How to present strategic information from a solar system

I wanted to start a conversation about the options for summarizing the strategic information from across the solar system. These could include such things as Mini-maps, strategic zoom, strategic icons, and even info-graphics. I am sure the community has some other ideas as well

Neutrino mentioned that via the server the player can get data on everything that has happened so far in the game. It raises some really cool possibilities for summarizing the war effort so far (i.e. total production and enemy unit destruction per base)

Just to be clear, I am assuming a Global Resource Economy (all planets share metal/energy). This is not a thread discussing separate planetary scale resources. This is discussing how useful particular information on the war effort is to the player and how this might best be presented.

To kick it off, here is an idea to use info-graphics (similar to that used in simcity 5) to present information on how the war effort is going on a per planet and per base level. Information could include metal production and use per planet, friendly and estimated enemy military force per planet, and perhaps even potential resources per planet.

How I see this being useful is by allowing the player to make high level strategic decisions on which fights are worth continuing by weighing a planet's strategic value against the estimated losses to win it.

I view this strategic level information as being about winning wars, not winning battles.

Please post your ideas on:
What information would be useful to you to help you make strategic decisions?
How do you think that information would best be presented?

This would provide you with free information you didn't have to scout for.

Wait, there's a red bar on that asteroid, it must be a hidden base! Lets go attack just it instead of scouting all 17 asteroids in system.

Haha, yeah, agreed, free information is no good. I was thinking that it would summarize information from what you already scouted. You would have to take it with a grain of salt of course, knowing that your scouting is not all seeing.

Whatever it is do not make it block the view of the planets.

At the very least, you'll need a display of how much e/m you're making there, and probably spending as well. With those four numbers you can get money and build capacity in moments. You could also have an 'army strength' bar, which could have a couple different implementations. Probably the simplest would be to give each unit a value, say 1 for t1 and 2 for t2, and just give a number. It could be useful to split that up into categories for the different unit types, but that would probably be too busy for a general screen. Perhaps a different/additional overlay could have more detailed unit info.

It would be good to have asteroids ready to use as KEWs highlighted in some way, your or the opponent's.

Well estimating how large army the enemy got sounds really complex.
Like if you spot a unit once and then you spot it again. How would the game know it is the same unit? Don't tell me unit ID. That is usually not visible to the player anyway.
Also if you destroy something with for example long range artillery without actually having knowing that you have destroyed it, how would that unit ever get subtracted from the enemy strength on that planet?

Some things that I think is important:
1. If you are currently spotting enemies on an orbital body that must be easy to see.
2. If you are currently taking damage on an orbital body that must be easy to see.

As for stuff that you have seen on the planet but are currently not seeing:
3. It could be useful to be able to get a list of different types of units that has been spotted on the planet. On stationary buildings you could have a counter as they wont disappear unless destroyed or reclaimed and you would know if so has occurred if you spot their position again. For mobile units I don't know. You could probably go by unit ID to count them but if they are destroyed without you knowing where, would they ever be subtracted?
4. For each spotted unit you could be able to go back to the last time and location when they were spotted. So say you just spotted a nuke or a battleship for short period of time without watching the event. Now that would be visible on the stats and you could click a nuke icon or battleship icon and the game would automatically go back in time to the location where the nuke or battleship was spotted.

Just have it represent what you can currently see?

How does having planets change from having one big ol' map?


I fail to see why we need graphs and stuff now, when we survived just fine without them.

One 2-d map maps really well to a traditional minimap. Planets do not.

What games are you referring to? What we had in SupCom and TA might not be adequate for a planetary RTS.

That would most likely be fluctuating wildly. If you can see what types of units that have been spotted on an orbital body with ease it might increase the readability and make it easier to assess[edit] the capabilities of the enemy.

I allready thought of mirrors to view backsides....

Doesn't matter. You haven't been able to see economic information on a minimap in other games.

Right now, I'm talking about the multiple-planet issue. I am not talking about the problem of looking on the dark side of planets. I currently don't see any difference between having bases on two planets, and having two bases on a square map. We don't have infographics for each base in SupCom, TA, or any other RTS games. Why do we need one here?

Now, for being able to see information about the dark side of planets; that's a legitimate problem. Now consider this: an RTS game that plays on a single spherical planet. Do you need bars and graphs?

It is just not economy. If the enemy got units on the far side of a planet you would like to be able to know the first point when enemy units have been spotted on that planet. If you do that with different windows you would need like 2-3 windows for every planet or 2-3 windows for the whole solar system.

A minimap showing the presence of enemy units, your own units and economy on each planet might be easier to survey.

The whole issue is about seeing what is happening on the "darkside" of a planet when your forces are on several different orbital bodies which may or may not be contested. If you only have 1 planet you already have bars and graphs for your economy. The metal and energy bar you know.

But from what Uber has implied (and from what the majority of the community wants), there'll be a map-wide economy. So the total number of metal and energy bars sums to two - and those can be integrated into the HUD somewhere.

And do you really think a few bars are a good way of presenting information about what forces your numerous opposition has? See, a minimap can show all your enemies, all your allies, and how they're all positioned. A bar cannot. If you want a dozen bars, one for each player; then so be it, but I think that's a terrible solution.

It doesn't matter if the economies are local or global. The point was to be able to quickly judge how much income you get from each orbital body.

Actually bars might not be the best way. When you are zoomed out the atmosphere could be colored by the player colors that control it. So if 2 enemies are both on the same planet the hemisphere could be colored 40% green and 60% red where the difference is dependent on the estimated amount of enemy forces on that planet. Income could simply be 2 numbers that is displayed ontop of the planet when your are really zoomed out or displayed on a minimap-type view.

Please show me a minimap for 1 planet that displays all its' surface. There are whole threads about this you know.
Please show me a minimap where a whole solarsystem is displayed and you can see exactly where each unit is on each planet and asteroid.
Bars, numbers, graphs are all just simplifications to show information in a 3D world that cannot easily be mapped to a 2-D screen.

Woah, I didn't mean show the ENEMY'S army strength. That's unfeasible for all the reasons posted. Just yours. And there is something to be said for, you know, remembering what's where. The only issue is that in the other games just zooming out will usually remind you what's where, where in this case most strategic icons will likely be invisible, unless we get something like the strat overlay from supcom 2 (which was pretty useless IMO).

I can see the sense in having some planetary indicators, simply having played SoaSE. It ends up being a weirdly different experience when planets are throw into the mix. Sins info was sort of hard to process though, so something simply might be nice. A little, optional pop-up in the system view that gives percents or totals of your own production, including effective military strength. I mean, when you think about it, yes we'll be fighting on single planets, but at other times, we may be occupying ten planets. We don't really know how it's going to pan out at this point.

Enemy information? No. Not a good idea. With the exception of resource production (based on what you've seen, meaning the info could be outdated), I think the only thing you really need to see of the enemy is buildings, like it's been in all the SupCom games.

But there will be a time when having some GUI to indicate some information based on each planet you are on that will come in very, very handy. Not for everyone, maybe, but at least for us noobs who have issues even managing multiple bases (I 'sucked' at Starcraft. What can I say.)

And BM, I recall that you could display economic information for yourself in FA, like how much resources each factory was using. I never used it because it was cluttered and took up too much space, but a per planet general summary would probably be nice so when the economy dies, you know which planet you can stop building on to resume normalcy.

Yet another reason I can't wait for alpha: figuring out how to keep track of everything will be interesting.

Did you need special tools to quickly judge how much income you get from each base in TA? Why is a base, or an island, any different to a planet?

And what about when there's three players on a planet? Use blue? Okay, fair enough.

What about four players? Five? Eight?

I'm not saying that minimaps are the solution.

I'm saying that bars and graphs are not the solution. They don't work because the number of stuff you have isn't enough information, the number of stuff the enemy has isn't enough information either. You need to know if they're clumped together, or spread apart. You need to know where they are, with a more accurate answer than "on that planet."

The number of planets is completely irrelevant, because once you find a solution for a single planet, you can apply it to multiple planets.

Because a base on an island can be glanced over quickly while a you might have to view a planet from different angles to assess the amount of units there.

This is discussed in this thread:http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=45569
I think the suggestions that have been put forth should apply to this as well.

I'm not saying that bars and graphs are THE solution. I think it might be part of the solution or a supplement to whatever we get.

That requires an actual solution. I haven't seen one all encompassing solution yet. Multiple viewports might be the solution but I haven't tried it yet and I think it would have to be very flexible and easy to use in order to be THE solution.

If I may use a world war 2 analogy for moment:

When the United states joined the war, it had to make hard calls on the amount of resources to apply to the two major theaters of war: the pacific and European mainland. The US had a huge but finite number of tanks, guns, troops, ships, planes, etc.. to apply to each theater. Part of that planning involved coming up with coming up to answers to the following questions:
-How big are the enemy forces and where might they be?
-How many losses did we take and where?
-How many enemy kills did we inflict and where?
-Are the places we are fighting strategically important enough to keep fighting or should we pull back?

For example, after a month in which the united states lost 10000 men in the pacific, and inflicted only 1000 enemy kills, they might have to consider increasing reinforcements at the cost of the European theater. Without that "monthly" count, it might be difficult to gauge the relative success of each theater and make that call to reinforce.

You will not watch every single battle in PA. It will be difficult to tell if you are wasting your time trying to secure a planet you are bound to loose anyways. The more information you have in terms of general progress over time (without having to watch every single battle) I think goes a long way to helping you make those tough strategic calls.

What other ways of conveying this general strategic vs resource expenditure view within this game are possible?