How Does One Paint Isometry?

The usual drawing order is
1
2 3
4 5 6
7 8
9

But then tile 5 will overlap sprite moving between cells 2 and 3

And you can't draw underlying tiles before the sprites, otherwise large sprites would mess the higher level tiles. Typical tile cubes in games like X-Com and Magic & Mayhem are 32x32x16 (allows modelling nice curved terrain), while sprites are several times higher to maintain proportions

>>6
It is a funny one. Maybe you can just sort all drawn objects by distance to the camera. In isometricness, the camera is infinitely far away from the scene. Project coordinates onto the line parallel to the camera's direction. And use that number to determine drawing order. I think that would work.