Gratuitous Space Battles No Longer Fully Gratuitous
The point of Gratuitous Space Battles was that it was a fleet manager, not an RTS. So while you watched the space battles play out, you didn't actually influence them - you were the admiral who had designed the ships and decided upon the tactics. And that made the actual battles gratuitous in terms of the gameplay. That, however, is no longer necessarily true. Cliff from Positech has sent word that he's continued fiddling with the game, and has released a free patch to allow players to get involved with the battle-action. Cliff says: "It's only an 'optional' feature, and only works in single-player offline games, but from patch 1.60 (which is now live, steam copies will be updated soon), the player can select ships and issue movement and fire orders mid battle, and even edit the 'standing' orders for ships in the middle of an engagement." There's a video, which explains it in a bit more detail, below.
