Top-Down View
The top-down view is used to easily locate natural resources and get an overview of buildings in a city.
Press the Backspace key to switch between top-down view and the first-person view of your character.
Overlays
Top-down view shows several categories of information, overlayed as icons or words on the terrain. Cycle between 8 different categories of information displayed using the \ and Shift+\ keys.
| Category | Information Provided |
|---|---|
| All Rocks | Shows presense of mine-able resources. |
| Rocks | Shows presense of mine-able resources. Excluding stone and eludium, as they are almost everywhere. |
| Plants | Shows plant resources. Size of the icons indicate density. This is only used for foraging. |
| Buildings | Shows type and level of buildings. |
| Roads | Shows roads and road slabs. |
| Flags | Shows military bases and flags. Showing the current ownership of each military flag and the town square. |
| Cities | Shows city ownership of each building and road. |
| Blank | Shows nothing. Good for taking pictures. |
Rocks Overlay
The Rocks overlay is used when placing mines and wells. Is it possible to find the resources as rocks in the terrain, but that can be a very slow process.
There are two Rocks overlays, one with stone and eludium and one without. This is because stone and eludium are resources that can be found almost everywhere where there isn't another resource already. Eludium is of course commonly only found on moons.
The rocks found using this overlay can be foraged, but not many of them have any handcrafting uses.
Note: The range at which this overlay displays information, is affected by the Rock View Range slider on the Settings (Shift+F12) window's Screne tab.
Plants Overlay
The Plants overlay is only used for foraging. The placement of farms and orchards is not affected by plants in the environment.
Buildings Overlay
The Buildings overlay can be used to help with managing and navigating a city. The overlay displays the building icons for each building, as well as its number of levels.
This overlay also helps greatly when checking the TL of buildings in a city.
Roads Overlay
The Roads overlay is not used for much, it simply display the road types.
Flags Overlay
The Flags overlay is very useful when attempting to invade an enemy city.
All military flags and town squares are highlighted and display the flag of the empire that hold them.
Military buildings are have their icons displayed, much like with the Buildings overlay.
Cities Overlay
The Cities overlay is used to see the name of a city. It becomes more useful when two cities are placed right next to each other.