@Powermonger - personally, I'd be happy with a nicely done 2D map. And I agree with you that the giant armies towering over the other landscape features looked pretty weird.

As for the zoomable 3d map - no, it's overkill. That's what we got in Civ4 and the system overhead was scary. (Although now that it occurs to me, the RTW map was already zoomable, wasn't it? Oh well...)

The "county" concept has occurred to me as well. It might have some advantages. But I think there are probably heaps of ways to achieve the same desired result.