Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and COLOUR

Something I've noticed recently while revisiting TA and the SupCom games was how TA communicated weapon fire and damage a lot clearer than its successors.

Lasers went through a spectrum of Yellow for tickle damage, Red for low damage, Green for awesome sounding high damage and Blue for oh **** **** bastard when did they build that ultra damage.

(The way the colours corresponded with Mechwarrior too, which I like. The red barrels standards of laser colours.)

Rapid fire weapons like the PeeWee's and the ghetto gunship's EMG were really nice and clear and bright.

Tank and artillery plasma shells, clearly exploded with different size blasts, though the shells weren't that much different in size till you got to Berthas and other heavy pieces.

Small rockets and missiles weren't much different to look at, but the large rockets were easily visible.

I found in Supreme Commander that a lot of the time weapon fire wasn't easily visible, or distinguishable between different tech tiers, until you reached tech three where there was an awful visual disjoint with the quantum tech and suddenly all the faction's guns fire the same blue stuff.

The only thing that SupCom communicated well was how it distinguished between the different factions via the weapon fire, if not the ferrocity.

However, with Planetary Annihilation and the units coming from one pool, do we need to see a return to colour coded weapon fire in regards to damage of weapons?

I think we do.

I also think weapons fire SHOULD not be colour coded as to the players because of the above points I've made.

I can't deny it would be kinda cool to have blue weapon fire for "good" commander's factions and red or purple for the"evil" if the factions have such ideologies that we can comprehend, but I think gameplay would be better served if the TA approach was mimicked.

I'll leave this conversation here though, I did want to talk about weapon types and projectile types but I think it needs its own topic.

So yeah what does everybody else think?

Re: Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and CO

Not a bad idea. But in real terms red is low energy and blue is high energy. I'm not sure how they thought yellow came before red on this scale. Personally I'd say purple is even higher energy as purple is the closest to UV on the visible spectrum.

Though I must say supcom did communicate nicely that cybran weapons were EMP based with the little electric effect.

Re: Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and CO

This would be a good thing to bring back, and now that there is only one unit pool you could really make it work.

in sup come with all the different factions, you needed to aesthetically differentiate all the different groups resulting in the loss of such a nice and simple system.

Re: Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and CO

This This This oh so much this. TA had a total of 4 explosions (not counting nukes), and only a small handful of projectiles, yet managed to portray weapon damage ratios perfectly (the only real exception is that the D-Gun used the smallest explosion, but had a whole row of them and the sound to match, so it felt as powerful as it was)
Sup Com & Sup Com 2 failed horribly at this, big explosions could do little damage and vice-versa (shields especially made this a problem, since there was no explosion when they were hit). You could watch a fight unfold in TA, and if you started to see the larger explosions you knew to look for a powerful unit in the enemy force. But in Sup Com the explosions and projectiles are mostly just visual noise, and did not communicate clearly what was actually happening.

Re: Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and CO

I imagine the theory is that using green as a middle ground between red and blue was due to its place in the visible spectrum. (although by the same logic you can definitely claim that purple should be the highest-powered, as you point out)

As someone who's a bit colourblind I'd also hope there's at least some other subtle cues though- while I'd probably do fine with this system people who are more colourblind than me wouldn't, and some variations in beam length, thickness, and other effects would be awesome.

Re: Of Weapon Fire and Muzzle Flash, Projectile types and CO

SupCom 1 suffered from particularly bad explosions and stuff.

SupCom 2 had MLRS which were less (barely at all) visible than plain old arty shells, which I felt should've been the opposite way round...