[Jeb]

Yeah, a scrolling tac map would make sense. The main trouble that I can foresee is if ships head off in opposite directions, so that the display area can't hold them both no matter where it scrolls. I suppose at that point you could declare the ships disengaged and end the combat, but I don't know how hard that would be to program. It certainly isn't going to make it into SEIV.

I still like the little dots, though. In my sim turns PBEM game, it's hard to know what the combat AI is going to do with my designs, so it's nice to have some sense of what my ships are doing in simulated combat. For instance, sometimes I see my ships aren't engaging the enemy at all, and then I have to reconfigure their combat strategy. If all I saw was that neither side lost a ship, I might think that they were fighting, but just not destroying one another. (Reports on the damage you inflict on enemy ships when you don't win outright in strategic combat would sure be a nice feature.) If anything, it bothers me that when I get combat reports in the log at the beginning of my turn it *doesn't* show me a replay of the combat. I agree, though, that different people like different things about the game, so maybe I'm in the minority here.