I love the cinematic mode, but it comes off as stilted against people's expectations from modern filming and animation techniques.  I think uou really need to talk to someone who directs animated movies, talk to them about shots and camera angles.  You are already doing excellent work on the overall production values.  They will know much better what I am talking about.  You need moving camera views, pans and zooms and tracking.  You need camera paths that look like they were done on purpose.  One reason you see such extreme camera paths in the movies is they show off the three dimensional nature of the battle.  Now that you have the battle viewer cooperating better on the 3D nature, you need to show it off.

When you talk to them (assuming you haven't already) listen to what they say about favorite shots and such and see if you can turn what they say into semi-randomizable patterns.  A straight panning shot traveling from point A to point B while centered on ship X would the simplest of such algorithms.  You polish it by finding reasonable and "artistic" regions for points A and B.  Then you make splines and arcs between the two points.  Then you find other tricks; there have to be enough to make the cinematic mode seem quite aware of what it is doing.

The free mode needs to be joystick friendly.  I would suck at it, but I know many a gamer that would make that thing stand up and do tricks.  That could be a source of some very awesome videos.  

I think I heard that there will be tumbling applied to the parts of an exploding ship.  That should add a lot.  The explosion effects are vastly improved.  I am not a big fan of big explosions, but this is GalCiv and certain excesses are to be both expected and encouraged.

Eventually, I am going to want a legend, like you get on maps.  (Actually, I want that for the strategic map, too.)  This one would somehow let me see which special effect was which weapon or which defense.  Maybe I could pop up a screen with labelled buttons that made an example ship shoot various weapons or display various weapons hits.  I can remind myself of what is what in the battle I am watching.  I can show off doom rays to someone even though I don't have that technology in the game I am playing.

I like it.  It is taking everything I like about GC2 and making it bigger and better.  Keep going.