GalCiv suffered immensely from Rock-Paper-Scissors approach to armor and weapons. Just like Endless Space it featured 3 weapon types and 3 armor types. In the end it all boiledto how fast players could refit their ships to match the enemy.
Enemy has missiles and deflectors? Refit to Rockets and ECM. Beams with Armor? Refit to Deflectors with Rockets. And so on.
It does not require any strategy, tactical sence or anything else - you just look at what enemy has and change ship loadout accordingly.
That's why Master of Orion approach is vastly superior to RPS and still rival GalCiv seriesin popularity.
Basically it's only one armor, one shield and huge variety of weapons. Thus, players could build ships according to their tactics, instead of refitting them to match the enemy. And could install additional systems to bolster various ship systems, more powerful shields for example.
You could make rocket ships to pound enemies from afar, or ion ships to blast their inner structure, glass cannons, armored carriers, support ships with tractor beams, super-armored boarding vessels fillde with shuttles - all this is absent in all GalCivs due to the fact that refitting your ships is the ONLY tactic that is left to you.
From screenshots it is obvious that third installments will see the same mechanic as before. We saw it in GalCiv2 and Endless Space - potentially interesting space battles stripped of 90%of tactics, strategies in an instant.
Please, developers, it's still early beta, at least consider changing this approach. Try MoO way and see if battles and ship developement would be more entertaining than constant refitting.
