I know it might be a bit much to ask, but I think observing the chaos from a 3rd person view on units could be pretty awesome! Imagine tracking an asteroid that's about to impact a planet, or a nuke in flight! Or even follow a platoon of tanks as they make their way through a hostile forest towards a sure-to-be heavily guarded outpost! Just food for thought.
I'd really like a first person mode more to be honest. Third person is a bit too impersonal, and it'd be really cool to have a series of cams on a secondary monitor for several robots perspectives.
The Track feature has been around since TA, so I'm guessing it will be in PA as well. And regarding third person; I'm pretty sure the camera will tilt up when you zoom in. Add free camera and you can watch battles from any angle you want. Imagine if you could take first person control of the commander at any time! Sort of like in Spring TA but with better controls.
I think that a combination of camera modes like "battle cam" (default RTS camera) "Action camera" (first/Third person camera on a selected unit) and a "Cinematic" or "Chase camera" to follow big things like nukes/asteroids and such.
So: Strategic/tactical camera - default SupCom style view, zoom between full planet view and check-units-for-rust view. Free camera - rotate freely by holding a button and moving mouse. Cinematic camera - select a unit or group of units and activate to follow them in an Empire At War fashion. That's what I'd like to have.
I'm going to pre-empt a response from Über on this but likely they will say this will be up to the "mod" community to implement.
Well hopefully it won't suffer from the same problem as SupCom where if you got really close to the ground the terrain would start interfering in ways it had no right to. It really seemed like the camera was on a massive boom that would prevent you from getting low to the ground if there was a hill within a kilometer of the back of the viewpoint. Also tracking should take into account altitude, and not just lateral position. So annoying trying to track a plane, only for it to go over a mountain, and suddenly shoot up to behind the camera.
