[douglas]

I'm really not getting why pausing isn't sufficient for you. Pause should work quite well enough for hotseat play, and no version of SE has ever had tactical combat for any other multiplayer mode. If you use the automatic pause-every-x-seconds feature which I believe has been officially confirmed to be a definite inclusion for SEV combat, the only real difference between that and turn-based is that you can't exploit the sequential movement for truly absurd tactics that really shouldn't be possible. As for tactical combat in PBEM, are you CRAZY? That would take forever to play just a single turn whenever combat happened, especially in large battles.