I agree with you completely. I like a zoomed out view for a better view of my cities and troops, but then I get a top down view where I can't recognize my troops anymore. For me it's a constant struggle of zooming in and out.
So, it would be nice to have the possibility of zooming out *at the same* angle.
You can toggle a little with CTRL-ALT-F, and SHIFT-ALT-F, but that's not quite the same.
Also, when you zoom in, even a little bit, the tiles are just huge compared to Civ III. I use CIV-scaling (at the blue marble site) for downsizing the units and cities, but that doesn't work for the tiles..... unfortunately.
Changing resolution ( I use 1600-1200) doesn't resize them too....