Thanks for the feedback!
I think something like a percentage selection for each job could be much better suited for population management as the number grows, I realize the game becomes tedious as the scale grows.
Could add automation as in using the AI growth algorithm to grow your own cities around some capitals you place, customizable with settings for how much of each structure type should be present.
Pausing is also a planned feature, should be easy enough to implement even for multiplayer. Fast forward could be done by reducing the tick time, speeding up the entities like planes, missiles and clouds by a certain factor. I'm sure it will induce a lot of lag, very much so when using the unreasonably fast AI speed.
One thing that may be necessary to get things to go faster while running smoothly is to multithread the player action processing. Firestorm processing already happens using a set amount of worker threads each having their own chunk of the full map, still lags a bit during end game with fast AI but it's much better than as I'd originally implemented it.
I'll most likely tone that feature down a bit since it can easily consume an entire continent, right now cities have pretty much no firefighting capability.