I love the game and cant wait for it's release. Nothing I'm about to say changes that.

In ground battles, I'm a little disappointed at the farthest zoom available before the interface disappears. My tanks and artillery still seem huge. If my artillery unit is in the center of the screen then I can't see out to its max range. I have to scroll out and back again when ordering artillery attacks on buildings. When moving, it's basically impossible to fit your unit, your unit's destination, and one of those giant laser turrets on the screen at the same time. It's easy to blunder into range of those massive gun batteries, even if it's already discovered and visible under the fog of war, because you can't keep track of it and still manage your units. To alleviate all this, I try to zoom out to 'maximum zoom out'. That's where the surprises begin...

Rolling the mouse wheel continuously seems at first to do nothing, but after 4 or 5 'clicks' I reach 'maximum zoom out'. Everything is at a much smaller size (which I like) but the interface is gone. Surprisingly, framerate has also increased dramatically! I felt the interface was larger than I'd like, but I still found it necessary. I'm also wondering why the framerate goes WAY up when zoomed all the way out.

Based on reading the forums, I'm not the only person disappointed by the loss of the interface. Not only is the minimap / special abilities gone, but I can NEVER see the health status of friendly/enemy units in this zoom mode. This makes this mode inappropriate for fighting, since I wont know how the battle is going until it's too late to do anything about it.

So now I have a dilemma, if I'm willing to lose the interface I can get a zoom level I like better, plus a higher framerate. But if I need more info, like during a fight, I have to zoom in to where I dont feel that I know what's going on, plus the FPS drops (still playable...)

Do you really have to crank the wheel 5 times to zoom out all the way?
Does everyone else have similar experiences with the framerate?
Does the interface really kill the FPS that badly that even with more objects on the screen, maximum zoom out provides higher FPS?

And the question this is all leading up to......
Are there any options in the game or tweaks that I could perform to alleviate either the zoom or framerate issue?

I have a BFG geforce 6200 256MB and Athlon 2.0Ghz ????+

Million thanks to all [constructive] respondants...

I agree with you totally, and I will also buy the game regardless. However, I suspect the release version will be a little different from the demo. If not, I would expect a patch soon after release. At the very least I expect frame rates to be smoothed out a little. My machine is a bit more powerfull than what you described and I experience the same thing as you. What's strange to me is that it doesn't even matter how I set the graphics and sound options. I get about the same performance at highest or lowest settings and there are occasional slowdowns that don't seem to happen for any reason. I could understand if there were tons of units on screen, or new sound/music files being loaded, but I don't see any hard drive access during slow-down periods. I suspect it's related to the AI and/or user interface because after a retreat is started it speeds way up, so it's not graphics or sound because they are still there.

I haven't found any good way to fix the problem, so I sit in quiet frustration the same as you. Look on the bright side. At least it's better than Force Comander. That had to be one of the worst UI's in game history.

I agree that it is difficult to effectively command your units with these limiting camera zoom levels. I also experience severely slow framerates the more I zoom in on ground battles.

On this note, I have another concern. I can rotate the camera left and right and up and down from a fixed position in space...on the ground I can only rotate the camera left and right and zoom up and down. In some of the screen shots and videos of gameplay it looks like they are getting camera angles that we aren't able to have in the demo version. Does anyone know if we will be able to pitch the camera up and down in ground battles once the final game is released? In other words, will we be able to look out onto the battle field form a horizontal angle that isn't from ground level. (like when you zoom in all the way)?

You can pitch the camera to a limited extent in ground battles, so you can get a straight-down view or slightly oblique view. To get a fully sideways camera view, you zoom in all the way (as you zoom in, the camera starts to pitch up). You can always move the camera backwards, then, to get a side-on, faraway view of your units. Great for cinematic-type views, but terrible for issuing orders.