It implies they are changing something anyway.

Kinda but in reality it was much more complicated. For instance cavalry are much faster then infantry and artillery outrange them. There isn't an artificial system where somehow one group does more damage to the other. You have to actually use the cavalry and artillery certain ways and set it up, the advantage doesn't magically appear when one unit smacks straight into another. The situation you described had several steps with one person anticipating another's moves and also different units working together. RPS has none of these things.

It's all size and speed, you can't chase small stuff down with big stuff, and what you'd use to blow away something small might not have much of an impact on something big.

RPS is the simple crutch to avoid having to model the physics of weaponry in a game.  Heavy armor should be heavy armor, it should need something powerful to punch through it.  Trying to actually hit a fighter is a matter of physics, a turret, whether it be laser or projectile, that is massive in scale and rotates too slowly to actually track it, or a missile so large that it's less maneuverable.

Armor class is what you need.  Heavy weapons to punch through heavy defenses, but at significantly less accuracy.  Not this nonsense about shields versus armor.

Properly modeled, it would be sheer dumb luck for a large projectile to hit a small strike craft, slightly less luck for a light speed beam weapon from a similarly cumbersome turret of size to do the same.  The smaller and faster the turret, the simpler the task would get, and the less penetration it would have.  Missiles would be similar, trading velocity and size for increased penetration and explosive power, for reduced maneuverability.

ECM would be added protection, not a hard counter.  If shields only deflected laser weaponry, they'd still be defended against with armor as well, ablatively.  Once you reach speeds necessary for space combat at any reasonable range, it's all ablative armor anyway.  A solid projectile isn't impacting with the armor, it vaporizes it on contact as both the shell and impacted armor turn to plasma.

Here's my two cents.

*plink, plink*

The thing I love the most about GalCiv 2 is the ability to make ridiculous starships. If we make the game about tactical combat (more specifically, what we're actually talking about here is real-time tactical combat), that becomes a bad idea. Here is why.

We already know that the game is planned to include online multiplayer. So let's set up a hypothetical battle.

Timmy has built his ships purely on Rule of Cool. They're designed to look menacing. They have big spikes and jagged blades and one bit that looks burned off and a hook coming off one side but not the other, and then there are guns pointing in random directions, sometimes inward, because they look cooler pointing inward. And he gave them big wings because wings look cool, and the armor is all on those wings because he covered all the other spots with spikes, and armor on a spike just looks weird.

He sends his fleet into battle against Bobby, and within moments, he is being decimated. Because of all those fancy frills, Timmy's ships present nice, big targets for Bobby's guns. Additionally, the guns that Timmy pointed inward for the looks, can't actually hit any of Bobby's ships. Bobby, you see, built his ships as small as he could, and placed all of his armor on the fronts of his ships, with all of his guns directly behind those, pointing forward. Timmy's few scant shots that actually make contact bounce off harmlessly, and his ships melt under the directed firepower of Bobby's vessels.

So now Timmy is faced with a harsh reality. Big ships, and cool ships, just don't work in tactical combat. He too will have to make small, streamlined vessels - perhaps in his case he will turn them into broadsides, placing lots of armor along the sides, flanked by turrets, and loaded with fast engines, and try to get between and behind Bobby's ships to bypass his front armor.

We end up with ships that start looking and playing alike between games and between players. Creativity - and humor - get lost, because the tactical combat requires the ships to be constructed in one of a handful of ways. The game becomes a metagame, as it always does, where one killer strategy gets hard countered, and then that gets soft countered, and then that gets countered, and so on and so on.

Wait, wasn't this a 4X turn-based game? Nope, it's all about the real-time metagame now. Your actions in the turn-based portions serve only to bolster and fuel your fleets in the combat portions.

I lost interest in Sword of the Stars because it became painfully clear that it was really an RTS game where the base-management stuff happened between battles. Sins of a Solar Empire got a pass from me because it wore that fact on its sleeve like a badge. I don't want this happening to Galactic Civilizations 3.

The closest thing to "tactical combat" I want in GC3 would be like what we see in Fallen Enchantress, or in Civilization 5. Units get a bonus for flanking and ganging up on enemies. Some units can bombard from two or three tiles away. But at no point does the specific location of modules, or the size or number of ship parts, help or hinder your ships in combat in any way.

So, in conclusion, no. I don't want real-time tactics battles. Play Sword of the Stars. Play Sins of a Solar Empire. Let me enjoy my turn-based game in peace, and watch my ship captains and fleet admirals do their jobs without me holding their hands like children, so I can instead concentrate on managing the empire as a whole. I'll see the fights on the holo-vid after the fact.

It implies the "cold day in hell" tone of Zydor's post 114. There will be some updating and minor changes, but the tactical combat people will need to look elsewhere to scratch that particular itch.

I shake my head every time a sci-fi writer mentions one ship being "faster" than another. Or that ships "slow down" when their engines are damaged - and if they're close to a astronomical object, you can be sure they'll "spiral" towards it. 

A RPS system for single player games will more-or-less work simply because the AIs tend to be fairly dumb about such thing.

But for multiplayer it'll fairly suck. Seriously, think about how you respond when you see the AI fleet. You change accordingly and the AI, if ever, does so very slowly.

Now think about your responses and multiply it. The games will simply be a mad dash towards, say, missile tech for the bigger bang against defenses or simply some middle ground, for everyone.

There'll be no real distinctiveness in style nor gameplay.

The "movie battles" will only be distinct in their lack of it. Battles will be pre-ordained. And since there's no real controls, how will evenly matched fleets (which will happen all the time with such a system in multiplayer) come out? How will the winning fleet be determined? Would both simply be destroyed? What would be the point then?

That points more towards something changing in the fleet combat area. Stardock people aren't stupid...

Tactical abilities does not automatically denote micromanaging the battle.

Take MOO3: you control fleets instead of seperate ships and the mechanic is primarily the same. You hit "play" and during that sequence you control movement, engagement, etc.

Time frames are essentially the same. The differences lay in the ability to control during the combat sequence.

A larger ship with equal thrust to mass still has a larger cross section.  Furthermore, the maximum thrust to mass that can be safely used decreases with the size and shape of the ship.  Star Wars for instance.

An ISD has an excellent shape for relatively fast movement.  A pyramid is a very stable structure capable of withstanding a great deal of force on the base without coming apart.  It's why the pyramids are pyramids, that was the tallest structure they could make out of limestone.

It still has to handle a great deal of stress though.  All that mass in front of the engines has to hold together as the engines accelerate it.  To move at the same speed as a small fighter craft can, ignoring what would happen to a person inside of course, is physically impossible barring some form of inertia cancellation, which would require increasing power with the mass being negated.  That excellent shape for forward thrust is also terrible for maneuvering.  Turning an ISD quickly would have been very bad.  Strafing would be impractical to any significant degree.

A small one man fighter with the same shape and a thrust ratio many times that of an ISD would have excellent mobility with thrusters in the nose for control.  It would not buckle under the stress of moving millions of tons of metal because there would be no millions of tons of metal.  The same shape and material, simply in a smaller size, would require far greater acceleration to cause it to fly apart.

The reality involved in hitting very small objects and making big ones move as fast or be as maneuverable still holds true even in space.  It's just to a significantly less degree with a significantly larger scale to cause the problem.

If the building materials were advanced enough to allow 30 million ton warships to behave like one man fighters, one man fighters would be able to maneuver far beyond the point where the person inside would simply implode when they pulled back on the stick. Or engine technology advances compared to construction technology would be like having modern fighter jets with a foot propelled wooden prop.

That's a pretty sad attitude to have.

Go ahead and project, man.

We've all been projecting all over each other's faces.

I just don't think TC should anywhere in  the scope of the game, and I don't want it being something the human can exploit against the AI like it could in FE.

Being able to give orders before a battle is fine, but once is starts, I don't want to be able to influence it.

Elemental series made me skittish about Stardock implementing TC in GC3.

Will the AI be able to handle it is also a worry of mine. It's not just with tactical combat either. Computers have a hard time making the the choices player find compelling. Deep and meaningful choices can really stump an AI.