Your territory is the area of land that you have control over and you can only construct buildings and mine resources or chop trees that are within your territory.
Your ‣ gives you a small area of territory to begin with. To expand your territory you need to construct ‣. Once a guardbot occupies a constructed watchtower you will gain new territory.
It's usually best to build watchtowers right on the border to gain the most territory. Also higher level watchtowers (‣, ‣) have a larger radius and will grant you more territory.
On some maps resources might only be accessible over water. To set up new colonies on different islands you'll need to set up an expedition at a ‣ and explore the high seas. Once you hit land on your new island, your new ‣ will grant you a small amount of territory to work with. For more information check out the Expeditions section.
On some maps you will come across unfriendly robot colonies and eventually your territory borders will meet and the only way to gain more territory will be to capture the enemy watchtowers. Full information on this in the Combat section.
The map can be accessed by the button in the top left of the screen or by the hotkey [M].
It shows you a top-down view of the land that is visible to you along with the amounts of locations of natural resources available to you. You can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel or the slider on the left.
Natural resources outside your fog of war are marked as unknown and may be any natural resource type, but their location can give you a hint about which direction to expand in.