What kind of camera is this Clockwork Empires going to have? One fixed angle? 4 fixed angles? or a freely moving camera? (if this was covered in a blog post already I apologize; its hella hard for me to find anything on a blog that isn't on the first page) If it's going to have a free camera, please give us the ability to invert the y-axis on the camera controls, and the ability to angle the camera all the way up so that it's looking straight down (and preferably also the ability to angle it to be parallel or nearly parallel with the ground, although this isn't nearly as important). Please don't half-ass it; I've had so many otherwise good games ruined by these factors, I don't want this to be one of them.
Four fixed angles. Isometric. Zoom in and out w/mousewheel. I can't imagine what a free camera would be like, other than "torturous."
Four fixed angles sounds fine to me. I know when playing other games like Anno or Tropico I tend to just set the camera in a certain position/angle and leave it there.
Tropico 4 is actually what got me thinking about this; I do the same thing that you do, in part because the camera controls have serious issues.