Map Modes — Wiki — Atomic Rivals

The world map always shows exactly one map mode. Political is the default, and every game starts in it. The others recolour the provinces to answer a single question at a glance: who belongs to which bloc, where the money is, where the next war might start. Map modes change only what you see, never the state of the game. In Multiplayer, each player picks their own.

You switch modes with the buttons along the top of the minimap in the bottom-right corner. Each button's tooltip names its mode, and the active one is highlighted.

The modes

Mode	What each province shows
Political	The owner's country colour. Colonies and protectorates take their overlord's colour, and occupied land is striped in the occupier's colour.
Sphere of influence	The colour of the bloc the owner belongs to. Countries leaning toward a bloc without joining it are grey with the bloc leader's colour in diagonal stripes, and non-aligned countries are grey.
Terrain	No colouring, only terrain, water, vegetation and borders.
Regions	A distinct colour for each region. Provinces outside any region show a muted version of their owner's colour.
GDP	The province's total economic output.
GDP per capita	Output per inhabitant.
Education	The province's Education level.
Population	The number of people living there.
Devastation	How badly war has wrecked the province (see Devastation). Undamaged land isn't shaded, so the war zones stand out.
Flashpoints	The provinces of every live dispute in the colour of its stage: pale when quiet, amber and orange as it heats up, red when critical, deep red in a standoff, plum at war, steel blue under a ceasefire. Everything else is grey.
Threat	How threatening each country is to yours, from 0 to 100 (see Threat Levels).
Outreach	Your regional networks in green, and the rival networks you can name in red.
Party support	The most popular party in its ideology's colour. The colour is strong where the party holds a clear majority and fades toward grey where the vote is split.
Dominant faction	The faction that dominates the province (see Factions).

Data modes

GDP, GDP per capita, Education, Population, Devastation and Threat are data modes. Each one shades provinces along a single colour ramp from low to high, and a small legend under the minimap buttons shows the ramp and its end values.

GDP, GDP per capita and Population span several orders of magnitude, so they use a logarithmic scale. The ends of that scale follow the current world distribution, so the map stays readable as the world develops over the decades. Education runs on a fixed scale from 0% to 100%. Devastation runs from 0% to 60%, the level of the worst-hit cities of 1946. Threat runs from 0 to 100.

Hovering a province in a data mode adds its value to the tooltip. Party support adds the two most popular parties with their shares, and Dominant faction adds the faction's name.

Spheres of influence

In Sphere of influence mode, the country names on the map label whole blocs. A bloc leader's name spans its own territory and that of every country aligned with it, so the Soviet bloc reads as one name from Eastern Europe to the Pacific. A bloc split by the sea is named on every landmass that holds one of its members' capitals. Countries that only lean toward a bloc, and non-aligned countries, keep their own names. The mode updates every day as alignments shift.

Faction colours

Parties always use their ideology's colour. Every other faction has a colour chosen by what kind of group it is, so the same kind of group looks the same everywhere. Armed forces are brown, organized labour orange, farm interests wheat, business dark gold, security services near-black, scientists and reformers violet, and national and separatist movements pink. In Dominant faction mode, a non-party faction shows the colour of the party it endorses, with its own colour drawn over it in stripes.

How the modes behave

Borders, hover highlighting, selection and labels behave the same in every mode, and country borders always follow real ownership.
In Political and Sphere of influence modes, the colouring fades as you zoom in close and stays only near borders. In Regions and the data modes, the colouring stays at every zoom, and trees take on the province's colour, so the information can still be read up close.
Occupation stripes appear only in Political mode.

Targeting missions

When a diplomat mission is waiting for you to pick a target on the map, the map temporarily switches to the mode for that kind of target. Every target that can take the mission is coloured green, and blocked ones are muted red and hatched. Hovering a blocked target explains why. Your previous mode returns when targeting ends.

The minimap

The minimap is an abstract world view in the interface's own gold-on-dark style, the same in every mode. A white rectangle marks the part of the world on screen. Click the minimap to fly the camera there, or drag across it to move the camera with the cursor. A toggle collapses the minimap to just its mode buttons and gives the space back to the outliner. The game remembers your choice.