The capital city and its buildings are visible when you open the second menu ("Give Industry Orders") on the main menu bar in Imperialism.
Standard buildings
The initial buildings at all levels of difficulty are eight in number:
- Armory - build army units
- Capitol - recruit immigrants
- Food Processing - convert good nutritious raw food shipped in from the fields and fisheries into cans of preserved stuff that feeds only half as many citizens
- Railyard - build transport cars and maybe barges
- Shipyard - build merchant ships and warships
- Trade School - give citizens general training, in two stages turning an "untrained worker" into a "trained worker" then an "expert")
- University - convert expert citizens into specialist civilians
- Warehouse - see what you've got, and mouseover to see how much is coming in on the transport system next turn
Some of those buildings may expand at times, without direct player input.
Decorative structures such as statues may appear later, along with spaces for an Oil Refinery and a Power Plant.
Buildings you may build and/or expand
On easy levels you may already see three mills (capacity 2) and three matching factories (capacity 1) when the game starts, but on harder levels you have to build those yourself, using lumber and steel, one unit of each for each unit of capacity.
After you learn the appropriate technology, you may build an Oil Refinery and a Power Plant in the north-east. They may be available immediately in some late-start scenarios.
At all levels you have to expend lumber and steel to expand those buildings, again one unit of each for each unit of increased capacity. Factories and Power Plants double to 2 then 4, then increase by 4 per expansion thereafter, while Mills and Oil Refineries follow the same pattern except double those numbers.