UBER - Everything is too hard to distinguish from one another in this game

I've noticed that I always have problem to recognize units when I start to play a new strategy game. I don't think 5 hours playtime in 1 session is enough time to let your brain get used to recognize a variety of units you have never seen before. I'd say 5-10 hours ingame time spread out over a few days is what you need before your brain have learnt to intuitively recognize the different units more quickly.
Of course large zoom, lots of units onscreen and seeing the units from many different angles doesn't exactly make it easier.

How long will we still get this answer ? This is stupid. If we don't raise the points that we think are the most important during Alpha/Beta, it won't matter to do it once the game is released.

Recognizing the units and buildings from one another is indeed a problem in PA, but I think it´s also that you don't see where the units are on the screen if you don't pay attention, because of the lack of colour and lightning contrast. Add to that the absence of a minimap, thus the fact that you have to turn around a sphere to find your units and the ones of the opponents, and the strategic icons which I find a lot less efficient than those of SupCom (sorry to compare but everyone will, and will be right to do so).

I'm not saying there is not a problem in PA. I'm just saying this to make people aware of this psychological effect.

And this is indeed likely to change as the beta progresses because there is no postprocessing done right now, PA don't really use your graphic card yet. BTW I can't recognize the units next to the ACU in your SupCom picture even if I zoom in and I have played a lot of SupCom so I think it is bad example.

I found the strategic icons hard to read in the start as well. Now I don't. It is hard to compare something which you've played for hundreds or thousands of hours to something you've only played tens of hours.
I find the icons in Zero-K to be very good as I can recognize every unit from their strategic icon and there are over 100 mobile units but it is hard for me to tell how easy it is for a new player to learn and distinguish them all.
SupCom isn't a good comparison. PA will have much more unit diversity and more units than each faction in SupCom. Imagine merging all the factions together from SupCom and trying to find a unique unit icon for each unit.

I think the strategic icons could be improved as well, currently I still have problems distinguishing stuff from each other which should get better but there are some icons which are also quite small and/or hard to recognize fast.
And units need more colors or the idea with lights sounds nice as well, I sometimes didn't even see my bots in the forest :/

That's a bit harsh. I could've easily said that it's stupid to compare things that have been finished for years and through several iterations of refinement to something that is FAR from being done. Also, the devs have continually stated that a massive amount of improvements have yet to come, which include performace, UI tuning, as well as graphical ones. Frankly, it's a bit narrow minded to assume the graphical quality will not improve from this point. On top of that, viewing the live streams and reading forum posts tell you that they know this is a problem, and it will receive attention when it makes sense to do it.

I guess I just believe that constructive critisism works best and slamming people and the dev team doesn't get you very far. You need to put things into perspective and make an effort to try to understand why it's in the state it's in, before piling on the criticisms and calling people stupid. There is an order to their development process that is mostly dictated by a lack of resources. They have to focus and prioritize on the important game elements first, like does it work without crashing? Graphics always come later in that process. It's not because it isn't important, just less important than functional issues and base feature implementation.

Be patient, it will come.

Sorry, I never meant that you were stupid, just that the idea that we have to wait for the final release before criticizing is stupid. I'm French so maybe "stupid" has a harsher sense than I mean for it. Sorry about that.

Anyways, I'm not asking for prettier graphics. I couldn't care less. I'm asking for clarity. I don't see how post processing can be enough, but we'll see.

This issue is really important. It has flawed Achron, another technically wonderful RTS (with multiplayer time travel!) which has rather poor unit and map design, boring story and so on. But it has perfect multiplayer time travel, history rewriting and grandfather paradox resolved, that's for sure. Units were undistinguishable even having much bigger size than those in PA, they are about Starcraft II size. In PA we have so small bots that we can't say who's who except via selecting them and looking to the selction list icons. Factories are even worse, I can't see any difference between vehicle factory and air factory, they have a big landing platform that was, like, copypasted? Advanced factory is just the same but a bit bigger. Of course, I have Shift+F1 to select every factory I've built and then spread the buildload between them but if I want to find the particular factory to replace its build queue with something else that becomes a problem. All land factories look the same! Naval factory is ok but advanced version not too much different from the basic one, too.

People tend to compare RTSes to Starcraft I. It has pretty low resolution (640x480) but manages to show easily distinguished units and buildings. They are all different and the only problem you have is remembering which building does what. But you won't ever confuse one with another, they're too unique for all races. I know, it's a huge designer's task to maintain the same style and keep things unique but that's what makes games look breathtaking.

So what we can do for buildings? It should look coherent with what it does. Air factories does exactly that, the landing pad says "Hey, your aircrafts can land on me and lauch from here!". But the vehicle factory should probably look more rectangular like a garage. Bots factory could be like barracks with many small cells for bot production stages. The idea is that the player should take a glimpse of the building and know what it can do and what it definitely doesn't. For now I don't see any visual reason against building aircrafts on the vehicle factory and having actually contrary expirience confuses me (subconsciously, of course). I also don't believe that the basic factory can't produce advanced units. They fit there and advanced factory doesn't have any noticeable addition that makes possible producing heavier units. I mean, factory shouldn't just grow. It should change.

I agree with you guys, I guess i just thought that the strategic icons were the answer (once you can turn them on at any zoom level). Maybe different shapes for factories could work to differentiate them?

Circular = Air
Square = Vehicle
Hexagonal = Bot

I think those would be easy enough to distinguish at various zoom levels.

Good idea

I think they even use circular for the metal extractors already. The other symbols should just be a bit more distinguishable and easier to recognize, I think also some towers show some symbol inside the symbol which refers to them, the problem is just that they're not immediately recognizable currently. The other problem was that at close up the units look too much the same sometimes and should be more distinguished using coloring.

We're not just talking about the strat icons. It's the art choices in general that make the game harder to play, unless you have lots of hours of training and finally get used to the tiny details that help distinguish units and buildings.

It would be really appreciated to have some insight from Uber on this topic.

Whilst I can see that the devs would not want to be seen to be 'copying' SupCom's strat icons, I also think that making them different to SupCom just for the sake of it is a bad idea. If it ain't broke, don't fix it as they say.

So whilst a complete carbon-copy of SupCom's icon system is undesirable for many reasons, I think it should still serve as a template in some cases. Some of the current PA icons are very hard to tell apart and there often doesn't seem to be any logic behind their shape or internal markings (e.g. why is a mex a circle with another circle inside it? To me it should be square to represent a building, and then the internal marker should be something that suggests production, such as a + symbol or something like that).

i dont see your point PA looks like the best one there

I think the planet list window that appears when in system view is the start. Selecting a planet from the list could show a separate panel that has a small render of it rotating.

On planets that have an orbiting radar satellite you could get full vision or a strategic view, otherwise just the fog of war and seeing the metal spots. The planet could rotate slightly, or be controlled with some input, or could just track the satellite all while showing the strategic view. At the moment, you cannot see what is happening on another planet so this would help to add that functionality and give the orbital satellites more usefulness.

I will agree that the Buildings need to be more distinguished in design for their actually look because the bot and vehicle factories both look very similar. The strategic icons need to be more distinguished between the the different units as well but that will come in time. The UI for Planetary and celestial need to be finished right now so that using these features is easier.

As for the minimap feature the Strategic View was designed in SupCom to replace this and even add more functionality to it. In the Strategic view you are able to interact with your armies in a Minimap you are not. I do not see a mini map in the picture of SupCom. But they also said that there would be a way to open multiple PA windows in order to allow you to have sights on different areas and even planets durring the Kickstarter. This will work alot like a Mini map if you want it to.

As for the art style we wanted the swirls in the textures because it looks slightly cartoonish and different from other games out there. This game is in a much better position art wise than it was in Alpha. In alpha the T1 Pgen was just a smaller version of the T2. This has changed and the art will continue to change and will evolve as they add more units.

The purpose of minimap isn't only a view but also alerts. It's even more important I think. If you fight on several planets you should know if there's a battle somewhere without jumping all over and checking things out instead of doing other things. That's offtopic though.

Today I've played against AI and built an Advanced Air Factory near another one. Then I clicked it and couldn't figure out how to build an aircraft... because it was Advanced Vehicle Factory. It took several seconds to understand that. I guess, says it all. Icons on the build panel are also messed up but I hope they'll be grouped by type and level in future. For now I don't see any way to click what I want from the first try without reading the tooltips over and over. Same for units after Shift+F1, there's a big bunch of all sorts of units and I don't even know where T2 units are and where T1s are. Strange enough, T2s go before T1s. Anyway, I can't tell which are advanced just by looking at their icons as well as models. They need to be more different.

Getting a notification on the side of the screen would be nice. And for bigger things we would need a nice voice that says "Strategic launch detected" or "Celestial body left its orbit" stuff like that.

xanath,
What if we had the Control Group side panel from SupCom?
I was thinking we take that, and go 1 further by adding in your suggestion.
- Left Click to select Control Group.
- Right Click to cycle through units in Control Group.

Would that make sense?


I've added that to the
"Unofficial" Official GUI Discussion Thread
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unofficial-official-gui-discussion-thread.52055/

Hope to get more feedback and suggestions.

This!!!
Minimap is supposed to be your "I see everything battlefield commander view".

I think SupCom strategic icons are better, at least as they stand now.
But better, I mean more simple, more intuitive and easier to read.
I know it's only Uber's first pass on the icons, so it's not "broken" per se, but it will need to be addressed I think?


p.s.
Is it just me, or are the trees also hiding units from you guys?