My first post with some questions

[tinkthank]

Hello,
I just DLed the "demo" (that is, I have not yet ordered the CD), just looking for something new (I know shrapnel from Dom2), and this game looked appealing. I am having some difficulties despite the documentation that came with the game. Some questions, if I may:

1. I am running the game in a window on my laptop, no problems, at 800x600. I am having difficulty deciphering the icons and reading the text, everything is so small. I dont know much about computers, so I would like to know: in the full game, when I set the resolution to 1180, will that fill the screen with larger text or just make it crisper but stay the same size? (I like to play in a window since I switch between music apps and internet often.)

2. Some parts of the interface seem counter-intuitive to me. In the couple of hours I have tried so far, I find I accidentally move my units god-knows-where quite often by having them selected and accidentally clicking somewhere on the map. I suppose I just dont know how to use the buttons as most others do, or am used to a different system. Can these be customized somehow?

3. Although there is this "encyclopedia" feature, I see that it contains lots information presented in the same way that it is in-game. That is, I find it difficult to decipher, and am not sure what most of it means. (Additionally, finding a unit about which you want to know more seems quite a challenge -- I just tried looking for an American unit, but was baffled by the numbers entries all sorted in a way that escaped my knowledge and by the number of seemingly identical entries.) I browsed these boards a bit more, but it seems all of you here are near-experts and dont have my problems. In the CD version of the game, is there some documentation which can be either sorted better or more revealing to people who need full text descriptions of what certain features mean and do (not just numbers)?

4. I am not the big PBEM or MP player that most others probably are, and have so far not understood this game well enough to judge the quality of the computer AI. Is there any consensus as to how well it stacks up? I know it cannot be as good as a decent chess program can be, but is it at least better than, say, the otherwise fine Dominions2?

Any additional tips for decent newbie guides would be appreciated. I would like to enjoy this game more than I am now, and have so far found it somewhat off-putting. (Similarly, I felt this way about dom2 some time ago, but did get over the learning curve and enjoyed it for quite some time.)

Thank you very much in advance.