It's not hysterical fear. I like RTS. I like TBS. Both have their strengths. Both have their drawbacks. I don't mind a little mixxing and matching when it's done to good effect. ie, the original X-COM used RTS on the main map and TBS tactical. That worked well for that environment and helped build a suspense and tension (very fitting for the game). Homeworld was an RTS that required lots of pause and order, making it practically TBS in certain scenarios.
RTS battles have no place in a TBS game in which you design your own units. MoO3 really alienated its customer base with their tactical system. Why? Because the scale of the combat and the speed of the combat was such that players didn't know what their own units were doing, nor how well they did it. Remove that connection, and you have just removed any reason to bother including ship design in the game. If players don't feel the connection between ship design and performance in combat, then the combat becomes meaningless to them. When it becomes meaningless, they then just skip it. If the majority of players are skipping the combat, there isn't a reason to have it in the game.
SP TBS games target customers are the micro-managers and people that have a want or need to play at their own pace (ie, dads and moms that have to put down the controls while they take care of something in the house and then return to what they were doing). RTS doesn't fit either of those people's needs. RTS tactical combats can look pretty (ie, Homeworld masses of small fighters swarming over capital ships, while the capital ships turn in a slow ballet to bring their weapons to bear), but eye candy like that disappears very quickly in the long term of a game. Indeed, it generally vanishes in the first couple of days of playing a game, unless its a game like X2 or Railroad Tycoon 3 which forces you into noticable spans of doing nothing except stare at the pretty graphics on the screen. Are you saying we should be forced to click once and watch the big fight movie the hundreds of times that you will fight on even medium maps? Why? If the player isn't interacting with that layer, there isn't a point on wasting time on it. Not developer time. Not player time. Star Dock doesn't have unlimited resources to spend on GC2, after all. And if it isn't going to contribute to a significant portion of GC2 players enjoyment of the game, it isn't worth Star Dock wasting their precious time and budget on it.
A secondary, but I think still important issue, is the time spent on waiting in games where you have seperate tactical combat layer. The transistion time alone will really mount up in GC2, and will be especially noticable from moderate map sizes onward. Think about it. How many fights do players get into on, say, Large, Rare, Tight map settings with full count of AI civs? Transition time (load screen time) will really add up. I play a lot of Japanese console style RGS. In these RPGs, you will fight thousands of times. In the games where you have a seperate tactical combat system/layer, whether its RTS or TBS, it really slows down the amount of time spent playing the game, because each battle has to load up, and then when that battle is done, then the main screen has to be loaded again. This load up time alone usually doubles the time it takes to play the game to closure, without adding to the fun of the game. Why? Because all that time added is pure down time looking at the load/transistion screen. If you are going to fight, and fight a lot, intergrate it. Put it on the main screen, regardless of what the combat system is, and let your players spend their time playing, and not waste time while the game switches between layers. With GC2's current game engine, it should just super zoom in on the tile being fought over, if the game just has to have a seperate tactical layer. Whether that's TBS or RTS, that one refinement will allow players to devote more time to actively playing. More playing means more time spent on having fun.
When we boil it all down, we have to remember this is about fun, and what it is about GC that we find fun. Why do you play GC? What is it that you find fun? Why does everyone else play GC? What is it that they find fun about it? What elements in GC attract its customers? What elements keep people playing the game? If the main map is set in a TBS environment, to allow us to spend all the time we want to on micro-managing our empire, then we are talking about a customer base that will be biased to micro-management and going at its own pace. Even the best RTS systems (using a "pause and give orders" UI) will not please that bias. Why? Because players will not be able to see what every unit of their forces is doing, and how well or poorly. That's diametrically opposed to being able to see on the main map how well each of your units there (ie, worlds, starbases, etc) are doing, and how well they do it. That will irritate a lot more customers then customers that the number of players that get a happy charge out of having a RTS tactical combat layer.
