Your camera hovering in the orbit, you might not see everything just as clear as the commander on the surface you are trying to guide to victory. From up there it's pretty much impossible to distinguish any two units, or to see what color they have.

Luckily the game helps you out. If you are too far away, the units will be overlaid with unit specific icons, making it possible to see where they are and to whom they belong. Since the icons also come in a handful of different shapes and being filled with a bunch of symbols, it also helps to distinguish different types of units.

But they tell you much more! Just looking at the symbol, you can tell if it is a building, bot, ship, tank, airhip or orbital unit, what units it can attack, and how its range is compared to other units.

This guide will tell you exactly how to do this.

The icons come in different shapes, most of them looking like super simplified drawings of the unit type they represent, already making it easier to distinguish them. The shape will essentially tell you, if you are looking at a bot, building, ship etc.
So just by looking at the shape of the icon, you can already tell if this enemy thing you are seeing can move at all, and if so, where it could potentially move.

Here is a complete list of shapes and what they they tell you. They are split up in the two tables; One for units and one for buildings.






You will have noticed that ingame, these shapes are never empty. They contain even more symbols, making it seem even more overloaded. But these symbols carry informations about the unit/building that are equally important, and will be discussed next.

These symbols will tell you many things you might want to know about your unit or building, like:

Can it build stuff?
How far does it shoot?
Actually, what can it shoot?!

Since the symbols are always placed inside one of the shapes, I will use the following shape

for the purpose of demonstration. But the meaning of the symbols is independant of the shape at hand. So since the symbols apply to units and buildings alike, I will continue by calling them "objects".



This first set of symbols is made up of lines and carries the information of what can be targeted. You could think of the line as a gun barrel, pointing into the direction the shot can go. So every additional line in the shape will tell you that the object can shoot there too.


These symbols can be combined to indicate that the object can shoot at many types of elevation.


To give you an idea about how far the object can shoot, a rough idication of the range will also be given by these symbols. More points behind the line mean longer range.


(Example for anti air shooting, but it applies to the others as well)

So by looking at lines, you can already read of the most important information about an object in an RTS game: Can it shoot, and what?



Here you will find the other symbols that objects can be dressed with. They are ordered by a subjective estimate of their importance.

I hope that you found the informations in this guide helpful.

What I presented to you above is pretty much what I came up with, when I tried to make sense of the unit icons. It is not backed by any iformations from some official source or anything else, simply because... I couldn't find anything. (I didn't even find a guide about this topic, which is the main reason I wrote this one) I also don't know if these symbols are commenly used somewhere else; So far, I only came across them in this game.

So if you know anything more about these or if you have suggestions when it comes to the "interpretation" of the icons; I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.