I think a view from infinitely far away would be fine... a full 3d explorer would be quite excessive. Start with the easy solution; the hard one can be added later if the easy solution is not satisfactory.
Instead of giving the ships hitpoints and stats, the game just looks up the probability of winning for each ship against another. The amount of ships serves as hitpoints instead. It also makes the battles look big.
Boring. Play the recent Reach for the Stars if you want that.