Army painter

Yes it does, it comes back to readability, in your system it's more complex as you have to remember not only the player name and which team they're on, but also which crazy color scheme belongs to which player and which team that player is on.

One thing SCII did really well for this kind of thing is that when doing team based matchmaking the team colors grouped up logically into color groups so it was much more intuitive in larger battles and on the minimap who was on which team.

Mike

They're practically ants while zoomed in anyway. No one that I know of keeps track of units on a visual scale unless they're looking at the level of engineers and buildings in any TA-like game I can think of (except TA itself, which even then using color to tell your units apart is a bad, bad idea as opposed to hotkeys). When combat starts, you typically tell them apart by who you can and can't select + who you have grouped on your hotkeys.

If you don't do this, and you zoom all the way in so you can tell each and every unit apart by color, let me know, because you would literally be the first person that I know that does this in a TA-like game.

I still like the skin idea in the other thread better than a straight army painter. Maybe swappable skins with an assigned primary/secondary color in-lobby. I had my opinion changed from the standard army painter idea waay back when this was brought up in the emblem thread and someone mentioned how people uploading any emblem or painting their army whatever they wanted would ruin the set aesthetic of the game. Which I do not want.

Then disable custom painting (which is something you can do in every other game with army painters) if someone is being a **** and seriously trying to confuse people that way.

The same can be said for skins, emblems, or any customization that can be given (including personalized commanders). Other RTS games manage just fine, some of them barely color individual units at all.

I honestly think it's a non-issue, we'll get customization of some kind, I'm predicting unlockable army skins in the future.

I for one would go with a 2 colour scheme:
1st: not selectable, determined by team/side: (e.g. colours for yourself, friend, foe, neutral etc)
(just a handful of colours to separate sides in a conflict on first glance)
2nd: the player colour, chosen, unique
(with multiple teams perhaps colour ranges from a specific colour)

With a look at the intended scale of the game in terms of number of players and therefore number of teams, I personally would abandon any too intricate custom colouring scheme.

The other reason is, that the graphic style is more symbolic in some ways. Therefore, a colouring method which contains as much consistent and easy readable information would fit better the overall game spirit.

As for optional, I somehow lost count how many "as optional" features have been proposed already - at least beyond two dozen. Not that I don't like options, when starting a game, but if half of the available options never become defacto standard in online games, they are more or less lost dev time.

I believe that readability should not be a huge problem if we have the ways to identify the players in the game. Such as highlighting units on strategic map when I click the username (If there is a kind of score tab like AOE series..), or displaying user info when I move a cursor on a unit.

Speaking of readability, I'd quite like if they went with the system Sins has of differentiating players. With players having certain sigils applied to their units that are significantly different from others. Such sigils could be pretty easy to customise.

First post here, long time coming.

I'm in favour of an army painter, but only if it's visible to the player and other players who have opted into customisable colours in the options menu, and not to everyone else who should view the default colours decided in the match setup. It's fine to want to colour your army however you want, but I don't think that it should impact on gameplay, and as has been mentioned previously in the thread it's easy to game an RGB colour system to produce two virtually identical army colours. That's not a big deal if you're both on the same side, in fact I'm in favour of there being an option for blanket alliance colours so that it's easy to work out who to violently explode, but when you've got a few different players in different alliances with what is effectively the same colour to the human eye, you've got a problem.

The default colours should be bright and distinguishable, colours should be able to be toggled by other users into a simple enemy/ally scheme, alliance colours, or individual colours depending on your wishes, and individual colours, if customisable, should only be visible to the player actually customising them and those who wish to see them.

Just my thoughts.

Err? Units would be painted to differentiate players. Your small details (called decals) would be just not visible on most used scale, so ...

If you really want to make your units different, than you should request ability to make non-technical mods, with per-player unit replacement. I.e. you should be able to replace models with similar-sized models with same characteristics. But to maintain unit's recognition and, therefore, game playability, it should be possible to switch off. And that would be done by most players instantly

Really, one faction is not so much different from three factions, if you have 40K potential players, so what's the reason?

ARmypainter would be nice. It would be silly to chose a "Faction" color in a huge game because at onepoint they dont differ mucht anymore. You that that it some Games where you have green and a bit darker green and one a bit lighter.

So the Armypainter would give you just your "personal" touch to your personal faction.

In the end every enemy is RED anyway or ally green on the strategic layer. So you dont have any confusen.

So the armypainter would the more detailed touch for your self.

Every problem you've brought up with an army painter is either a solvable problem, or a problem not unique to an army painter.

So let's say there is no army painter, only 40 predetermined colors/designs. You now have to distinguish light teal blue that is the enemy from light sky blue that is your ally. It's already a problem they're going to have to solve by making team readability not based on the unit colors.

Supcom also had a camera ceiling where all units turned into symbols at which point unit readability was a non-issue, so Supcom can indeed be directly compared to DoW2 in this regard.

DoW2 had 6 factions x ~15 (12+3 commanders) = ~90 units in the game (with additional upgrades for each unit that changed purpose and silhouette). Supcom had 4 x ? = ?? top tier units that got used in a normal game. You're saying ?? was a number significantly higher than 90? Additionally, Supcom units were split up by land/air/water where DoW2 had only land. I don't think anyone has problems distinguishing from a tank, battleship, and fighter jet which effectively divides ?? by 3.

Unit readability is already accomplished mostly with silhouette, so Uber mainly just needs to make sure people can't color their units black on black on black; this is an easy thing to limit.

You do point out valid problems; I just think you need to put some more thought into whether these can be solved in simple and effective ways before you totally dismiss the idea of an army painter.

What I think would be interesting is to have each player see their own individual colour scheme, but in the matchmaker menu they select an individual colour that all the other players will see them as, maybe there can also be an option in matchmaker to toggle the standard colour for individual players or the whole group.
Also I remember that in SC1 you could put overlays on the minimap and game screen that showed enemies as one colour, your guys as another and allies as a third or something like that, it would be cool to have that as well, so you dont have to even think about who is on your team, or who is an enemy, because it doesn't change between games. I know many players wouldn't like this but it is an option.

it dosent sound to important but i think it would be an awesome thing!

It's a good idea in a game where you have visually very different factions (Dawn of War for example)

But it's not a good idea to have it in a game where there is only 1 faction (in terms of style/look). The risk that multiple players share a very similar color is too great. There are popular color combinations that would get used too often.

Do we already know how many players there can be at max? I'd assume something like 8.

I think the max was around 40.

wow, that would totally not work then...
The only way i could see that work is if you choose your own colortheme but it only shows on your own screen - other players see colors that match your "lobby-color"

And yes, it's important to have easily identifiable colorschemes on units, because not everybody is a "pro" with hundreds of APM and super awareness - it would be very confusing for a newbie to see a battle between 2 entirely black T2 tank groups...
It's not comparable to SC1/FA because they had multiple faction that you could easily tell apart visually and only 8 players with predefined colors

Well you could have team colours with secondary colours defining the individual player.

I believe an army painter could work just fine. In a game with 40 players, ANY type of setting for colors wouldn't differentiate much, so it wouldn't matter whether there is an army painter or not, colors will be reused.

No, not if a team system like igncom1 described is used. Primary= Teamcolor, Secondary=Playercolor. if you have 8 Primaries for Teams and 8 for Secondaries every color combination will be unique. 64 combinations, or 56 if double color wouldn't be allowed.

With army painter you would just have chaos and possibly 15 players who use black as their primary :roll:

Alright, I dare one of you to try to create a color palette with 40 colors that has a large amount of difference between ALL of them. Heck, warcraft 3 could support 16 colors on custom maps and even THOSE got confusing sometimes.

And it would be easy to implement a system which wouldn't allow players to pick values within a certain range (like, if someone had 0,0,0, the other player couldn't have 0,0,1).

Another idea is to have TWO colors on minimap icons. Two main colors. This would allow for only needing 10 main colors, and every subset is a pair of them. Mirrors and two of the same color are not allowed.



Is a quick sketch of what a red/blue player could look like. For readability sake, if someone is red/blue, no one could be blue/red. That way each combination of colors is unique and there would be 45 of them.

While watching the LiveStream, my idea of the choosable colours is primary, secondary, weapon 1/2 and lights! So 5 different customisable colours which still give sense, huh. I also agree with crix for the minimap icons - nice idea!

Exactly this.