Moving the camera and viewing the battle

[heislloyd]

I bought the game some while ago, and have been giving it a go, and have made it through three of the campaigns.

The game, for me, is almost utterly ruined by the infuriating system for moving the angle of view, and then viewing the battle. Possibly, I am missing something. I have tried playing around with the controls in settings, but this hasn't fixed it.

When deploying my army, I am so far from the battlefield, that I cannot see what I am up against. Zooming in to see the opposition's units is awkward, with the keys for moving the camera being very counter-intuitively assigned, and very limited in movement. I cannot rotate the map, so deploying troops the far side of a high piece of terrain is impossible. When I'm on the icy maps, the icy mist obscures the field.

Then, when the battle starts, all the controls for moving the camera are for some unknown reason different, and so I make constant mistakes in trying to get a decent view. At least I can now rotate the battlefield, which is useful. Why are the two sets of controls different? Is it possible to make the battle set-up controls the same as the in-battle controls?

The first second or two of the battle tend to be the most important, and it is almost impossible to see what happens because one is either too far away, or too close in. Even if I press T to freeze time immediately after starting the fight, and then reset the view, it is still difficult, because everything happens so fast. If I engage slow-motion, everything happens unbearably slowly. Is there no middle ground?

The game could be good fun, but the viewing controls are so infuriating, that at the moment for me it isn't. Any advice?