Just because the devs are willing to make changes to certain areas, based on player feedback, doesn't mean, that they are willing to do so for everything. Especially if it doesn't fit into what they have in mind for the game.

Frogboy already said, that we won't be able to control each ship in combat, because being able to decide who shoots who (paraphrasing here) is not what this game is about. This is something that won't change. No matter how much (or how loud) people are arguing for it.

Precisely. That is why the pro-tactical combat faction is willing to bring this subject up over and over again.

I'd have to disagree with this one here.

I suspect that if a large enough percentage of players demand it, it may be expanded upon in a future expansion. There is also the possibility that good tactical combat could appeal to a broader fan base.

This guy knows what's up

Being a former WoW raider myself, the largest source of complaints by far in WoW was due to the class balance issues, particularly in PvP, but also in progression raiding. Every tier, there would be a few classes and builds that were somewhat OP and others that simply were not competitive and forced the players who used them as their mains to play an alt.

The truth is, we are not going to have real data. Even Brad won't. Nobody has perfect information. Instead, the prudent course of action is to take "your best guess" on what the players want and what your studio can deliver.

That and I think WoW is slowly dying right now because the vision of Blizzard is out of tune with what a large percentage of the fanbase wants. This is especially so considering that for the past couple of years, the PC market has been growing, not shrinking, mostly due to Steam.

We can certainly estimate. Alternatively, a survey could be posted.

I could very much use the same argument against you. Without information, it could very well be that 1-2% of the fanbase strongly opposes tactical combat, and 98% are either indifferent or support it. Neither you nor I know for sure though.

The fact that you said this earlier tells me that you have at least some concern that tactical combat will pass:

If this post were to be taken seriously, we are "fanboys"  and the game has a 100% chance (in your opinion) of being wrecked with tactical combat. That and you appear to acknowledge that there is a non-zero chance that full scale tactical combat may be a possibility in the future. Finally, I take it you will not be playing this title if tactical combat is added (and going back to GC2), assuming that I take this quote literally.

It's not possible to collect sales data for every TBS game. But likewise, do you have proof that the addition of tactical combat wrecked prior series of games?

Well, looking at 4X games with tactical combat, off the top of my head, there's 2 that have successors that were disasters:

- Master of Orion 3

- Sword of the Stars 2

Both were pretty poorly received and deviated significantly from their earlier titles. Another title that was poorly received on launch was Civilization 5, although it's since improved (although IMO, Civ IV: BTS is the pinnacle of Civ still - I do know a lot of Civ fans do share my opinions). There's undoubtedly more on the list. But look at what caused them to deviate. Buggy launches, poor UI, and in the case of SOTS 2, unneeded complexity that detracted substantially from the experience combined with a hostile community.

What can we say from these launches? Well if GC3 launches like Elemental did, then it could substantially detract from the brand value of this title. (I should note that my concerns over a repeat of Elemental are the reasons why I have opted to not become a Founder).

Am I?

Better diplomacy, new stellar phenomena, the ship designer, and mod support are incremental improvements. Tactical combat for this series would be what I call a revolutionary improvement (assuming it were well implemented - if poorly implemented, tactical combat would detract from the experience substantially). Are incremental improvements a good thing? Of course they are. But that doesn't change the fact that they are incremental improvements.

One of my biggest complaints in the field of strategy games has been the lack of innovation in this field. Pretty much we haven't seen much radically new since, around the year 2000, save better graphics.

- AI is still stagnant

- There have been some UI improvements I concede, but 4X in particular suffers from late game being a micro-hell at times

- The fundamental model of 4X and RTS games has not really changed much

What these 2 genres need are games that push the envelope so to speak. While I don't think that adding tactical combat to GC3 will push the genre radically, I am interested to see how Brad would approach it, especially if a large number of people asked him for it.

I don't believe so.

There is enough evidence that very limited tactical combat has been introduced so far. Compared to GC2, which had zero tactical combat, this is a step forward. I maintain that depending on how it's received in GC3, it may be expanded upon or removed in the future. We still need the details at this point though, so I am loathe to draw further conclusions.

Of course there's a non-zero chance of full scale tactical combat being implemented. Not much higher than zero, but still a chance. If I was absolutely sure tactical combat had been ruled out, I wouldn't waste my time making sure my viewpoint was heard.

And if you read the rest of the post the same way, there's also a non-zero chance tactical combat could be implemented in a way that would be an overall benefit to the game. I don't think that's terribly likely, though. The odds of tactical combat improving the game (IMO of course, what each person sees as "improvement" will vary) are low enough that I'd prefer they don't try. GalCiv2 still enjoys pretty good sales 7 years after release without tactical combat of any sort; changing the franchise so radically would not seem to be a prudent business decision.

But after all that, yes. If tactical combat ends as badly as I expect it to I will continue playing GC2. It's not that I have anything against tactical combat in other contexts, it's just that I don't know of any model of tactical combat that would be something I'd want to deal with while playing a GalCiv game.

Maybe they'll not include tactical combat. Maybe they will make it skippable without penalty. Maybe they'll come up with something that truly is an improvement on the game and not an artificial-feeling addition. And failing all that, maybe the horse will learn to sing.

Also being a former WoW raider myself, the largest source of complaints was that the WoW forums were a cesspit of negativity that served no useful purpose. EVERYTHING was broken if you read them. Every class was too weak on it's own class forum, including the flavour of the month that everyone else was hating on. Everything was buggy. Everything sucked.

Somehow millions of people who didn't bother to read the forums managed to use those things effectively and have fun, despite the forums telling us how much they sucked. There's a reason Blizzard used stuff like DPS logs and win/loss counts to figure out what to change first, and player feedback second.

Wow has been "slowly dying" for what, eight years, according to the Internet? It's shrinking now because it's a really old game, with a pretty weak expansion conceptually, in a genre that itself is in decline, and is at this point pretty much the only paid game left in a land of F2P. It's still by far the largest game around, and every other MMO developer would be really happy to be "dying" like Wow is.

A game that really died was Star Wars Galaxies, and that happened when they started radically deviating from what the gameplay had been and made it something else. Food for thought.

(LotRO is going through the same thing right now, after an expansion that radically overhauled classes. Man, those are some unhappy forums.)

Adding tactical combat to a franchise that doesn't have it is only an "improvement" if you want it. If you don't, it's just bloat.

In general, I split complaints into 2 categories:

1. Issues with class balance

2. Poor experiences (with other players, especially in PUGs, bots, and other issues like the occasional bug).

I'd say 95% of the posts were not useful on the forums, but there was 5% that led to good feedback.

Blizzard undoubtedly has it's own statistics, and I'm sure it has a way to analyze a combination of the WOL parses across the board for all classes.

Were they perfect? No. I think that in some areas they were too slow and there always seemed to be 1 or 2 classes that were OP in either PvP or raiding - every tier. They've gotten better at it, but I still feel there's work to be done.

Speaking of balance, let's take Stardock/Ironclad on Sins. The Vasari Loyalists remain a bit too potent vs Advent

Right now:

1. TEC vs Vasari, TEC has advantage early game, Vasari late; in general acceptable; phase missiles not a game-breaking advantage over TEC

2. TEC vs Advent, generally balanced, with TEC having the stronger economy, Advent having a better synergy

But

3. Advent vs Vasari, Phase Missiles especially are a breaker for Advent late game

Not perfect and I would argue that Stardock has been slower than it should have been to respond.

At it's peak in Wrath, WoW had over 12 million subscriptions. That dropped to about 10 million in Cataclysm (depending on which tier - I think it was close to 10m by T13 - Dragon Soul), and last time I checked they're down to 8 million as of Mists of Pandora by T14. I think "slowly dying" is an objective summary of what is happening in this case. They haven't lost a massive percentage of their subscribers within a span of a few months, but they are slowly, but surely losing them.

The latest is that they're down to 7.6 million - from a peak of 12 million+, that's huge:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3509-WoW-Down-to-7-6-Million-Subscribers-WoW-Down-to-7-6-Million-Subscribers

If the trend continues, this could be a long term issue for Blizzard.

Would it be? If a survey were sent to enough people, statistically, it would have a margin of error, but the confidence interval would be within reason - say 95%+ with a large enough sample.

A far better idea would be to send a survey to everyone who activated a copy of GC2 to see whether they feel that tactical combat is good (larger sample size than founders).

The evidence so far suggests that limited tactical combat has already been added. Regardless, we won't know until the game actually comes out. And in the eyes of many people, tactical combat is not a waste of development resources - to you, yes. To others, it's quite possibly the best thing that could happen to the game.

What you don't (or more accurately refuse to) understand is that to people who want tactical combat, being able to control even some of the outcome for the sake of itself is a huge step forward.

You misunderstood me. I'm saying that if the autoresolve has within a 5% damage taken and inflicted outcome to a moderately competent player, then autoresolve is a viable option.

The bigger issue is not the current base of Founders. It's everyone that buys the game. Because well, 1 person buying on launch day = the same amount of money, whether they are Founders or not (actually if Stardock's implication is that Founder's saves money, then it could be argued that Founders are worth less than an ardent fan on launch). People less loyal may wait longer (so the game will be cheaper then).

Can you honestly say that the majority of the fanbase would oppose or support tactical combat as much as the current participants of this thread do (assuming that most Founders are even against tactical combat - remember only a portion of Founders will be this active on the forums)? Without data, it's impossible. 

At this point, all we have is qualitative and speculative information. You (and several others) are biased against tactical combat. I am biased for tactical combat, along with several others as well.

A founder pays less, but Stardock makes more per dollar on them because they're bought here. They get 100% of that sale vs 70% of a Steam sale. So they're doing alright on a founder sale, and a founder elite is of course a lot of sales all in one.