Hi there, what does that mean?

I am speaking here as somebody who never liked the combat in ES1, but found -in theory- that the idea of the combat was very good. It was just boring to play. The decisions where too limited and I always felt shoehorned in 1-3 tactics - this gets repititive very fast.

Sadly ES2s combat from what I can reckon goes in a very similar direction. I can understand that you want simple yet decisive elements in your combat so that players who don't enjoy these don't get annoyed.

"Battle play manager" sound like something where we can design our own battle plans and in my mind this would really be great. The AI could also use these battle plans against us and you could make an endless variety. The people that don't like to tinker with this stuff, don't have to use it and voilá you have both parties pleased. Is it like that? I could not find any further info.

Apparently Amplitude are going to to add more things to do in combat, which is good to know because right now there's barely any reason to not skip spectating the battles. I mean, outside of checking how some new modules perform in combat or something like that, I don't really see any reason outside of spectacle to just watch these ships duking it out, especially since the camera seems so much more focused on showing you "cool" shots of the ships firing rather than giving you a good sense of what's actually happening in the battle.

Exactly. And I think this is the point where the old system never got a foot on the ground. It was simply not very interesting to play.

In the end I would like to see options which are simple to handle, but very powerful. I want to sit nailbiting in front of my monitor. In ES1 that never happend. 

I mean the created this system where every shot is simulated, why not give us a simple Battle Planer? Creating some lanes of attack, some attitudes for our ships (attack, defense, balanced) and a role (brawler, sharpshooterm bullet sponge whatever) and let the simulation do the rest. If the AI can use our Battle Plans - all the better. It has to be simple, so that the AI can use it too, but in the end it will create really different and complex results, without taking too much time to set up. If the battle is hands off, then give us something to do beforehand.