Secondly, the fact you always have to side loads and loads of (often huge) units, added to the fact there's no minimap means that you constantly have to zoom out to as far as possible to only have a glimpse of what is happening currently.
There is a minimap. There's a button to enable it on the left side of the interface panel.

On the lowest settings, the maps certainly look very bland and ugly. On higher settings, the map looks better, but I can't comment in detail, since then I get something like 3-7 FPS just looking at my supreme commander, a couple of burning wrecks, and an otherwise mostly empty landscape (on the lowest settings, the game only starts skipping horribly when there's fighting going on).