Well, GC2 has no tactical combat. Besides, if you look carefully, all weapons have unlimited range and can hit any ship. The rule of the automated combat is to fire at the offensive ship that can be fastly killed. 

With theses rules, there is few need to have a manual control over the battle. One case is possible through: if the other side is composed of a fleet of various ships, designated to counter different weapons. if it is the case, your ships may target incorrectly a ship that defend well against your weapons instead of targeting first the ships that may appears stronger but are weaker against your weapons.

GC2 has no tactical combat or muiltiplayer because the devs want to focus on other parts of the game, either that or they simply don't like tactical combat.

I think frogboy said that GC2 was supposed to be a strategy game.

There is already a whole bunch of management going on now in the game. For me I am glad I do not have to do the whole starship strategy thing myself. Not that I couldn't, just really don't want it to take from the rest of the game, which it would.

However, I would like to have more options when attacking, instead of just plain attacking. Like IanWorld had suggested. Give us a window prior to an attack, things like:

Hit and Run - Does max dmg for one round and then retreats, if ships have any movement left they can continue to move.
Standard Combat - Stays in for duration
Retreat - Leave after one round if combat initiated by another party

so on and so forth.

I think this would add just the right amount of strategy without making it overwhelming. It would be the same as the Planetary Assault screen that is currently used.

I'd love to see a compromise system with different weapons designed to target different size ships. For example, researching Quantum topedoes would unlock a missile weapon effective only against Small or Tiny ships as well as a torpedo weapon that could hit only Medium ships and above. This would allow the creation of true fighters and bombers as well as add a layer of strategy for designing large ships. (A nice by-product is that small fighters would more easily be a credible threat to large ships.) It's not tactical combat per se, but it would make ship design more strategic.

I like the two main ideas presented here. The most common one is battle planning. The other interesting thing is the idea of having weapons that go on certain size ship that damage certain size ships.

But in all fairness, you can customize the hell outta your ships, so if theyre not doing what you want them to during battles, theres really nobody to blame but yourself. And as far as the weapons go, it taks so long to get to the big ships with the big weapons, then to build the fuckers and have a nice fleet going. Theres a reason big ships are mighty, they are built to be so. I just dont think Id like it if some lil tiny sized ship came up and started blasting away on my Cosmic Destroyer MkIV that it took me 39 tech trees to build right. So I'd have to nip the second idea in the bud.

I agree with the OP. I played the hell out of BotF for several years for two main reasons: 1. the fact that it was a Star Trek game and 2. the fact that it had tac battles. In these battles you could choose from a half dozen formations that could either aid or hinder your attack depending on the formation your opponent chose. You also would target a class of ship in your enemys fleet [all the destroyers or all the dreadnaughts] or if you wanted you could individually target enemy ships for more control. You then would hit the turn button and the battle would play out in something like a 2 or 3 second real time chunk. Then it would automatically pause and you could hit the turn button again or change your formation and targets.

It was a simple, easy and fast system; and it was fun. Of course you could also auto-resolve, and it would automatically crunch numbers and give a result like GalCiv2 [without the preety fleet combat simulator]. But it was much more fun to control your ships, even in this limited way, so that your decisions could win or lose a battle.

If something along these lines were added to GalCiv2 [added to the existing logistics feature] this game would rock even more than it does now.