Please use Camera shake "EVERYWHERE"

The things that you could do with sound...

For example, pulling the camera away from the planet might reduce the volume as the atmosphere gets thinner until nothing is left. This replaces the planetary sound effects with whatever is happening on the sector level.

Planets without atmosphere can only have sound travel through the planet's crust. Taking damage and shooting would still be audible, as the sound is directly picked up by your own units. Sounds from the enemy would be completely different, as they can only travel through the ground. People who put their ears to the ground will notice a muffled effect, emphasizing more bass and filtering out the high tones. Long range artillery would become dubstep.

Sound effects from projectiles flying through the air would be gone, creating a spooky silence for normally loud projectiles. Air units would be super stealthy, that is if they are allowed to fly without an atmosphere at all.

As much as I liked how Serenity did the whole sound in space thing as accurately as possible I feel that it only really works in films. And even then only rarely.

I'm not saying space shouldn't have sound.... just fewer of them.

Space has its own problems to deal with. As it can encompass the information of multiple worlds at once, including terrestrial sound effects would only cause confusion.

YEAH camerashake! Also, trow some dubsteb in there and make the camera shake with the wub wub!

No guys, seriously. I thought we were above that? I thought that we wanted a game that does not need obnoxious explosions, dubsteb and other such things to be fun to play. I thought we wanted it to be all about the game play. Isn't that why we like the simpler graphics?

PS: I am by no means against having things like the KEW (the planet annihilating meteor) in the game, as it is justified element in the game play. A "nuke" against total planetary control is probably a good idea

Since when are explosions obnoxious?

Scence NEVER!

I agree.

Explosions? Not obnoxious.
Camera shake? Obnoxious.
Camera shake everywhere? Completely destroys the "This is big deal" idea behind it.

That certainly depends. If explosions are overly loud or flashy with too many particle effects then they will be obnoxious. See the particle mods for Crysis for example. I trust Uber to make explosions tasteful and appropriate to the damage being dealt.

Explosions under clouds when zoomed out would be pretty spectacular. Almost like watching massive lightning storms, just seeing the flashes.
Edit: I believe it was mentioned somewhere that there won't be clouds, however.