Conceptually the distance the fleets traverse is massive. I would still say that unique modules, buildings, and ships can justifiably have a “range” attack. Long range missiles, plucking asteroids from a nearby belts using a magnetic rail gun, and other weapon systems makes sense. I would say the range of long distance attacks would depend on sensor range and have a great chance of failing to hit the long range attack the further your target is. This would allow planets and star bases to enforce their zone of control forcing players to either take the two turns to get to the enemy space station to destroy it. Or try to bypass it as it takes shots at your fleet.
The problem is, what's nearby? I can build a starbase that can cover (parts of) two, three, sometimes even four or five star systems systems, and you really don't expect distinct systems to be separated by less than a couple of lightyears (heck, if I'm playing as the Terran Alliance, we know how far away the nearest stars are, and yet I can still have a single station covering both the Sol system and a star which has to be a minimum of ~4 lightyears away, and which is arguably more distant since it's not usually one of the three Centauri). You want to pull an asteroid from that "nearby" asteroid field and shoot it at a "nearby" target with a magnetic railgun? It could very well take several years for your projectile to arrive at the target location, when each turn represents a single week. On top of that, the distances represented within each tile are inconsistent, to say the least; Earth and Jupiter may be as far from each other as from a planet in the next system over, and the stated tile dimension is 1 "adjusted parsec," a unit of distance whose official size (according to the game developers) ranges from just under 2% of an AU to about 10 real-world parsecs (from here; Draginol is Frogboy, if I understand things correctly), though I feel like the upper end of that range might be off by a factor of 10 (it'd make more sense to me if the 'adjusted parsec' was based off of how many parsecs a hyperdrive could cover under ideal circumstances; the 'adjustment' would then reduce the tile dimension to account for non-ideal conditions). Regardless of whether or not the upper end of the distance range covered by an 'adjusted parsec' is correct or a typo, you're still looking at a unit of distance which is enormously variable; any two tiles can have dimensions which differ by seven or eight orders of magnitude, with distances ranging from "maybe it's practical to engage with sublight weapons" to "hell no, they'll be long gone by the time anything we shoot at them gets there."
I would add that even at the low end of the tile dimension, it's unlikely that the game's weapon systems are capable of engaging, if the battle viewer is even remotely accurate. The minimum tile dimension is ~2 million miles (~3 million kilometers), which is about 10 light-seconds; judging by travel time of the lasers in the battle viewer, the maximum engagement range of standard ship-based weaponry is not more than 1 light-second as a rough estimate and probably much less. Homing missiles and unguided subluminal projectiles are demonstrably capable of missing at combat ranges, and as such it's likely that their performance will be worse at the ranges implicit in attacks launched from several tiles away, if they're even really capable of reaching the target within a reasonable period of time.
It's a sticking point for me that the "feel" of the game ought to reflect the fact that you are dealing with galactic distances.
Personally, I tend to feel that the game plays out over a much, much smaller part of the galaxy than might be thought from the title 'Galactic Civilizations.' Toria and Drengi are known to be separated by about 20 light-years and it took the Drengin ~250,000 years of exploration to find them. It's probably a reasonable assumption that Toria, when discovered, is towards the edge of Drengin-explored space; if you assume a constant exploration rate and that the entire volume enclosed in the smallest sphere encompassing Toria, you get an exploration rate of ~0.13 cubic light-years per year, which would indicate that Arcea and Drengi are within ~14.7 lightyears of one another (this seems reasonable; the Drengin stargate which was bound for Toria crossed 20 ly in about 70000 years for an average speed of 0.00029c, and a Drengin probe launched with the intention of delivering the stargate plans to Arcea took 25000 years to arrive; if the separation is 14.7ly, this gives an average probe speed of 0.00059c, comfortably superior to the stargate but not excessively fast, and roughly four times faster than anything that humanity has put into space of which I am aware, aside from radio transmissions), that Arcea and Toria are within ~23.1 ly of one another, that Arcea and Altaria are within ~23.1 ly of one another, and that Earth is within ~23.4 ly of Arcea. A quick Google search indicates that there are probably about 2000 stars within 50 lightyears of Earth, which is reasonably consistent with the expected number of stars on an Insane map.
