[DRG]

The original game displayed terrain for each zoom level from a unique SHP file and as a result, adding new terrain was a ROYAL PITA as each different tile had to be manually reduced and expanded and put in its own files. About a decade ago that was changed and now all the Terrain tiles are reduced or expanded from Z4 and all the terrain SHP files but the Z4s' are redundant and not used (Z4 is the 1:1 standard ).

That was how the Icons were made larger and smaller depending on the zoom and we applied it to terrain. We believe it was done this way in the 1990s to lessen the memory used back in the day when available memory was not nearly as abundant as now and computers were considerably slower.. having a tile in each size made loading zoom in/out faster

So... the code uses that Z4 to create the smaller and larger tiles needed to zoom out and in but as Andy noted the code that does that is not something we could change even if we wanted to