It seems there's a lack of turn-based tactical space games. By that I mean games where you control ships in some kind of grid and fight in missions against enemy fleets, where the focus is the combat itself and not some kind of empire managament like Master of Orion 2 or most other space strategy games. Think games like Panzer General but with spaceships.

I've been trying to find games like these for quite some time, and the only one I could find was Sunrider Mask of Arcadius and Liberation Day (Already beaten them) which I really liked the gameplay, though the anime harem and some eroge scenes put me off a bit, but it's a fun game.

And there's also the Super Robot Wars series, which I've already beaten most of which have an english translation.
So, what are some good turn-based space games where the focus is on the combat, not in managing a space empire?

R-Type Tactics and its sequel for PSP might work. They're based more around the side-scrolling SHMUP template than fleet battles (unsurprisingly, being spun off from R-Type), but the gameplay still takes its cues for SRW et al.

You might also want to take a look at Doomstar on Itch. It was in the recent BLM bundle, although I haven't tried it yet, but it looks a bit like Stratego with spaceships- turn and grid based, with hidden information so you and your opponent don't know what a given piece is until it's revealed, and you have to work out where they've hidden their 'leader' and destroy it.

Oh, and if you don't mind losing the 'grid' part as long as there's still turns, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a pretty good fleet strategy that lets you stop and formulate plans. It's divided up into rounds of a few seconds each, each player (or the player and AI) give all their ships instructions, both sets of instructions play out at once, then it pauses again and you can give new orders.

FTL might be what you are looking for:

https://www.gog.com/game/faster_than_light

Not exactly what you're looking for, because it's not a TBS, but it's about spaceship battles, there's no base building and there's an active pause: Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.

Lets see, on steam in my Space - Above and Beyond directory you can find games such as

Ceres - Tactical Space Combat
Ancient Frontier
The Fleets of Sol
Final Theory
BattleStar Galactica Deadlock
Starhammer
Nexus - The jupiter incident
Homeworld Remastered
BattleFleet Gothic - Armada

Ancient Frontier, Final Theory, Battlestar and Starhammer are tbs games
Ceres, Nexus, Homeworld, Battlefleet are real time pausables

oh and lets not forget the star wolves series which are squad based rpg like tactical pausable battles in space

Robot games, Battletech of course

Here is a very short Star Trek: Legacy trailer. If that game isn't for you maybe you will like Star Wars Empire at War and Star Trek Armada I/II/III

I'd recomend Sid Meier's Starships. Basically it is combat based in a turn based hexagonal grid, the galaxy pseudoempire part is not deep at all, it is just a sandbox for the missions, selected and chosen in a very open way. The interesting part of this game is the tactical prototype for the turn based battles. Very tabletop and fun.

And another recomendation is Star General. From the Panzer General family. With turn based tabletop battles in space with armadas and/or in the surface of planets etc...More complex than its brothers and sisters from the called "5 stars series"

I Think both fit relatively well in what you are looking for.

Star General is most certainly worthwhile, i can only dream of a HD version with a zoomeable star map, not to mention the a.i. behavior, i'm not sure if current day developers have the know how to put something like that together, not that the games are bad, just different, other focus etc

here you can find a good working version of star general, get the 1.1 version and the 160 mb download should be good enough since the music won't work in game, at least not with me.

version 1 is to tame

( yes i tried all of them )

oops forgot the link..

http://panzergeneraldownload.com/star-general.html

Thanks for the link :)

About the music, originally it was red audio or CD tracks based like Fantasy General. But I am sure it is present in the BIN CUE version from one of your links.

Greetings

Ascendancy and Space Empires IV come to mind.

The game your looking for is
renegade legion: interceptor

It is exactly per you description.
Unfortunately the only place you’re likely to find it is eBay.

Tactical space fighters in detailed combat. Turn based. The pilots are individual and rated for different skills.
It’s very detailed although not the best AI. No capital ships. Mission based. No empire to manage.

yea the music is present, with the cd loaded to a virtual drive the start song will even play but after that there is only silence.... i have a 4x space soundtrack to which i like to play in the background of some of the games and added the songs to the playlist, used a program forgot its name, not windows media player and what happenend, every time the program choose a song from star general the program stopped with playing songs random and only choose star general songs following the exact numbers from the list! this ended with me converting some songs too media player formats ( since media player doesn't play vog files ) and listen through mediaplayer... the hassle ! ;)

Star General
Space Rangers 2 HD

For the music correctly playing the safest solution is use the DOS exe to run the game. Using the mounting commands for the bin cue files. Because Running the music under the win95 version via mounting it virtually could not work and can be a dificult problem to solve.

Z:\>IMGMOUNT E C:\MyGame\MyImage.cue -t iso
Z:\>MOUNT C C:\MyGame
Z:\>Myexe.exe

It should work to run game with the cd music.

Of course all af it relative to your route folders and names. I guess It should be enough to run the game directly typing it under dosbox or editing it in the conf file you use to run your game under dosbox,. at the end of the file

I hadn't time to try this out but it is convenient to edit the cue file and make sure the image name is correct. Sometimes, I do not know why, use to mismatch.

greetings

ah then it is a no go, thank you for providing the solution. The win 95 version offers larger maps then the dos one, not to mention a tad more functionality.... though the music will be missed i guess i will wait on a remaster and play the game with the soundtrack of other games mixed