Loading times are short, it is something like 5 seconds or less on my system.

Resolutions are long (the hourglass), whether you click watch or not, if you played two hours never reloading a save.

If your scout battles are during a long time, I think you should refit your ships to last missiles and retry.

This, I agree. The realisation is quite choppy and this is not the best selling argument to watch the battle. Music is always the same too.

I think the cuts could be twice as long, and I think the camera should exploit more group shots to understand what happens, show the different size of ships and show more kabooms, especially on the biggest ships (we should see all the biggest ships exploding, I think, because those can be turnovers in the battle).

In SF, there is a lot of classic framing they could use. For exemple the ones when a turret is in the forefront and you see its target in the background (I'm not sure I saw those in ES2).

Or the "war journalism" zooming battlestar gallactica used a lot for ship transiting in front of a bigger ship (they over used this, with low focal). Slow travelling on the biggest ships over used in starwars.

All of this could be really better. :/

I ended hoping this was not final yet, because they remade all trajectories in the last patch and the fighters are coming for release (so I guess there will be fighter shots. Btw, I think I never saw a good videogame making a nice use of their fighter shots).

All of this framing is external to the game engine and put in xml, you can see how it's handled in

[[YOUR_DRIVE]]:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Endless Space 2\Public\Simulation\Battles\RealizationPoolShots

Beware, it's not really easy to read or understand (and it should be a nightmare to test).

I can imagine the following things:

Camera cuts (generic changes) :

* Generically, any cuts in all the battle should lenght twice the time as the current version.

* Some, but not all, camera shots could use a sea effect (like filming aboard a ship).

* Explosions should not be cut if filmed by the current camera

* ...but the camera director should have authorization to cut an explosion if the next shot is showing the same explosion.

* ...but the camera director should have authorization to cut an explosion if a bigger ship is exploding to show it.

* Not all ships should be shown exploding : small ships are shown exploding, then if this escaladate to medium, only medium, and if this escalade to big, only big.

* It could be better if explosions were slower and used more sub explosions before the big kaboom by the way (ok, this is a japaneese classic, but I think many people loves this). Why no sphere subexplosions like in oldschoold Japan space anime ? (Macross, etc)

* Maybe experiment with zoom / change of focal which is a numeric effect they over-used on BSG. But this should be very rare shots (maybe once in 3 battles ?), because that effect is a little weird and give a little 3d sickness (but this may be me).

* Foreground turret shots shooting a ship in background. Extra points if the target is exploding (so there, keep focus on the target's explosion while the turret is picking another target). Foreground missiles turrets should be far because this a little like Macros missiles :) Beams should better be filmed with a side by side shot I think (like in pirate movies).

* Slow pan shots, best pan shots ! :)

Now about fighters, if they use rear shots or cockpit shots:

Sound (fighters) :

* some sort of "bathroom" filter on all battle but the sounds coming from the fighter

* accelerations : use a cook burner for that : *click* *click* *VROOF*, but this would need to anticipate accelerations for the clicks.

* throtle : use the cook burner *pshhhhhh*

* deceleration : use some kind of the Cylon 2-cylinder engine in BSG sort of *DUGU-DUGU-DUGU.*

* lasers and pew-pew: i don't know.

Camera (rear shot or cockpit shots, fighters) :

(Formula 1 inspiration)

* acceleration: would tilt the camera slitly up angle and down pan (like your F1 pilot's head)

* decel: does the opposite (like your F1 pilot's head)

* turning: tilt Z+Y-angle/pan camera like your F1 pilot's head would do too (ok "like your F1 head would do" is NOT easy I agree ! sorry for this :/).

* very very slight recoil when the ship is shooting.

* use some blank noise to generate camera angle/pan bumps (there is no road, I agree, but the engine could do this. This would give organic sense to the camera).

Fighters's explosions should be anticipated too so there is no hard cut. I could imagine some KLANG in a bathroom (like metal against metal, or your titanic trying to hug this iceberg) then flames for 1 or 2 seconds, a small *POOF* and a cut.
Extra love points if fighters could kamikaze on bigger ships (or ram another fighter) but I also agree this is NOT easy (at all)...

(but all this can be only me, I don't know).