ORIGINAL: HansBolter
Personally, I have never been a huge fan of fighting out the tactical battles in a strategic game. Especially if thet tactical portion relies on my eye hand coordinaation for success. I don't want an arcade clickfest to determine the outcome of my strategy.
I almost always let the computer resolve the tactical battles in Medieval Total War.
I picked up a copy of a game called Pacific Storm. What a mistake. Apparently somewhere embedded below the arcade action portion of the game is a strategy game. I never got past the arcade like implementation of placing me in the cockpit of a plane in teh first battle. One some gaming website the reviewer trashed the game because it had all this boring strategy stuff to deal with between the "action". Obviously the reviewer was the FPS type looking for "shoot-em-up action. I wanted just the opposite. I didn't want the success of the fights to be dependent on my skill piloting the bomber.
If the tactical battles can't be turned off and left to the computer to resolve I certainly won't be purchasing the new game.
Sorry, my previous post was very rambling. Let me simplify the key message for the true Grogs among us . . .
If you guys have not tried Forge of Freedom, you really should check it out. This is a beautiful example of what I think is the future of turn-based strategy. This game is a full-fledged turn-based strategy game, in which you control the strategic level (including political factors, unit building and training, officer assignments and promotions/demotions), but it ALSO includes a tactical battle map engine for "detailed combat" option. You can choose to never use it or to use it for every battle, or to use it for every battle but then (at any time) let the battle resolve instantly. It is ideal flexibility.
The other thing is: it is NOT, NOT, NOT in anyway like an RTS arcade game. No hand-eye coordination needed beyond slow ponderous mouseclicks [;)]
In the tactical battles, opponent forces start out on opposite ends of a 55x55 hex map of randomly generated nature (but dependent on season and province). All the brigades comprising all the Div, Corps, Army that were in the province are present, and you can move brigades around as individual units with commanders attached, you can also split brigades into two units. Units move according to their initiative and the two rival sides take turns, just like in any other turn-based strategy engine. The key to doing well here, is in NO WAY dependent on quickness, but simply on knowing your units very, very well, and understanding tactics (as they manifest in that game engine) very well.
Hopefully, what they have in mind for Carrier Force is something along these lines, and not something along the lines of an RTS "arcade" twitch fest.