The battle stuff in GalCiv II is a whole new level over the first one. We plan to have various levels of battle viewing from detailed (Where you can see the ships exchange blows) to quick battles (instantly resolved).
Players don't control ships directly, the strategy is in how they design them. As time permits we plan to put a lot of sophistication in ship design. Right now, GalCiv II supports a very sophisticated visual design system.
This is a ship I designed in the game. I should also mention that there are various lighting settings in case anyone feels this one is too dark. I was taking these screenshots rather late and in the dark so I turned down the ambient light quite a bit.
This is a single frame of a starship battle. The animation and sound effects really are needed to do them justice. But you can see countermeasures in place here as my shield dampens their laser cannons and at the same time their ECM defense knocks out some of my missiles.
If you zoom out enough, the map changes to a strategic view where the game looks like a board game. You could play the entire game this way if you wanted. Over the course of the betas, we will be working to make this screen increasingly useful to hard core players who might want to treat the whole game as a in-depth strategy board game type thing.
This is one of the ships I designed. When you design ships, little red dots appear all over and there's various "pieces" you can stick on those red dots (if you ever played with legos, you're going to love this).
More to come..
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