Good points!
More feedback on battle viewer...
Cinematic needs to have its clips be a little longer and possibly a little more random in length. It isn't as ADD fast edit as it used to be and I appreciate that.
I get shots that have ships go through the camera. Although that does interesting things with my hollow designs, overall, it's bad for visualization immersion.
I still think you need cinematic angles that slew, pan, and tilt. It will show off the three dimensional nature of the battle.
I also think you really need to make the free view joystick or controller friendly. I have two uber gamer family members with twitch finger reflexes. When I mention the idea of flying your camera around and through an ongoing space battle, their eyes light up. I think it would be an interesting compromise to offer those who clamor for tactical battles. Some kind of flying and interaction could make a lot of difference. With replay, it would even be fun for those of us who are less eye-hand coordinated, seeing if we can avoid flying into explosions, etc. My best argument is think about the videos that can be made and shared with talented pilots, or even untalented ones!
The cinematic mode needs a random number generator. It picks the same view sequence over and over. Yeah, the battle stays the same, but replay in cinematic should probably show different views of that same battle for visual entertainment purposes.
I'm glad you put in a 1/2 play back speed. Please consider 1/4 speed so I can freeze things for screenshots.
Add a lot more variability in the explosion effects, changes in size, disc, maybe color shades. Be creative. You don't want things blowing up to get old and repetitive looking. I know pyros. They will notice.
The initial formations are still very two dimensional. There had been talk about working on that. I hope that is still in progress. I think the extrapolation of two dimensional frontlines pointing to each other as a three dimensional thing could be two truncated cones pointed towards a circle where the ships intend to intersect. The ships start out in their present front to back order of types, but the layers would be circular groups. They start out spread apart and slowly converge as they approach the opposing ships, some vessels speeding ahead of the others. Anyway, that's how I would do it if I owned a software company.
I am not sure why you took out so many options on the view modes. I understand that some of them would be seldom used, but I still think you trimmed the list too far.
I would like to be able to mouse wheel zoom a little closer to the ships.
Perhaps there should be a free view mode that lets me go into the ship and look out, or perhaps there should be a camera mode that is the front portal view from any one ship as well as a chase view. What does it look like for the troops in the transport ships? That must be exciting.
