K, there are so many ridiculous things said in this thread I can't remember them all so I'll just address the ones that itched me worst:
* No emperors on the battlefield? well maybe no.. except for say, alexander, atilla, ghengis, the persian emperor
alexander fought (missplaced his name), and just a few of the ones made famous in western culture.
*an emperor wouldn't go down and command an army / it makes no sense -
Back to alexander, atilla, etc etc.
And it makes at least as much sense as the emperor of a galactic empire designing a fighter craft or directly controlling colonies.
As someone put fairly strongly and eloquently, if you took away the areas of interest you'll end up with a game of 'emperor having tea'. or worse, a game composed of a series of sliders and thats it.
* Tactical combat AI in moo2 was weak.
no, surely you jest, moo2s tactical AI was the best ever made and no progress has been made in computing power or AI programming in the last 10 years
And yeah, you can claim that tactical AI was weak in RTW, but mods could fix it, patches fixed it to an extent, and interestingly, its precursor, M:TW had fantastic AI, much better than RTWs, so try that one.
* "wouldn't want players with bad strategy to make up for it with brilliant tactics" /
I don't even know how to respond to that, but man, it itches
Some say that its too much work, well, expansions should be worthwhile.
I'll be damned if I buy an expansion that has an extra campagin and a couple of new ship graphics
OK I know civ4 is great even without tactical combat, but thats civ. it has a tradition and focus and very very intricate levels of control of whats going on for those who are proficient enough to get down there, but in a 4X game you're catering for a huge moo2 crowd thats used to having control over fleets.
anyway, even with galciv2s very simple combat system there can be fun added into tactical combat when you add range and speed of weapons and unique properties to some weapons a la moo2.
My own argument is that some form of tactical combat is a MUST because strategic gameplay means nothing without it.
Think about it:
As a strategic choice you decide to build a small fleet composed of one gigantic planet killer ship, and many smaller screening and point defense ships to protect it.
Now, you attack a planet with it.
Do your screening craft actually screen? do they protect? do they understand the tactical implications of your strategic choice? no. so you have to either command them to do it yourself, or click a button setting them to do it, but since that would necessitate adding a button for every possible tactical situation you can think of, doing it yourself is much better.
And to the toilet goesa lot of the strategic meaningfulness of fleet makeup and ship design