The various structures of a region are regrouped in a single sprite in AACW, which has the notable property of showing exactly what is there in the region! This is mostly done for flavor, but it can also be useful to gather quickly some infos, like the presence of a depot, a big stockpile of ammunitions or a high level fortification. (rest assured, you have tooltips and special filters to get more infos on a specific detail).
Pre-war forts have their own sprite, and will only show if there is a stockpile or if an anchorage is there (this is the case most of the time). Teepees show indians village.
Cities are regrouped in something we name 'cityscape'. Here you can see chimneys, showing that the city is producing war supply (heavy materials mostly used for ships and guns), or tents showing that there is a regular 'income' in conscripts from the city (this is seldomly the case, as in AACW you get conscripts by issuing call to volunteers and such, but more later
).The first board show you some possibles variations of a cityscape (populations level don't change during the war though). It dates a bit and some things have been refined. You can see the final and current version in the second board (comments are in french, but they are not needed to understand what is at hand I think).
The bad thing about them is that they are so damn small that all that excellent graphics work is too hard to see for most players. I have excellent vision and have a 19" monitor set to 1024/768 and 24-bit color and the differences in the structures are just too hard to see to be of any real use. 
leure:
I think that it will be much more visually effective than the little pulsing red boxes.
Quando omni flunkus imbibo bière!
