Here some tweaks to improve framerate.

[Bertram W. Wooster]

Huge improvement in framerate and, crucially, in reducing the amount of stuttering when flying over land, especially using the new nomipmaps mod that Kegetys added to that post a few minutes ago. Unfortunately, as he said in his notes the nomipmaps mod suffers from massive texture aliasing which I suspect for most people will make it an unworkable solution in the long-run. However, it does point to the underlying cause of the stuttering problem which should help either the devs or dedicated third-party tinkerers resolve the problem.

Flying over the terrain with details up and without constant stuttering (albeit with shimmering textures), I can finally see how impressive the terrain can look in this game - as in, it's going to be jaw-breakingly gorgeous once we're able to fly over it with forest and building levels up high. I have had serious doubts about the terrain but the forests, woods, scattered villages, little copses and trees lining the roads and fields bring it all together in a way I hadn't expected. Very, very nice.