Just reposting a topic in here because it got swamped in the regular forum, and hoping the Dev's see it. Admin: feel free to delete. 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 senator Clay Davis SH***************T when did they build that ultra damage. (I liked the way the colours corresponded with Mechwarrior too. 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 alliegance 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 ultimately gameplay and identification would be better served if the TA approach was mimicked. So yeah what does everybody else think?
If weapons fire has specific properties that distinguish it from other weapons (e.g. has a stun capability, or "armour piercing", or is from a massively long range unit) then it helps dramatically to have an easy visual method to communicate this to the player. I liked the colour coding from TA, as I could see if my units were getting hit by a light barrage or if they were being hammered by Annihilators, however that simply distinguished between damage output (and to a lesser extent, range). It was also fairly easy to distinguish between Punisher fire and Bertha fire (mainly from the explosion animation) so you had a feel for the sort of range you may need to traverse to find the offending artillery. For a first pass / alpha I don't actually care if it fires grey cubes or lines, but from a polish and UI perspective I certainly feel that distinct weapons effects add to the overall experience, and can communicate useful information in and of themselves. Being able to determine what is shooting you before you can see them, can help drive the decision on what gets sent to scout / intercept, and how you ask them to arrive there.
Good idea, certainly worth looking into, and given Uber understand the importance of readability of things I've got a good feeling that they will at least do something to help in this area . But it's too early for them to be acting on this yet so bring it up again some time after they launch the alpha.
