I’ve been trying to recall a game I played briefly as a kid at a friends house.
I feel like it was similar in style to Settlers 4 with an isometric view, typical click and drag a square around who you want to control, and a focus on building and combat. What makes me think it wasn’t Settlers 4 is I don’t recall it having that kind of cartoon style and I vividly remember there being some kind of cheat code that would reveal the map.
The reason I say it’s around 2006 was because I originally went to buy it in a Future Shop (a Canadian store that was bought by Best Buy) but my mom said I should get Civilizations 4 instead because she recalled my uncle talking about it.
Awesome, glad I could help! What’s funny is that the only reason I remembered that was because of the “cheat that reveals the whole map” - someone from school told me about EE2 because of that exact cheat, and it was my introduction to the concept of cheats :D
I kind of miss the old school games like SimCity 2000 or Civilization 2 that looked like every other Windows program and had normal menus at the top of the screen. If you put in the right code a whole extra Cheat menu appeared with all sorts of options!