The interface was a top bar and a 288-pixel sidebar. On a 1360-pixel screen that is a fifth of the world you never see, permanently, in a game whose entire calling card is the world.
What Age of Empires, Empire Earth and Anno agree about
They are three games from three different decades with different engines and different teams, and they arrived at the same skeleton: the map gets the full window, and one opaque strip runs across the bottom. Resources at one end, minimap at the other, and a context panel in the middle that changes with what you have selected.
When three independent attempts converge on a shape, the shape is load-bearing. Two reasons it is the right one here. A map you travel wants every pixel, and horizontal space is the cheap kind — a strip across the bottom of a widescreen display costs you very little of the thing you are looking at, while a sidebar costs you a fifth of it. And the hand is already at the bottom of the screen.
What we took, and what we did not
Taken: the layout, the tabbed middle — build, selected, dispatches — and the rule that clicking a building opens that building’s own menu rather than a global production screen. That last one is the core loop of the game and it is deliberately theirs.
Not taken: the stone and the parchment. Beveled frames, carved borders, gold gradients. That was a solution to a 1999 problem — making a flat 2D panel feel like an object — and copying it now would be costume rather than design. Our chrome is flat: one opaque band, hairline rules, monospace figures, and a single brass line along the top edge to separate the instrument from the world.
Nothing overlaps the map
Except transient cards, which sit top-left and go away. A permanent floating panel over the diorama is a sidebar that has learned to hover, and it costs exactly as much.
The bar is currently structural rather than styled — the positions are right and the spacing, weights and resource treatment are placeholder. That is the correct order to do it in: structure is what you polish against, and polishing a layout you are about to move is work you throw away.