It is pretty intrusive, in my opinion. With large games, there would be an utter mess of icons. Also have all these color bands around the outside of the planet, isn't exactly pleasing to the eyes. Interesting idea, but not 'the' solution.
How about a keyboard shortcut which when pressed makes all front-facing units disappear and the front-facing terrain to go translucent, and causes antipodal strategic icons to display. Units just behind the horizon could possibly show on stalks.
At that point it would be less confusing to just rotate the planet 180 degrees. I think we're overcomplicating everything. A simple auto-alert and pinging system will be ideal! Example: *beep! - Units under attack/in danger* *player zooms out* *ping waypoint on planet - Ants under attack* *beep beep - Commander in direct danger* *beep beep beep - Commander under direct assault, critical danger* You could have different sounds as well. Heck, you could assign your own custom sounds to different alerts! You could have Ride of the Valkyries play every time a Gunship begins engaging a target.
It'd be nice to have both. That way, you can keep your focus on your base, and get a quick glimpse of what's going on on the other side. Sometimes you want to know whats going on, when nothing alert worthy is happening.
I think we should utilize the idea what is posted in the topic start but with one minor change. The size of the icons grow or shrink based on the ammount of units that are clustered within the area. This way you can quickly see that if your army is shrinking while the enemy army stays the same you have to intervene. Another option is to be able to group enemy units, same as your own. But with the purpose to track them like in the topic start. And the ability to attack the enemy group just selecting the enemy icon.
It sounds already annoying, probably the first thing I will turn off. I hate sound/popup alert with a passion. And in case of PA, it would be about every 2 seconds. The OP idea is ideal IMHO.
Imagine you at you´r base, you don´t want turn planet around and loose what you are think in you´r builds, because a particulate fight its happend in the other half planet. What iff we be able to construct a ground unit or air or anithing else ,and send to a place in field you want with the need off make with an engenier a radar t2, and secure that place field with units to the incoming video work,just to record and send to a special window menu with key map,to you see what is happend without you need to go there? With the possibility off on menu window,you also be hable to move units and micro them on fight without go there.
It's already been mentioned a few times by some developers that they are planning on allowing picture-in-picture displays by allowing to have multiple viewports on at the same time with the ability to move them around and resize them. It's a bit similar in how the end/home keys worked in Supreme Commander (or actually the Picture-In-Picture displays in Empire Earth II)
Agreed, a simple key do an exact 180 achieves exactly what the OP is looking for, without having the devs spend weeks on trying to implement something that resembles anything close to the picture in the first post. (to dumb this down to the max, you get an extra window in which you can play and do everything, though of course you only have one mouse / keyboard so only one can be active at a time. Of course you'll still be able to see everything happening, but you would have to click on it, to make it your active playing screen) Add this into the mix, and you have more freedom, than 99% of the games gives you. (really hope I'll be able to abuse my second / third screen for this)
With the current system, a beep only occurs when necessary. When a unit is attacked, it's one beep and then silence. It isn't a beep for every time a unit takes damage, like in TF2. There is probably a Cooldown for individual types of beeps, which might be configurable in the future. I agree though, I want to see both audio cues and OP's idea in the future.
Sure a hotkey would be useful in terms of direct intel and ease of navigation, but I find that lack of indirect intel sort of makes you play blind - without rotating behind a planet you have no idea if there are any enemy units, how much, where they are moving without either rotating or recalling things from memory. On a larger scale with 40 planets it would be difficult to solely rely on memory and flipping the camera around. (Remember you can't quite flip the planets round in celestial view) and going to individual planets one at a time just to flip the camera around to see what is there gets time consuming if it's possible to have the information rendered for you. In my opinion it is crucial to have the ability to either see all intelligence or vital intelligence at the same time for the simple sake of ease of use. I'd like to spend more time focusing on strategy than playing spin the planet around. I would prefer it to spin the planet round only when it needs my focus (such as managing a front line / army movements across that side etc.) An analogy to this is like trying to play Starcraft without a mini-map (or half a minimap, and you only see the other half if you move your camera focus beyond it's bounds)
+1 to OP idea, its the cleanest so far. As suggested perhaps grouping large numbers will make it cleaner. ... one thing though. how will orbital units interfere with this?
I see what you mean now, but I still feel that even though we are already discussing this now, we should wait to see what Uber comes up with, as from what I gathered from their livestreams, they (or some of them) have a personal "hate / dislike" towards mini-maps, however they did have some interesting ideas to give you all the information you need / want. Multi-viewports, would be a big step towards that imo. The inherent problem is playing on a globe, and its just impossible to show everything on the other side (without multi-view) without destroying the globe concept. Or maybe thats just me not thinking outside the box far enough. Never been a big Starcraft player myself, but I'll ask a buddy of mine, what he would do without a minimap on Starcraft and if he can explain to me how much it would impact things.
This is kind of a cool idea. I think either this or a see through version of the planet could work showing roughly where things are. Though for either of these options I think you should be able to turn it off and on with a button press and choose whether you want it to toggle or if you have to hold the button for it to be active. Though it might just be a distraction. I'm not sure if either of these are necessary.
Great idea from OP, but I think it might interfere with orbital units (unless they orbit MUCH higher than the display. I think the ability to label different parts of the map might make up for this, in large part.
Yes OP's idea is great and would make a nice toggleabel feqture addition to the game. +1 Would be neat to toggle with a hotkey instead of options.
