I would love to see this feature added as well!

I think i can help with this.

Find the "Game" folder in your Gal Civ folder.

Then copy the file MapSizeDef.xml from that folder into your C:\Users\Documents\My Games\GalCiv3\Mods\New folder\game

Once the copy of the file is in that new folder open it using notepad.

 You will see something like

<MapSize>
        <InternalName>Tiny</InternalName>
        <HexSectorRadius>0</HexSectorRadius>
        <HexSectorSize>30</HexSectorSize>
        <Base>32</Base>
        <RiftAppearanceChance>1.00</RiftAppearanceChance>
        <StarboxDef>DefaultStarbox</StarboxDef>
        <MinCameraZoom>100.0</MinCameraZoom>       <------Change this line
        <MaxCameraZoom>6800.0</MaxCameraZoom>
        <MapGenSectorSize>8</MapGenSectorSize>

Change the line marked above from 100.0 to a higher number and save it. Load the game up and you will see that you cannot zoom in as far as you could before.

Keep trying different numbers until you get the effect you want.

You will need to do this for each different map size listed in the MapSizeDef.xml file

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the tip, Valtek01! +1 Karma to you.  

I bought a cheap laptop when I was on vacationing just to play this game (at the suggestion of my wife, believe it or not). It has 4 cores, but only integrated graphics and only 4 GB of RAM.  While I haven't experienced a crash, it would help speed things up.

I'll probably tweak this on my main gaming machine as well, since I only keep it zoomed to the icon level anyway.