Brutal Honesty

We need more options to control what you're viewing. I have tried to use the arrow keys to move my view around the map way too often now. This is slightly irritating, even though I click on the map to go where I want for the most part.

Additional controls for groups of units, both in managing which units are selected and for what they do. If want to select five specific units and there are units between them, I either have to move those five so I can drag a box around them to select them all at once or move them each one at a time. The move units one at a time problem becomes even worse if I'm multitasking and cannot queue tasks for a unit. Being able to tell a unit to do several tasks in a row is very important for efficiently managing my empire.

More terrain. Right now, no matter how the map is generated, you're going to find yourself on flatlands with a nearly straight march to the enemy, with only larger forests really forcing any slightly notable change in path. Even if only impassable terrain were introduced, it would add much more variety to the games. Bridges over pits, bamboo forests which slow movement or cause units to be lost, geothermal hot spots with geysers, and misty lakes which reduce sight range are possibilities. Even just more varieties of grasses would be nice for the purpose of recognising distinct areas on the map.

Later versions of the game rectified the situation with the terrain, although I agree that the straight march to the enemy was lame. Sending a scout out for provisions only to trip into their town was not a good way to start the match. If they have more abundant natural resources around them, they could send troops in the direction of your scout's general entry-point. They'll find you and rape you if you choose to advance in various sciences or do general farming or scouting instead of building up a clusterf'uck army.

I think the control of multiple units could be rectified with a more user-friendly AI director. Having my troops initiate full attacks on any single enemy instead of scattering about haphazardly after I move my camera over to another location of the map to deal with other pressing matters would be a wonderful addition. Even a "follow-the-leader" deal could vastly improve the efficiency of one's troops and lessen the overall workload for the end user.

I don't mind the current view controls. I usually just click the minimap anyway.