Strategic Icons

Is it going to be possible to turn off the strategic icons?

Sup Com had that. There'll probably be quite a lot of UI options.

Strat icons will go through changes to look better and be more informative with less effort. It was a first pass, man.

I totally under stand guys, but I hate them. I know a lot of people like them, and it makes it easer to see where everything is from a distance, but I feel it runes the view for me. I like to see all the pretty trees and little details from far above without having those annoying strategic icons.

You could disable the whole UI in SupCom, I would expect the same thing for PA.

While we're on the topic of Strategic Icons, some feedback guys?

I thought all of the icons looked too similar. There need to be marks or something that distinguish between tech levels and unit type (tank or bot), otherwise they all just look like pretty colors. I especially noticed this with the commander; he just looked like a bulky KBot at strategic zoom.

While were on the subject of them. I think they might be better if they were smaller and less cartoonish. If you get too many units in a small spot they become a blob. This happened a lot in Supreme Commander.

neutrino said somewhere that they were basically 0th pass. Like the first try at it they did.
I'd expect them to improve a lot in the coming weeks and they already were quite helpful. I always felt kinda blinded the moment they were hidden when zooming in.

Smaller? Definitely.

Less cartoonish? Now that you mention it, that might actually be a good suggestion.


I'm thinking that fixed-size icons are going to be much easier on the eyes.

Reading and listening to the devs, I would be quite surprised of the UI and Icons were not modifiable, so we could create our own icons if the ones they make don't seem good.

Less cartoonish? They looked AMAZING. I loved it.

For being a first pass on them, they were great. Reminded me a lot of the Sins of a Solar Empire strategic icons.


As for the op, I'm curious though. How do you expect to play on larger maps without strategic icons? While I also think they sometimes come in the way of the game looking great (in the sense that one is often zoomed out a lot instead of being up close) I can't think of a better way of doing it and to see whats going on on a larger scale.

The thing I liked better in the original TA than in SupCom for example is that fact you would spend looking at the actual units in the battlefield doing their things (like blowing stuff up).

The footage they showed us didn't really give me that TA feeling. Instead, it made me feel like most of the battle commands would be issued in the strategic view (similar to SupCom) and actually seeing your actual unit's 3D models is just something pretty much optional in order to 'play the game' (They looked tiny most of the time).

I don't like that idea and I personally feel it's a waste of all the great effort that goes into designing and implementing all the 3D units. TA (in my memory of it when I played it back in the day) was very much about the 3D units and maps that made it cool. I don't really like the prospect of just looking at a 2D abstraction of it 75% of the time.

I definitely get what you're saying, but TA also had a totally different scale, and ran under a different resolution. Maps were a lot smaller, units were a lot bigger, and there were a lot fewer of them.

With that in mind though, I still want to find a way to reconcile the two so that I have more of that feeling. There was nothing quite like having a squadron of Bulldogs steamroll the enemy. I think the unit ranges and speeds kept everything feeling much more weighty and monumental, while the amounts of units allowed had a feeling of scale.

Or I dunno. I mean, I could be wrong.

And unintentionally apt typo of the month goes to snownebula.

I personally love strategic zoom. slavetoinsurance is totally right when he said that the scale of the game is completely different than with TA. In order for this to truly be *planetary* annihilation, the very essence of the game needs to be on a grander scale than what we had in TA. Take strategic zoom away from PA (or SupCom for that matter) and you instantly make it a LOT harder to play. You'd also need a minimap, and I have no idea how a minimap would work with spherical land masses that exist in 3D space with asteroids and other planets. Hell, even with strategic zoom it's going to tough for Uber to make a coherent, intuitive system for seeing what on earth is going on across the game field.

I get what you're saying and agree to a point that it's a shame you can't see the 3D models all the time, but it's a simple requirement of the scale of this game that you won't be able to see the models in all their 3D glory at all times. When SupCom first came out with strategic zoom, I basically jizzed in my pants, and I really hope Uber can do a great job with it again this time.

Configurable strategic icons sounds great. But aside from that they should have distinct overall shape.

I've been playing supcom recently and I have a 2560x1600 monitor now that I didn't have back in 2007-09 when I first played it, and the strategic icons are too damn small on this monitor. Hopefully you can adjust size in PA. I duno how you could play without strategic icons though honestly.

I think strategic zoom was the best feature in an RTS in 10+ years and I don't know why every rts has this zoomed in view that doesn't even scale with higher res. I get the whole competition and advantage/disadvantage but playing starcraft 2 on my monitor the drones are larger than my hand and all I wanna do is zoom out

I was thinking a list of things. All are noteworthy ideas in my opinion:

1) The icons should "layer" intellegently, as in unit strategic zoom icons should layer in order of importance to the game, possibly give all the icons black outlines so the thing that "sits on top" is a completely noticeable icon that doesn't "blur" into the color of the rest. Example, a t2 factory icon should show up over the little units standing around it, and a t2 unit should show on top if in a group with a bunch of t1 units.

2) The icons should should also "stack", as in if there are 5 units of the same type really close together, once you zoom out so far, you should see the 1 strategic zoom icon, with a number in it's corner indicating the number of the units. This would be very useful in absolutely massive groups, where you would turn 40 strategic zoom icons into 4-5. Example, if you have 20 of all the same t1 unit and 1 engineer in the middle of all of them, then on strategic zoom it should only show 2 strategic icons, 1 engineer and 1 t1 unit with a number 20 on it's corner.

3) It might also help if the corners that didn't show the numbers of the icon units (or even the colors of the icon itself), showed what the units do. Construction stripes on fabrication unit's strategic icons for example, or that orange pattern for units that do "single shot high damage" blasts like the commander's gun. Another example would be having a color for air units, a color for ground units, and a color for naval units. Just simple universal instances of color coding or shape coding the strategic zoom so you can tell what the unit it represents does, be it combat or construction, land or air, bot or structure. Example, a tight group of an air factory, a land combat unit, and a naval scout, should have distinguishing icons from one another, like the factory being a square icon and partially being colored with construction stripes, the land combat unit being triangular and having a brown area on it, and the naval scout being horizontal-flat and having a blue area on it.

thetrophysystem has some really good points there. Perhaps one of the biggest things to minimize icon clutter would be to stack them. It also makes it a lot faster to get a good summary of how many units you have at a given location and make decisions based on that.

If multiple units were present in the same area, they could be made into one combined icon

|-----------|
| Unit 1 (20)|
|-----------|
| Unit 2 (1) |
|-----------|
| Unit 3 (4) |
|-----------|

Or something like that. Could work out better than have multiple icons next to each other.

Having them scale right with different resolutions would be a great advantage and make the game live longer. Especially as manufacturers have been talking about getting higher resolution monitors out there.

Agreed!!!

I think in this instance, video games should adopt from the real world?
I think traffic signs are very distinct.
Governmental bodies have gone through very expensive studies to see what is plain, clear and properly differentiated.



Why not adopt from these simple shapes and use some of that bold heavy outline?
To me, these are clear as day.
I can be our riding my bike at night and still see traffic signs as something very distinct.



Side note.
The 1, 2 or 3 pips on the bottom of the SupCom icons was VERY effective.
I am not advocating from copying SupCom wholesale, but pips are MUCH easier to read than a bunch of random numbers.