Firstly let me apologise if this has been discussed in any detail, searching for "strategic icons" brings up a huge amount of results as you can imagine. I don't know what plans Uber have for the icons to evolve, but I would like to put my two pence in. Firstly, I think it would be great if the icons scaled with the zoom level, thus eliminating the problem of overlapping icons and meaning that icons maintain their relative distance at all times. Secondly, icons should appear on scouted but shrouded buildings. I assume this is planned anyway, but just in case it makes no sense that I can see the building under the fog of war, but not its icon. Most importantly, I think that certain special buildings should get extra highlighting to make them easier to see. There's a mod for Forged Alliance that does this, and it means that you will never have to spend ages searching for the nuke/anti-nuke or other important building in the mass of icons. Click here to link to the thread about it on FAForever. And here's a screenshot: As you can see, it makes offensive and defensive buildings much easier to see, by using high-contrast borders, bars and so on. For those not familiar with SupCom icons, it does the following: - Adds orange vertical lines to anti-land turrets. The lines get bigger in relation to the tech level of the turret - Adds orange horizontal lines to the top of AA turrets. The lines get bigger in relation to the tech level of the turret - Adds yellow, red (or both in the case of the nuke) highlighting to long-range offensive buildings - Highlights anti-offense buildings (e.g. missile defence, anti-nuke) with a purple border This makes spotting holes in defences much easier, and also stops you marching an army into certain death just because you didn't spot a particular icon.
No many things still require changes in native parts that we have no access to. Replacing the icons can be done by replacing a few images in the UI. It's a rather simple change.
Nonetheless, it would be better if this was a standard feature rather than something people had to manually install. Every third-party mod that becomes essential for serious players is a further bar to entry for new players.
