UI and readability Requests

due massive number of things that could be happening at once in this game there area few things that I think the UI should do.

when you zoom out to the planetary scale I think it is impotent for each planet should give some kind summery of what is going on on the planet based on whatever Intel you have. This should include the relative military Strength of each players forces on the planet, the relative economic strength of each player harvesting resources from the planet, and the net resource you are gaining(or losing) on the planet.

It was brought up earlier that it would be possible to do massive 40+ player mega battles in Planetary Annihilation. Although, this is cool I don't think the simple player color approach would work very well to differentiate all of the players as certain team colors would inevitably be too similar to tell apart. This is why I think Planetary Annihilation should have 2 team colors per player. This would allow for fewer more differentiable team colors while still allowing the massive number of players that would make a game truly epic.

This is purely my opinion but I think the strategic icons in Sins of a Solar Empire were more readable Then the Strategic icons in Supreme Commander. If planetary Annihilation uses Strategic Icons I think they should vaguely resemble the unit the represent instead of some esoteric diamond with a + in the center.

Compare
SOASEhttp://www.draginol.com/images/WhyIroncladissosuccessfulsoquickly_C29F/image_4.png
SChttp://www.tauniverse.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=24530&stc=1&d=1291361179

Thoughts?

Nice post!

I donno about the two team colors... at least... in the way shown in your example...... but I agree that it would be nice/important to have some kind of high level intelligence on planets... possibly with the requirement of ground scouts and orbital spy satellites or spy-ships etc....

I find the double team colors a very interesting idea.

the problem of the power-of-balance meter is, that the player won't know everything of the enemy most likely, giving a false reading.

I have played neither supcom or soase enough to be sure. Both have their merits, with the supcom version, it seems that you need to learn less icons, but the icons themselves are a bit random. The soase version looks nicer, but at first you have no idea what the unit type is and all, until you learn them all.

I like the concept, but yeah acey has a good point about the Fog Of War. It would work in SoaSE, because you always know everything in a system you could see.

i remeber the higaaran ships from homeworld 2 being a much more appropriate parallel but i couldn't find a picture of that in 15 seconds so i gave up.

here is the interceptor but not from the set player colour screen. but as you can see it has the base colour stripe colour and player badge.

I feel the badge is not necessary when dealing with the invariably large number of units and would only muddle up the models. if you have one maybe attack to the commander.

I like what you're on to with the quick overview of a planet when zoomed out. Definitely a good idea that I'd like to see implemented in some form.

/approve team colors.

I don't think we'll need to worry about Team Colors, based on what we've seen so far units are 50-80% team color already!

Mike

the problem is, when there are 40 players, there will not be enough colors to accommodate the difference. So even when they are 80% team color, if the other team has a nearly equal color, you are not going to see the difference.

It would probably be easier, in those cases, to just designate an enemy team color, a friendly team color, and your own color.

It could work like this

Have a custom colors screen. Default would be.
Green for allies (can assign custom color)
Blue own color (can assing custom color)
Red for enemies (as above)

That was the thing I also thought of first. The downside is that you not know which enemy you are attacking (unless you constantly hover-over the units). When there are multiple enemies on your planet and you want to totally eradicate one, you are never quite sure if you are attacking the right units (especially if all enemies have multiple bases).

I find the 2 team color an elegant and an original solution as well. As a bonus, the need for an actual army painter is reduced (not that I personally need one) if you can choose your own, but unique color combination at the start of the game.

I tought about having the enemies with their original colors, while your allies would have one unique colors, if you wanted you could see your allies colors too anyway.

If in a game with up to 39 potential enemies, would it really matter which specific enemy you were targeting? Battles are just going to become a giant clusterfudge of explosions and debris limiting the effectiveness of specific-target attacks, or so small scale that it'll be easy to just remember what name popped up when hovering to cursor over them.

Also, finding 40 unique colours is, well, impossible. At casual inspection, every 5 or so will look very similar. (5x red/green/blue/yellow/white/pink/brown/black each). I assumed that an option for friendly/enemy colours would be included due to this issue.

If you do the math there are 16777216 possible colors and if you divide this by 40 that leaves 419430.4 possible colors between each color if you were to pick 40 evenly divided colors

now that may seem like a lot but realize that this line
and the above line are separated by exactly 419430 colors

that's a pretty small difference and why I think that 1 color per player is not feasible.

However with 2 team colors and only using the 6 primary colors as well as black and white.
there are 64 possible team color combinations.

Unfortunately, the issue with the 2 color idea I think is integrating it into the strategic icons without making them clunky.

wow, all this and now secondary colors are being removed. Guess that's progress?

Not sure we will get 40 team games, or just 40 players in the game at once with just a few teams.

Holy necro batman!

I had no idea this was that old until you said that... I should read timestamps before replying to people.