Suggestions & Ideas for strategic icons

Brad said there was going to be an overhaul to strategic icons, though I’ve had none of the other devs give details about that. So I don’t know what this overhaul includes, but I would like to share some ideas:

-Icons could flash red when the unit is hit by something (with a split second cooldown between flashing, to avoid performance drops and dizziness) Or they could vanish-flash or flash white, flash bright,....

-Icons could fade nanolathe green and back (to the original color of the player and repeat) when a building or unit is under construction. Obviously the green needs to be different enough from the actual playable color green.

-Dual-color icons (so your secondary color is used for something)
The second color could be used for team armies, where teammates share the same primary color, but have a different secondary color. - Idea from Twinstar


example of dual-color and depth icons from Civ5 (click to zoom in!)

-Enemy building icons visible trough fog of war*

-Planetary icons disappear become transparent when you see the Orbital Shell, so you can easily find orbital units. (as an option, though clouds could also help this)
oh look, it's in the game as 'show terrestrial' option. It needs work though.

-Icons should appear depending on distance from the surface, not on a zoom percentage**

- Flashing separate ‘no power’ icon (lightning bolt icon) for when a building can’t operate because it has no power.

-Radar blips could have a different shape based on what unit type they are (structure, land, air, naval.).
Tatsujb has quite a big thread regarding that over here

-Icons appear in the build bar next to their corresponding structure/unit. Idea from Eluvatar92, mod

-Icons shouldn't be blurry. They need to be smooth and clearly readable. I'm not a fan of them being pixel-perfect, they need to be smooth instead. And they need depth and a shadow underneath them to make them stand out (from the terrain)


*This would save a lot of time figuring out where the enemy is and which enemy you’re looking at, the icons should have a darker tone to tell the difference between fog and visible areas. Edit: This was a confirmed feature.


**You may have noticed on small planets icons disappear when you zoom in really close, and on large planets icons appear very far away. This is because icons are based on a zooming percentage, which is also based on the planet’s radius. It should be based on the distance from the average surface height.


Further thoughts and suggestions?


Last update 15 apr. 2014

I feel like the flashing red when the unit is hit would be a cool feature, might be added graphics drain, but why not.

Bgoloususus did a sizable telling of Strategic icons

The strategic icons really do need an overhaul. It's often difficult to tell what units are what, especially as the unit roster grows.

Enemy building icons through fog of war is a confirmed addition. And we'll also likely see radar blips switch from a generic icon to their strategic icon when they've been scouted out.

I like the flashing when hit.

The orbital view still does need work. :-/

The flashing no power is kinda neat... but not really needed. When your power is in the red below 80% none of the buildings that require power operate (radar and such).

-I didn't know fog of war icons where a confirmed addition.

-Flashing no power icon isn't necessary, but it would help newbies.

It was confirmed in one of the recent playtests.

That is a very good point.

I don't watch all of the playtests, but I always read your recaps Brian.

How about strategic icons on a strategic framework.

Meaning depending on how close the view is set icons collected and are displayed at the unit level, then battalion level, division etc.

As the game progresses the screen is clobbered with too much information to manage.

How do you know how many tanks in the division? The model is still drawn on the map.

Let me be more clear for my first idea:

So when you zoom far out, it is basically impossible to tell if unit is under construction, unless it is pretty large (like an adv. factory). When icons appear, health bars disappear and nanolathe particle effects disappear at a certain distance. I've pulled off many fabbers before thinking they were idle, then later finding out they were building something and have the progress on that construction fade away.

So by having icons fade (=smooth and slowly flashing) in the 'nanolathe color' and back, you can easily tell the difference.

I edited the original post a bit, also added a note about spacing between icons.

So want this.

Additionally, I'd like to see Enemy unit icons briefly visible, then gradually fade-out through fog of war over a reasonable period of time. Air scouting runs are more costly / less effective in this latest patch, and I expect that to continue to be the case. In the meta-battle for my attention in-game, it seems absurd that as advanced as this battlefield is, that if I (as the penultimate commander) do not personally inspect my scouting runs on every single active battlefield, as they occur, that I could miss incredibly important intel so easily. Intel that by all logic should be important enough to forward up the [in this case, flat] chain of command.

i.e.: Oh hey, there's actually a force of 200 slammers and dox about to exit the west side of that base. Your scouts all saw it, and you could've too, but well, since you weren't watching 2 seconds ago, as your scouting run was flakked to pieces, you don't know that. Our war machine is unable to find a way to convey that relevant info to you (??!?!) since your attention wasn't looking in this exact spot 3-5 seconds ago.

This problem could be solved a number of ways, but I think a very efficient swag at it would be to continue to show those unit icons as the fog of war re-envelops them, and slowly fade those icons over the course of some number of seconds (on the order of 30? possibly a value that is inversely related to the unit movement speed?)

PS, I recognize the complexity and ultimately confusion that a simplistic implementation could introduce. Imagine during skirmishes and battles as vision radii shift rapidly and enemy units duck into and out of vision, the confusion that multiple lingering ghosted icons could represent. Same issue with follow-up scouting runs. So I understand this isn't necessarily an easy task to code, but Uber has some smart devs. And on the line between too much (possibly conflicting) information and double-even-triple counting some units vs lack of info stickiness, I'd rather be pleasantly surprised that some unit icons were multi-counts (and I suspect we'd all adjust to that behavior quickly enough).

I think the icons are ok(The art) but maybe the way they behave could be better(Its still beta though)

I think the flashing Icons would be cool in the beginning of the game(20 units) but when you have 500 bot armies and everything is flashing red it would get a little weird. Maybe if the game detects they are in a formation it will just make a red alert(Similar to a ping) instead of flashing every unit.

I like the idea of being able to tell what is under construction, maybe instead of making them green they could just be a little see through. (Mainly because green might be a color, also I would always think that the enemy is building in my base)

The orbital icons I 100% agree with, as I understand it orbital is getting a makeover so this might actually be a thing internally.

I don't know about the distance from the ground one, I like having all the icons pop in at once(Maybe you could specify to only show a layer of icons ex: only air or only ground)

The no power idea I also 100% agree with, maybe also have a little alert like "3 Units can not operate because of power restrictions"

- Flashing: So if every single unit would flash every time it gets hit, this would be a serious performance drop in large battles. So there must be a delay for flashing, like 1/4 or 1/3 of a a second or so. So they aren't completely turned to red when they are shot by a million tanks.

-The construction: They aren't just green, they fade smoothly to bright green and back to your original color in like 1.5 seconds (so it doesn't make dizzy). The green must be different from the actual player color green, so far there is no nano lathe green player color.

- You didn't really understand with what I meant with the distance one; I'l make it more clear.

So you may have noticed that on very small planets (200-300 radius), you need to zoom in very close to get icons disappear. On large planets (850+ radius), you need to zoom very far to get them appear, which is a little odd.

So with this, icons always appear (all at once, except for orbital as I said), based on the DISTANCE FROM THE SURFACE instead of a percentage from the radius, which varies, as it does now. I wonder how far you would have to zoom out to get icons on a 3000 radius planet, someone needs to try that out confirm how terrible it is right now.

gettit?

Now I get it. I didn't realize the problem with the zoom %

All right. So Gamma just removed secondary army color picking, so that color is now randomized and many people want it back to be how it was. I really disgust green+pink and every time I spawn with that, I just want to suicide my comm.

Scathis said it wasn't noticeable enough.

So to see in an instant what colors a player has, dual-color strategic icons would be excellent. That will make it NOTICEABLE.

And to be honest, the two colors made this game a little bit more unique from other rts games.

+1

+2

+3

I would like to add this to the ideas:

That would be cool AND give a good use for the secondary color. Having all team players share the same primary color, but differing secondary colors. +1 from me.

I encourage you to take a step over here if you haven't already : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/different-blips.49424/