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Shadow1980 said:
On a sidenote: PLEASE NO REAL TIME BATTLES!!!
I am a *huge* master of orion fan but threw moo3 into the trashbarrel. Didn't like it at all. Of course real time is mostly for the thrill and eye candy so a much better compromise between real time and turn based would be the Birth of the Federation method. All sides issue orders to their ships, press "done" and the orders are executed in real time that turn. Then the combat paused, and allows players to issue the next orders, etc.
Of course if you dont get to control your units at all during battle proper real time is the way to go. Or at least an option tio "play" the battle without having to press next turn every single turn. Add a "pause" and "stop" button to this which u can press at all time and voila, a great working system 
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Or realism and play balance... those are major advantages to real time combat. None of the absurdity of one side firing first, or the tediousness of watching each ship or weapon from each side firing, one at a time... There are a few turn based models that can approach real time in terms of balance, but they tend to be tedious and complicated in execution.
Most likely, SE5 will have the ability to pause the combat and issue orders while paused, so single player battles will be at whatever pace you want them to be. No possible problems here. Multiplayer PBEM games will never have you controlling the battle, so it doesn't matter from the player's perspective how the AI executes the combat (in terms of real time or turn based). TCP/IP probably won't have player-controlled battles simply because this would really screw over games with more than 2 players, or even 2 player games when combat with the AI occurs. Hot seat games could have player controlled combat, but there at least you are physically present to whap your friends when they are taking too long in any case... A simple auto-execute X seconds of combat then force pause with turn-based like phases of each player issuing orders will eliminate any problems with hotseat real time combat. It will make the combat function like the best of turn based systems, only better, because there will be no limitations of turn based combat on play balance at all.