They look better than the old ones, but IMHO there is still room for improvement. One of the odd things I felt about FA was the UI dissonance between the strategic icons and the other UI elements. The UI often had futuristic themes with lots of transparencies and shiny borders. I found it odd that the Icons didn't follow suit. I don't know what the final UI for PA will look like, but the kickstarter visualisation is generally called upon as a target. UI elements weren't shown much in the trailer, but what was shown felt quite fitting to me: As you can see, there is a kind of "holographic" themed interface with neon glowing elements, forming shapes and borders that remind me of the interface used in Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. I think strategic icons based on a similar theme could actually work. By being a little more visually attractive, it would also help mitigate one of the more common criticisms of supcom, that the game could often be described as "Icon wars".
I think the new ones looked better. I do think the old ones were too big, but looked neater. I think the current ones are too small, and too 1960s drab. 1) Also, I want to reinterate how nice it would be to have a backdrop color behind unit icons that related what "class" they fell under. It needs to have a team color on the icon, a symbol perhaps as it's "strength" and an underlying icon pattern for what it does such as construction units having yellow/black stripes on a square behind their icon or an outline around their icon. Really, I should try my hand in making some, just to see how it works, huh? I just don't have the personal ability to implement my next suggestion: 2) Unit icons, instead of showing per unit, should really stack (correct layering, as someone said the commander icon being on top of all others, should help too). By which I mean a group of 20 units that are all 3 types of unit, should only have 3 icons and a tally-mark in the corner of how many. I couldn't program this into the game myself, else I would show what I meant. 3) ALSO IN LIGHT OF THE POST ABOVE ME, the icons having a toggleable button for on-off, so you can quickly switch between seeing your units and seeing their icons covering everything, would be nice. That would also be simple, would be disappointed in not seeing it next alpha patch. A toggleable button (is the "i" button taken yet?) turning all icons on/off, possibly if it is a problem in the future have it default back to turning on itself if left off for longer than 30 seconds. 4) The icons could have an option in the UI for transparency. I am not sure how that works, does the UI webkit generate the icons, or does the game? Anyway, having a dial somewhere in the menu to toggle how translucent they are would be nice, then you could always see a little under the icons anyway. Toggleable to on/off would still be higher priority, easier, and useful in junction with icons being transparent.
I'm waiting for them to be used by the game before releasing my version. It will be nice to have more symbols. I agree with a previous poster, there needs to be some kind of aggregation mechanism. Maybe something that ends up being as simple as just giving a number of units (or something similar) when you zoom out and are looking at several different planets at the same time. There's no way a superposition of individual icons will look readable at that scale.
