now fleets can only make 1 attack per turn, so now it takes at least a few turns for a lone fleet to clear out a star system of defenders. To counter this, I've been splitting my fleets so I can make more attacks in a turn, but this has lead to my fleets to be weaker and thus I've been suffering more losses than normal.

I don't use ship roles that much. I have only 2 ship roles: combatants and non-combatants. I think splitting up my forces any other way leads to fewer ships fighting at once, which reduces dps, which increases surviving enemy ships, which increases the amount of damage my fleets suffer.

I agree that full tactical combat would be terrible.

I suggest Stardock look at the Dominions series (by Illwinter) to get some really good ideas of how to give the player some very good agency in an otherwise automated combat. Setting formations, high level orders, and targeting priorities at a group level. Then these orders can be copied and pasted across different unit groups in the same or different armies. 

Beta 2 makes missile range equal to others.

The funny thing about the missiles is if we did't have the battle viewer in there, we woudln't have noticed just how OP they were.

I had this huge fleet of tiny ships with disruptors be taken out by a single, much weaker ship with a bunch of missiles.

Even though GC4 isn't on Steam, I still managed to leave a negative Steam review for it just in principle.

I've always believed that Missiles should have a longer range, but with limited ammo per combat. Energy Weapons should be great at medium range, damage dissipation at longer ranges, and a longer recharge rate than Kinetic Weapons. Kinetic Weapons only having a short range, but with a much faster recharge rate and massive damage.

This would make the weapons more distinct from one another, not so much rock- paper- scissors. It also makes different ship roles more distinct. Assault Ships with faster tactical speed, get in close to pound the enemy. Capital Ships firing missiles and launching fighters from afar. Escorts keeping Assault Ships at bay with lasers, and providing missile defense. 

Good suggestions. Torpedoes could be shorter range than missiles, and similar to energy weapons. Effected by ecm and shields could treat them like energy weapons. Whereas missiles have guidance systems, that can be disrupted by ecm. With point defense and shields (to a lesser effect), that would give 3 defenses against missiles.

I just want to through in some ideas.

- not too much micro-management

- you already got two mechanisms: missiles (at galaxy map) and markers (after action reports). Based on these two I could imagine an auto-anti-harassement-system (AAHS).

AAHS: buff damage and range at galaxy map. Turn on AAHS (for single fleets or empire wide). If enemy fleets enter the range of your missiles/squadrons(?) they will be attacked and maybe destroyed -> After-Action-Report (marker)

This would take all minor battles (i.e. one side is overwhelming the other) out of scope if we talk about any kind of tactical battle.

What tactical aspects could I imagine? We got ship roles. Maybe we could - depending upon logistic or another ressource (most experienced ship in fleet?) - change the roles of individual ships before battle?
Maybe: 1-10 logistic: you can change role of one ship. 11-20 logistic: you can change role of two ships. 21+ you can change role of three ships
Situation: one ship is assigned as assault ship and all others as escort/capital. You could switch this one ship to capital to have a well working force. This would be a motivator to work on the number of ships you can change (i.e. logistics/experience/...). Warmonger civs could get one switch extra. There could be a wonder too. But not too many sources. Choices could be saved for ships as long as they remain in their fleet.

Frogboy,  

Thanks for listening to our input on the Battle viewer!  I design most of my ships during play throughs and much of my story telling with Gal Civ focuses on how these ship lines are developed and why they exist.  Example:  I developed the Longbow Cruiser that had a longer ship range to fight a war on the other side of the galaxy.  It was so far away that I had to deploy two additional star bases to get there.

I really enjoy watching ships I've spent so much time designing flying around blasting away at enemy ships.  The cosmetic upgrades are looking good!  The ships look better than they did in GC3.

I agree with you that tactical combat is out of the question.  It would become way too tedious to constantly have to make decisions every battle.

I think improving the options for fleet planning is the most viable route when considering how to make combat more engaging.  

You may have already seen this, but I made a suggestion on I think combat could be improved here.

https://forums.galciv4.com/509104/page/1/#3830841

The tl;dr of it is that currently in GC3 I really only build medium combat ships.  Tiny and small hulls don't have enough hit points and large and huge ships quickly get overwhelmed by swarms from carriers.  I would really like to have a reason to build more than one hull size. It's any easy way to make battles more interesting to watch on the battle viewer and it makes logistical combat more interesting.  Example: A heavy hitting battle ship that is good against medium hulls surrounded by a swarm of tiny interceptors that are good at taking down small and tiny hulls vs a couple medium hull frigates that can rapidly remove tiny ships and are escorting a couple of bombers.

One way I can think of to try and get this variety would be to add individual ship roles to each hull type.  Tiny ships would have ship roles of "fighter" or "bomber" and each one would provide bonuses to it's combat capabilities vs other ships.  In the post I go into what could be done for each hull type.  

I would also bunch the ships closer together and keep them from straying to far.  In GC3 smaller ships would get ahead of the larger ships and bite the dust before the large and huge hulls could get anywhere near the combat zone.

I, personally, find it entertaining to design fleets at the macro level, especially since there are modules that magnify the entire fleet. 

I would love to see a fleet template manager where you can set up a template for a fleet with the various ships, roles, positioning, etc.  You could then show the fleet template name in the ship viewer side menu so you could quickly send your "rock" to take care of your opponents "scissors." 

For assembling the fleet once the template is created, you could either:

1) Have the fleet be a build option at the shipyard. The shipyard would queue up all the necessary ships, keep them docked at the shipyard until they are all complete, then send them to whatever rally point the shipyard is currently using once the fleet is assembled.

2) Designate a rally point to use a specific fleet template. As ships arrive at the rally point, they will automatically form fleets according to the selected template. You could also automatically select the nearest ships that would complete the template and route them to the rally point.

@transjeremy

You misunderstand me, sir. Its not like we dont like tactical combat in general. Otherwise i wouldnt have spent like 200 hours in Pathfinder kingmaker. But there is a difference between having tactical combat with (relatively) generic ships every round, which are, for the most part made to be disposable, or tactical combat with characters which are distinct from one another and which you formed an attachment to. (Crpgs, Xcom etc.)

Yes - tactical combat, even with generic units, would be infinitely more appealing if the units involved had special abilities and options to chose from (Age of Wonders for instance, or kings bounty) - but implementing this in the remaining months would be an immense undertaking. Unless you are willing to pay the developers for an extra year, i dont see how we can get that. And this game isnt made for that to begin with.

@imperious leader & others

That said - i think, not the actual "how missiles and CWIS" work within the confines of the automatic battle" is my issue with the game as it is, but the question ( or illusion) of agency, that I need to be invested in that battle. A smarter man than me once said: a well designed game ist just a chain of interesting decisions.

This is why i said we should have a battle planner before the actual battle. It literally could be just a screen with some pretty animations. Select your parts of the fleet, maybe use a leader ability, tell them how to conduct themselves in battle, tell them that "England confides that every man will do his duty" and send them off to pew pew each other.

I think this is something that we can realistically achieve - and it would go a looong way for me.

To remind us all:

"There is quite a bit more depth with both ship-to-ship combat and invasions. For this reason, combat doesn’t necessarily conclude in a single turn

In previous Galactic Civilizations games, combat and invasions always finished in a single turn no matter how many ships or soldiers were involved. Now, the number of turns it takes to complete a battle or an invasion depends on the forces that are involved."

This passage from the GalCiv4 FAQ, and the promise that it holds, is the main reason why I decided to take a risk on this game and bought early access, something that I abhor from normally. I have GalCiv 2 and 3 - that would have been enough, if not for this prospect. The new Leader system was a draw - but THIS was the tipping point for me.

In times like Warcraft 3 reforged and Cyberpunk, people should stop trusting developers with their money until the product is actually out.

However, i do trust stardock, bcs not only are they clearly passionate about this series, they are also, as far as i can tell, not under the heel of some publisher.

the ship combat as it is now however, falls short on that promise IMHO, using all your move points to fire generic missiles before a battle just isnt enough.

The problem that I would like to highlight is that in GC3 and currently in GC4 the combat system is very skewed towards a swarm of tiny ships. 

This is caused by the fact that a ship can only target one ship at a time.  If a huge ship has 6 powerful lasers, it can still only fire at one ship before recharging.  If it is fighting a swarm it can only take down one ship at a time which is far to slow and it is often annihilated in two volley's from the swarm.  There was no way to give a huge ship enough armor to even give it a chance.  

You could build a swarm of your own tiny ships, but carriers where by far the most effective means because building that many small ships could become tedious.

I think the easiest and quickest way to provide some balance between large and small hulls is to make smaller hull sizes do less damage to larger ships and maybe increase larger hulls fire rate.  

The goal of the player in combat is to maximize ship survivability and logistic points per weapon/armor/other.  Currently large and huge hulls fail to come close to achieving any of these goals and are often relegated to the back line as support ships.

I have played this game since GC2 and do not have even close to 12 major battles each turn.This is pretty lame excuse.The pointless one sided battles do not need to be played.