The battle viewer needs some serious love. Not only are there the ubiquitous camera issues: ships moving out of sight, cinematic camera pointing the wrong way, etc.
The free-cam controls are far too sensitive and lacking a lot of obvious features (like the ability to snap to various views -- top-down, bottom-up, etc. with a button/key press).
Then there's the problem of the strange (and disturbing) pauses in the action. The opening salvo of the battle viewer is impressive, it's beautiful to watch all the ships slowly close on each other and then unleash waves of destruction. But when the battle actually closes and the ships are right on top of each other, the game seems to get confused. Ships slow down, make lazy drunk-driver turns, and seem to lose track of the fact that they're involved in a life-or-death space war. Weapon fire ceases for several seconds as ships slowly skate through space.
And finally, there's the complete lack of tactical awareness in the game. Every battle is the same stupid space-opera fight (well, space-opera w/ drunk captains). There needs to be some situational rules to vary the tactics of both attackers and defenders. If the defenders have a ranged-weapon advantage, they need to maximize their advantage by closing slower and moving at an angle to their target. Smaller ships should try to stay close to larger ones (if possible) and should NEVER SLOW DOWN. When defending a starbase, ships should consider whether the starbase can survive a few rounds of direct attacks and whether the starbase defenses might help them survive, rather than flying suicidally out of the starbase's range to engage the enemy. Powerful ships (like the one from the Campaign) should seek to maximize the HP effect of their kills, if one shot will take down a large ship, it makes no sense to fire on the tiny ships with tiny attack rather than focusing on the larger damage dealers. Etc. etc. etc.
