Please, please, kind Firaxis, can we have a button or a key or something that will zoom out to just below the clouds.

I like large maps and I don't know how many times I have tried to zoom out so I can see a reasonable amount of my wonderful empire only to have everything stop for long enough for me to go and make yet another coffee while the ****** clouds form. And just because I went up one yard too far (that's one metre for the imperially challenged!).

And then I have to wait again while the nice clouds clear.

You can use the blue marble mod to turn the clouds off. The graphics are much better, and you can adjust many of the graphic things that you could want changed.

Edit: The thread is here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140246)

Thanks lost civantares. It isn't the clouds themselves that I don't like, but the time it takes to go from the zoomed out ordinary view to the world view. Particularly when I didn't mean to go there.

I will get the blue marble mod. It sound good, but from what I read in the thread it seems that it won't help the delay. I see in the other thread that disabling building display in world view may help. I'll try that too.

I would like to be able to back off, rather than increase altitude. I prefer the shallow angle appearance of the map; if you try to back off to see more of it, though, you simply gain altitude, which results in a view closer to nadir which, in my opinion, is not nearly as appealing.