Please see attached image. It is hard for me to distinguish all the planes strategic icons. I can't pick out any planes without zooming in and trying to locate a particular type. Regular, advanced, bombers, fighters, it is not easy to see from the strategic icons.
I agree. I also think the icons are not particularly visually meaningful either (in particular for units... structures are generally ok). I've made a set of icons which I think is clearer, and more consistent. Although right now there are still a few readability issues, as the game forces all icons to be blurry because of a bug in the code. You can find them here. I think the air icons are sufficiently comprehensible and distinguishable:
you can do what I did and compensate the size difference. It makes them almost pixel perfect. ALMOST it really always stays blurry. I'm just about to try yours
This is a somewhat common topic. Uber has said (somewhere) that they'll be improving the strategic icons. If they don't, I'll design my own and release them in a mod.
Part of the issue is that the concept of having a strategic icon for every individual unit means that those icons are small, and the player is presented with a fuzzy sea of little icons. I would like to the ability to group units together, such as a hotkey to bind units into a platoon. Platoons would move, fight, and be selected together as well as display one strategic icon for the group, possibly with numbers representing that group's strength. From a high strategic level, this would display the necessary information to the player much more clearly, and allow selection and orders to be executed without needing to zoom in.
Kind of like the "fleet" option in Sins of a solar empire? You could rally your factories to the platoons, and they would automatically join them. This could allow you to divide your forces as you choose.
I Think units could easily be distinguished by different colors. You could have the usual colors for different players and then 4-5 colors for you. For example: Every player is red on his point of view and there are 9 other players in the game which have 9 other colors (again this is different from each players point of view). Every player has 4 more colors (or some candy-stripe combination) for different units. This your be changed in the setting to fit everyones needs. There already is a "favorite color" mod so this can't be so hard to do