How about adding gunnery skill.

I like that! I've thought for a while that having a completely random distribution for attack and defense seems wrong. I have 30 defense and you have 30 offense. A decent roll by you of say 23 (about 3/4 firepower) and a slightly not so great defense roll of 8 (about 1/4 defense) and I take 15 damage.

There would need to be a similar one for defense as well... A way to assure almost always getting full defense and almost always getting full offense would be nice.

Maybe everyone should be guaranteed a 25% accuracy for offense and defense. If you have 20 attack, you are guaranteed to get 5 attack points. If you have 20 defense, you are guranteed 5 defense. But the more you research up the accuracy tree, the higher your numbers become (with still some random factor -- even a marksman will miss the bullseye once in a while).

Great idea!

I agree. While the GalCiv2 interface is much more advanced than my all time favorite space game, Malkari, it still lacks many of the basics in gameplay that I loved so much from Malkari.

Or perhaps it should be a modifier that can cause misses/critical hits, delivering 0 damage at times.

Missiles miss the most, Mass Drivers the least (since Mass drivers are underpowered)

Smaller craft are at a penalty to hit. (Gotta do something to discourage the big ship players- since that's almost always the way to go- and the only other solution I see to that is allowing people to build 2 ships/turn if they have the production for it, but even then I'd pump out Yamatos quickly instead)