Help, I can't see what's under the city name!

[Ilkuul]

Has anyone ever had this problem? You have a long city name (like some of the Aztec ones!) that obscures 2 or more tiles under the city - so you can't see what's in those tiles (roads? railroads? is it a special resource tile??)... Or there are so many cities close together, plus units, plus (rail)roads, that everything's a jumble and you can't see certain features clearly.

OK, so you can press T to see hidden terrain. Fine. But then you see just the terrain, you can't see the road & rail networks - and I've often found that I'd like to get rid of the clutter so I can see those. And often I'd also like to see just the cities in their terrain - or cities plus roads/rail, but without all the units.

It would really be great if Civ3 had a more sophisticated view mechanism (maybe accessed via a 'View' menu?) whereby terrain, cities, map grid, borders, road/rail networks, trade routes, and units, were all on separate map 'layers' that could selectively be turned on or off at the player's discretion. Then you could 'mix-&-match' whatever elements you wanted to see at a given time.

And, pushing it a bit further, maybe you could even turn off the terrain itself apart from a basic distinction between land and sea: so that, if you did this but kept borders in view, you'd get essentially a 'political' map of the world with all the borders shown and (dare we hope?) the territory within each border coloured according to each civ's colour...

Maybe this is all a case of "dream on...", but it would be nice!!

[Chronus]

Call To Power (and I presume CTP2) has the option of turning off the City names while leaving the rest of the terrain untouched. I don't see why it couldn't be implemented in Civ III.

[cyborgasm]

Alpha Centauri had a better hidden terrain function then Civ II; first it would turn off units and citys, then terrain improvements, and then forests. But a system sort of like the layer view check list in sim city 3000, where you can select any combination of layers to be viewed until you change the layers back, would be really nice.