4. Rather than have a chaotic mess of ships attacking the 'nearest' ship to them, you may want to subdivide a combat group into squadrons to group up and adapt a role/share a target. If you have detailed roles and combat behaviour, of course, this will occur somewhat naturally, but in large-scale engagements you might see absurdities like an entire fleet piling in on a single ship, taking half a second to kill it before orienting on the next.
I doubt an average battle would have enough ships to warrant this type of behavior. I'm expecting the majority of fighters to be 1v1, 1v2 or 2v2.
If the player has no control over the combat, isn't having them watch a long battle sequence play-out each time going to get tedious? Personally I'd use a more abstract and quicker way of showing the results of battles (think advanced wars for example) to keep the game flowing and then you don't have to solve any of the problems you mention in the OP.
Well, assuming the sequence is 30 seconds, and can be skipped to the result screen instead, I consider it mostly a tool to visualize victory/defeat. The key component here is that its interesting to see how ships behave in combat, so that you understand when you need them. How manoeuvrability, speed, attack range, etc affect combat is interesting.
Not seen in my previous videos is an interesting thing that can happen: minimum weapon firing range. Some ships will equip long-range missiles, which can lead to some epic flawless victories (launching volleys of missiles at incoming enemies). However, if fast ships equiped with deadly short-ranged cannons come too close to these battleships, they'll find themselves losing despite being technically far superior.
It would be hard for a player to figure out why he's lost unless he sees that.
Since there will be many subtleties to combat (cloaking for example), a playback will really help players understand when and how.
Advance Wars was actually suggested by Yannick (the other developer on this team). We haven't ruled that option out yet either.
As motorherp said, I think it will become boring for the player very quickly by having no control over it. 4X are big games, it takes a lot of time to play one game and it can spread through weeks sometimes. Players are mostly interested in the grand plan of things and not in little skirmishes. If you have 10 fleets and battle each one ten times a day, you would skip such non-interactive features after watching a couple. Even the "Skip to results" button would be hard to press 100 times during a war.
In our case, games will be possibly far longer than weeks. Assuming 1 turn per day, its not impossible to imagine a long game to span 6 months, and it may be interesting to make turn frequency lower than once per day to account for people's lives, therefore, a year is not impossible.
Assuming "playing the turn" will represent a minor part of the entire span of the game, I believe its good to provide playback tools that you can learn from when you are waiting on your next turn. This provides means to analyse the outcome and learn from it.
Also, note that, with the given scope of this game, a battle of 3V3 is not a skirmish, by any stretch: it's a major encounter, possibly deciding of the entire war. Players won't be expected to own more than 100 ships at any given point in time (most likely much less), therefore, losing 3 will matter.
If you have 10 fleet and battle each one, chances are you're left with no more ships, or have destroyed 1 or more players.
I think its all a matter of assessing the scope of this game.
I realize this is a bit different from modern 4X games, but this title is meant to be true to the origins of the genre, most notably, similar to VGA Planets 3.0
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