[Suicide Junkie]

This of course will not be popular with the realtime battle crowed, but it is much more realistic. Even with our battlefield communications today, ultimately, you have to trust your people in field to do their jobs when they are in the thick of it.

What are you talking about??
Real time vs turn based strategic combat has nothing to do with how much control you have, only the quality of the simulated results.

No matter what system you use, the AI is still playing the whole combat with only the fleet formation/strategy to guide it.

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As for making it a tense game, having MORE control helps that.
Having the fate of your ship rest on your moment-to-moment decisions during tactical combat is tense and exciting, especially if you are outgunned, outnumbered and desperate to win with a major colony/base/chokepoint at stake.

At the empire level, you're just throwing massive fleets around, and combat becomes impersonal, detached.

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The only disadvantage to real time strategic combat is the amount of CPU time it will take for PBW to grind through it.

You probably won't even notice the difference in a multiplayer game.