What do you mean by a "painful and overly complex" turn-based system? Something like MOO2's initiative system, which while it works well in smaller battles, makes long battles drag on forever so one is tempted to "Z the combat" (Z being the hotkey to autoresolve)? Or did you have something else in mind? Despite what Alikiwi said earlier, we're still not sure exactly how combat will be resolved (player control or AI control? turn based or real time?)... Alikiwi and a few other folks left the team a few months ago due to a disagreement on the direction the project was taking!
One interesting feature we're going to implement, though, and might be able to help us figure out how to do this combat thing, is that of "battlespaces"... Nick (Suicide Junkie) came up with the idea, and basically the way it works is, each ship or other space object, given an amount of time (1 turn, 1 "phase", or 1 "round", with phases and rounds being subdivisions of turns), has a certain "combat effect radius", wherein it can potentially engage in combat with other ships, etc. This radius is equal to the ship's physical size plus the ship's weapons range plus the maximum distance the ship can travel over that period of time.
Whenever a ship encounters an enemy ship within its combat radius for the turn, then, a "battlespace" is formed containing all of the ships involved (whose combat radii overlap). Those ships then have time "slowed down", and the battlespaces are checked again. If we're at the phase level and they don't overlap, then the game just goes on processing those ships at the slower time speed, to see if they ever do actually meet, or if they fly by each other. If on the other hand they DO meet at the phase level, then combat has officially been entered, and time is broken down once again, into rounds. This is where things get a bit murky - do we allow players to issue orders to ships in combat, or are combats autoresolved? If the player is involved, will it be turn-based or real-time? Or will all of the above be game options? We still have yet to figure that out!
In case that all sounds confusing, here's a couple animations that Nick whipped up a while back to illustrate the concept...
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/nick/p...es/FleetsA.gif
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/nick/p...es/FleetsB.gif