Ii have been wondering how handy it will be to move my view around given that the game involves planets. I thought it would be best to experience it before doing any too far reaching conclusions on theorethical grounds. Now that I have tested there seems to be three "modes" to the strategic zoom, there is the close-up where it tilts, there is the far mode what is the usual and default zoom mode and then there is the horizon mode where visibility is limited by the curvature of the planet. For the close-up zoom it seems to not allow to get as close as I would have wanted to. For the middle portion it scrolls quite a lot with very little mousewheel movement. I have a little trouble not missing what I had in mind for the zoom level. However the most new ground is the mode where all of the horizon is in view. I found it made perfectly sense for the mouse scroll up rotate planet that way when the mouse is over the horizon. However the reverse of mouse scrolling down pulling the planet somehow didn't seem as intuitive. I spent some time "scratcing" the planet like a DJ. Upon thiking it a bit I think I would rather have the mouse scroll down trying to center on my cursor. That would mean scrolling up and scrolling down would do the same thing when the mouse is over the horizon. It also made surprisingly amount of sense that the planet didn't become more pointlike when scrolling down from far out zoom. It was slightly disorienting that the mouse position didn't matter for the amount of rotating of the planet. I was kinda expecting that having the mouse higher over the horizon would result in more rotation. When giving very long distance orders my expectations where also a little betrayed. When I tried to move a tank over the horizon it refused to give the movement order. I would have very much liked that right clicking over the horizon when a unit is selected would movement order at last point visible in that direction or beyond that depending on how high the mouse was over the horizon. Maybe an area about equal to the atmossphere would function as a dead-zone? I also found that you can use the period to switch focused body and that there is the celestial view in comma. It probably isn't time for to be tweaking that but I found these systems to be very unstrategic-zoom-like. In a way I would like for the planet to get more point like if I have a system focus instead of a planetary focus. Trivial suggestion would be to add a modifier key to let the zoom keep rising. I have seen that when users are confronted with the sphere nature of the maps they instinctively try to suggest to somehow force them to be flat. It's new territority and I would like that territority to be more explore before it is abandoned for more covered flat area of expertise.
