I'm embarassed to admit, but I still have no idea how combat works in this game.

I mean, I built attacker ships filled to the brim with missiles for long range, and defenders with close range lasers. Then, I chose a battle tactic where my close range ones go to the front, and my ranged ones stay far behind. Nice, simple and easy, even I can do that. But... how does it work? If I have a fleet that wants to stay far away, and the opponent chooses a strategy that involves getting up close and personal, what happens? Is it in three stages (range, mid, close) and the battle ends after that? Or do they try to stay at their preferred range, and movement ship mods decide who gets to do what?

You might want to read this thread: HORATIO UPDATE - FOCUS ON THE SPACE BATTLE

10th post has a range table.

Starmender wrote:

You might want to read this thread: HORATIO UPDATE - FOCUS ON THE SPACE BATTLE

10th post has a range table.

That's... quite informative. Now if only I had a TL;DR version...

Jokes aside, thanks for the response. I'm not sure I understood it to 100%, but I got the gist of it at least.

You will see it is quite simple when you get it. You have short/medium/long on X axis (choice for 1st player) and short/medium/long on Y axis (choice for 2nd player). Battle consists of three phases. In each phase fleets can be in three different distances from each other. The table says when for example 1st player choose tactics (card of strategy) with short and 2nd player tactics with medium, then fleets will be at medium distance in 1st phase and in short distance in 2nd and 3rd phase. You choose your tactics by cards. There are short/medium/long declarations and some other bonus (+75% to shileds for example). Each card divides your group into three fleets (if you have enough CP in your group for that). Every card usually has different setting for each fleet in your group. You can swap ships from your group between your fleets as you see fit but in the first fleet (middle one) the must be every time at least 1 CP present. Ships can fire on enemy ships from other fleets when they're done with enemy ships from their fleet. However it is somewhat limitted - not sure how this works exactly. Basically, ships cannot fire backwards (opposite direction to their movement). Ships from different fleets will never get closer than on long distance.