Planet Size/Camera angle

Extreme realism in terms of scale is not where the art direction appears to be going. We have chunky robots on swirly planets with cool puffy explosions. The planets are definately mikro sized but still bigger and clearly more bad-arse than spore tried to pull off. I bet once post effects begin to take place in late production a bit of subtle tilt shift depth blur will give it that "I am overseer of my robots" feel to it. Like looking at them through a magnifying glass. Making a realistic sun size, ALSO means making the planets a realistic distance that would make the sun appear the right size in the air when looking at it from the ground. We dont want a giant wall for a sun, and getting something that far away would require rediculous render distances and increase floating point values (in some cases for computing, 0.0000000001 is bigger than 10 in the scale of computing accuracy, im no programmer but I know this fixes render issues at work) The clipping plane would be off the charts. Forget it.
Eve online has realistic looking planet scales, but its actually way closer than it looks, its all about framing the shot, but in a games case just placement so it can be seen from the ground as proportionately accurate. (if you play eve online, try pulling the FOV so that your ship looks super tiny over a gas giant, it looks phenomenal)
Even Kerbal Space program is using 1/600th the size for its scale, thats still bloody huge.
This games art direction has exaggerated proportions and I have learned to get out of the pretentious gutter that is claiming that CG and games is all about making it as real as possible. Once you learn how to follow a real reference you can make real looking art, but good luck making something interesting and loveable or memorable.

..breath..

I am pretty sure the camera is tilting correctly, maybe if it was adjustable(i think it is) like how it worked in SupCom, where you just hit a hotkey to disable hud and adjust camera while holding spacebar or alt, (i used to just nudge it 10 degrees to see forward a tiny bit more) and as you zoom out it straightens into strategic map. This zoom to map is most likely the reason neutrino implies the lack of need for a minimap, it is far superior with a quick zoom out to leap frog around the terrain. I disable mine all the time in SupCom and really it is more useful in games like starcraft where you have to spam arrowkeys to get anywhere.
(BTW, a mouse with freespin middleclick is amazing for this, try one out)

cheers

also exaggeration in animation is also the reason it looks better than ugly stiff mo-cap.
All in the curves baby!

I'm sorry, but a connect anytime server with a sh|tload of planets in a giant solar system running off of realistic wall clock time sounds AWESOME.