This is my first time with this sort of game, and this sort of gaming community, and I'm a cook/historian, not too knowledgeable about computers, but I wonder if the zoom function could somehow be improved, so that one could move smoothly between different levels of resolution, from the unit-level, up to the whole world? It seems fairly laborious to have to hunt and peck to explore the worlds, and I wonder if it might open up a whole new perspective on the gameplay.

Such functionality is common on console and executable games but is unrealistic to expect on a browser game -- especially one which is not written in flash or silverlight.

However, this seems hard to explain to a non-technical person -- or maybe you understood what I meant?