TL;DR
Improve the toggles for detailed information in map view (by which I mean remote view while zoomed out) and the way they are switched on/off with the Alt key.- These toggles
- 09-25-2025, 00-23-10.png (22.83 KiB) Viewed 70 times
What?
Give each toggle three states, cycled through by clicking the buttons:- always disabled,
- toggled with Alt,
- always enabled.
Quick mock-up to illustrate the point:
- Before pressing Alt
- 09-24-2025, 23-02-13.png (24.03 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- After pressing Alt
- 09-24-2025, 23-16-55.png (23.86 KiB) Viewed 70 times
Why?
The issue starts with the logistic network coverage and pollution, because those can make some parts of the map nearly unreadable. They are greatly useful occasionally, but inconvenient when kept on at all times, so I generally want to keep them hidden most of the time, but have quick access to them when I need to.- Logistic coverage and maximum pollution stacked on top
- 09-24-2025, 20-18-44.png (47.14 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- Logistic coverage and pollution disabled
- 09-24-2025, 20-19-06.png (51.54 KiB) Viewed 70 times
Currently, the Alt key activates or deactivates a set selection of the toggles (and doesn't affect three specific ones at all). If I manually enable a smaller selection to be visible, then the Alt key only toggles the ones that I selected (except the three unaffected ones). Whenever I want to see the others, I have to manually enable them, and then manually disable them again once I get the information I need.
- Before pressing Alt
- 09-24-2025, 20-10-45.png (23.67 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- After pressing Alt
- 09-24-2025, 19-56-04.png (23.04 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- Manually setting a smaller selection
- 09-24-2025, 20-23-49.png (23.86 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- Pressing the Alt key
- 09-24-2025, 23-12-13.png (23.07 KiB) Viewed 70 times
- Pressing the Alt key again
- 09-24-2025, 20-37-49.png (23.86 KiB) Viewed 70 times
This means that I can fairly reasonably change what the "high-information view" includes, but the "low-information view" is always limited at most to the three toggles that are unaffected by the Alt key. Also, if I disable the toggles with Alt and then enable one of the toggles specifically, the game will only toggle this one with the Alt key, and I have to reselect the ones I want to stay up again,
If I wanted to simply use the Alt key to occasionally toggle network coverage and pollution info when I need it, I would also have to settle for not having a bunch of other info enabled at all times.
This improvement would extent to all the other extra map information, not just pollution and network coverage.
This Alt functionality seems completely separate from Alt-mode, though it doesn't seem to have a separate keybind or something like a mention in tips and tricks despite this. Note that integrating toggling this detailed map info with Alt-mode could also be considered; however, considering Alt-mode being the default for many players and having pollution and network coverage enabled at all times being undesirable, I'm afraid this wouldn't actually fix my specific issue at hand.
Potential downstream issues include getting in the way for people who would prefer to toggle things one-by-one, as this would require three mouse presses up from two to cycle a button - you tell me if that's a significant problem, but it doesn't affect me as I'd much prefer to just use Alt for this.
Other notes:
- if this can be customized without using mods, feel free to let me know; I couldn't find any way to do it though,
- there could be a bunch of other solutions like toggle groups with dedicated hotkeys, but that's overkill for such a small feature - three button states seem to me like a much better balance of usefulness and simplicity,
- reworking the way network coverage and pollution appear on the map or just lowering their opacity could also be a valid suggestion, but that's a completely separate issue and it's not guaranteed to necessarily improve map clarity all that much either.