I would like to make a suggestion to the GalCiv gaming development team. When the space battles take place, and since the user has really no control of the ships... why not make a cinematic view of the battles where you can watch things going on inside the ships, crew faces, viewscreens, lights inside the ship going on and off, consoles sparking, voices of people talking to each other, also outside views of the battles.. like it is now, except automatically focus in on interesting parts like a missle about to hit a shield, manuevers, etc.

example encouter:
The battle starts out and you see the inside of a bridge of your starship and the officers looking at the battlefield from their view screen, the weapons crewman says "Sir, your orders?", The captain says, "Raise shields.. get our other ships on the wire", others ships voice, "we are here... " based on experience level could say in a shaky voice, "standing by assist ..." etc etc.. It doesn't have to be the same all the time.. something different each battle, or at least a little variation.

The scene can rotate from the internals of ship to ship, crew to crew, room to room, outside of ship battle (similar to what is already). For smaller ships, we can just see the smaller crew talking to each other with less sophicated equipment in the back ground.. etc.

This could be a nice add-on module and that doesn't really need any change to the gameplay. I'd definitely buy this one! I think this would definitely keep GalCiv having an upper hand in space game strategy.