Different unit designs

Hello all, I'm Disalign, also known as Theterrarian, and as this is one of my first posts on this forum I have decided to make it something hopefully positive and thought provoking.

What I am talking about is an idea for PA, a suggestion of some sorts, and I'm putting it in the general discussion simply because I don't know where else to put it.

Now, confusion paragraph situations aside, I move on to my actual suggestion: Custom-Ish unit designs. What I mean, of course, is different pre-made unit designs for the same unit (that can be toggled in the armory) to differentiate what everyone sees for those units. Of course, this doesn't change the unit icons or how they act, just what they look like.

For instance, maybe you're a tank player. You love tanks. You love using tanks simply because they're FREAKING TANKS (I mean who doesn't like a tank. They're tanks.) And because of this, you usually don't use bots, simply because you prefer the feel of tanks. Well, what if you could change your bot units into more hover-tank like units?

Or what if you're a bot player. You just love those cute little bots and their noises. Love the look of bots jogging out into battle. Well, what if you could change your tanks into big clunky legged units like a Scorpion or a Spider?

Or possibly, you're not into the whole super high tech thing, and you would rather have low tech rustic looking robots. Well, you could do that to! Instead of lasers, your dox could shoot machine gun-like bullets. Instead of big jet planes, you could have blimps and more rustic looking fighters.

Of course, this would all be held under a new tab in the armory, possibly even in pre-made sets for players to easily pick the theme they like, or customize their units one by one.

I believe every commander deserves to model their units to their liking. What do YOU think about this idea?

to quote another post or several thousand. "this will mess with WYSIWYG"

sounds like a fun idea, but I think there are more pressing issues that need to be fixed first, like wreckages, a minimap, bigger maps, control of terrain height in the system editor, re-balancing of existing units to be more different gameplay wise, a new unit or two etc pp. So many things that probably will yield more "fun" compared to different unit looks.
Not saying different unit looks are bad, but there are more important things,.

that means it is good to implement it so people finally realize WYSIWYG is just a stupid acronym and not a religion.

Not really needed at all, and would be a complete waste of time imo since there's far more important things to be done.

We might as well have different factions.

If I had a dollar for everytime WYSIWYG was miss-applied or said to be violated when it's not

This doesn't violate WYSIWYG at all, unless you make a different unit look identical to an existing one. Multiple units that act the same but look different are fine. It's when multiple units act different but look the same that WYSIWYG is violated. It's the same as why the custom commanders don't violate WYSIWYG.

If the OP may add a bit of insight on their own idea, I wasn't saying this should be priority at all, or done now. I'm just saying its a feature that I personally would like to see included at one point in time when the game is more finished and polished c:

neat idea but too time and resourceheavy for only a visual change ...

Amphibious Dox and combat fabber (i learned that some weeks ago) are totally against the wysiwyg paradigm, it's not even written in the unit description. We already have double standards about this so we can add whatever unit we wish now.

No, they aren't against WYSIWYG. Every Combat Fabber is identical. Every Dox is identical. There are no upgrades or bonuses that ever make one Dox or Combat Fabber different from the others. Lack of indication of what a unit does might be bad design/UI, but it's a different thing to the WYSIWYG paradigm, which is about consistency of units.

wysiwyg is all about a unit being used once will be like this always through a match ... meaning it will look always the same ... it will do always the same ..

See, I thought this suggestion would completely ignore WYSIQYG simply because the strategic icons aren't changing at all, only the visual look of the unit. Nobody looks at an ant to identify the fact that its an ant, just at the icon, but its nice to take a look at the actual ants as they roll across terrain

But since this would require a lot more models they should just make more factions.

There's one faction because it takes way too much time to make 100+ other models for just one other faction.

THANNNNK YOUUUUUUUUUU

See my above two posts; WYSIWYG isn't a concern for this idea.

While I agree this idea is too time intensive for Uber to work on any time in the next decade, making a whole new faction is obviously a lot more work than just a load of new unit models. I imagine balancing the factions would be the most time intensive part for the devs.

If any modders want to make a steam punk texture pack with blimp planes and hot air balloon orbital and everything with tiny chimneys I will happily pay you money for it though. Just so you know.

This idea turned into factions. OP just sitting here like "I just wanted texture packs .-."

Maybe later this could be added when Uber has included all most wanted features. First I'd like to see a better Galactic War, full server release, some terrain/planet generation improvements etc.

I would like this to be a thing.

Ridiculous idea.

You want to create a new faction and let someone select 'retro looking units' or 'hi-tech units' then fine. Anything else is madness.

Modded texture packs (Model packs) would be too legit to think about quit.....ing.