See the poll above. It's somewhat doubtful that a large degree of customization will make it in to PA, but unit color schemes are probably one of the most effective/likely. As to what I mean by color picker with constraints, something like this:
If anyone has played the dawn of war games there was this nice army painter where you could pick several colors that would effect different parts of your dudes. The more color choices that go into your robots the less likely it will be that two people pick the same colors. Also I think this topic is already in the main "Confirmed features and suggestions" thread
I voted for Pre-selected colors and 1 Team Color Per Player. Frankly the Preselected Colors and the Limited Color Picker are really the same thing. As Far as number of colors, there was a thread where we already went over the subject of team colors, and adding team colors add the potential for making readability worse, and that an Army painter works for a game of DoW's Scale, but leads to some complications when you get to things at SupCom/PA's scale. Mike
There's definitely some overlap between preset colors and color picker. However, I would be somewhat upset if I was stuck with like 10 colors, that's so boring :x One of the first mods I always installed for FA was the more colors mod.
if you consider those numbers of players, the question of differentiating units of different players becomes a serious issue. custom color schemes can only be part of it. I wouldn't want to memorize 30+ different color schemes (independent of one or multiple colors per side). Therefore, the actual visual style becomes more an issue of personal taste than uniqueness. the more interesting info would be, if the player you encounter is friend, foe, ally, temp ally (whatever diplomatic options are available). On the second level of information would be, which player this actually is. In some games player colors just differ from their basic state(you, ally, enemy). In a game with 40 players, if not all for themselves, colors for teams might be more sensible.
I still like the 2 toned-player color solution very much. I do think though the colors you should be able to choose from should be limited to 8-10 or so (8*8=64 options) that way its possible for the engine to prevent people to pick the same(or very similar) color combinations and disable colors which can be camouflaging (eg black, dark green, dark brown) Edit: I can also see, where in teamgames the first color is used for the team and the second one is for the player's identity. Where the first color must be very dominant and the secondary color can be more subtle.
I'm not sure about two colors per player. How about one color and a pattern? So you have 20 colors to choose from, and if there's more players than that you can also choose whether your units are striped or not. So it's player 'red' vs player 'red-striped'.
I'm pretty sure we need the two colour system for strategic view / minimaps, as in, the commander icon is green with a red outline for player one, and purple with a yellow outline for player two, et cetera. Actual unit colours should probably resemble this. But I'd really like to have something akin to Dawn of War as well. Of course, you could select your strategic view / minimap colours as well, but what would prevent you from painting your units pink and making your minimap colour black? Still, it wouldn't matter that much, considering most people (I guess) will spend the majority of their time zoomed out enough to see icons instead of units. Actually, a Dawn of War army painter thingy would probably be a waste of resources... But I still want it. Anyway, the Civilization series works with a two colour system, and there are mods with hundreds of different civilizations, which can still work fine with a two colour system. The pattern idea seems to hard to differentiate between, especially when viewing only icons (strategic zoom / minimap).
If the game has games of ~40, then you'd need about that many colours. Personally, I'd happily accept a set colour scheme for player #. This isn't DoW, you wouldn't be able to distinguish Nightlords from Ultramarines at this scale. Colour should be largely for gameplay purposes, rather than vanity. Or maybe I'm just being curmudgeonly.
I would like it, when you choose one for yourself and then you get one for your team, so the people can already see from who they are and which team they are, e.g. the main color is red, but there is also some orange in it.-> red player in orange team.
Let's build up on this and make it like this: The color that takes the most space on the unit is the chosen team color, like Team Red, Team Blue and etc. If you're not allied to anyone this color is 50% gray. Then you have two customizable colors to give more style to a unit and show off how it's their own unique creation. Plus, depending on how they do it, you could possibly just have the entire 24-bit RGB palette at your service, as in DoW.
