How should ground, air, and orbital all be displayed?

If you're in a game with multiple opponents you need to know who owns which units.

I agree, how could one deal with that many opponent colours then? if it is a 40 player game that is a hell of a lot of shades of colour. Probably more than I could tell apart at a glance.

Were 40 player games even going to be within a single match? or was that more referring to the Galactic war? 40 players and the associated armies would seem to be quite a high amount of players to fit within a single solar system.

20-30 planets revolving around 2-3 suns, id don't see why that should be much of a problem?

It's not like you were supposed to play a game of that size free for all with a single winner (have fun at managing 30 planets and over 50.000 units...), more likely as teams.

And as for the colors: One of the first things said about colors was, that we require not a single color per player but a color scheme consisting of at least 2 colors. 2 colors is enough, even with only 6 basic colors (you should be able to tell apart that many colors with ease) you get 36 possible combinations. Maybe even one color for the team and one color for the actual player.

I sure hope we'll have powerful enough UI and tools to precisely do that. 40-players FFA sounds like giant fun.

So triangles, squares, semi-circles for air, land and navel stuff.

How about donuts for orbital units?

And if units are on the opposite side of a planet, shade them out?

You are right that isn't nearly as difficult as I was imagining for some reason. Who knows what I was thinking last night... ALL is right with the world. I long for war on that scale in real time :twisted:

I must have missed that statement! such a simple solution I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it.

Seems nice and clear, I like that idea.

Donuts and semi circles are terrible shapes.

I've see games use semicircles for naval already but I'm open to better ideas, what would you suggest? maybe circles for Orbital units.

Diamonds and stars?

Stars seem kind of bad too. Semi circles should be nice though?

Brilliant. Context driven could be really good and intuitive to use.

I agree I'm a bit unsure on selectable layers. What keys would you put that on? How would you train people to use it without just confusing everyone? It sounds like this idea could be more confusing than helpful.

What is it with assuming symbols means regular basic shapes? Why not just symbols that look like what they represent. For example, a tank can be a rectangle with a line on it to represent a gun barrel.

Considering the building like nature of orbital units, I guess we could just make them rectangles like buildings usually are.

Or maybe a type of upside down triangle? like how submarines have a upside down semicircle in SupCom?

Scaling and grey scaling.

They get smaller the higher you go and they fade a bit with distance, realistic.