Uh... so is everybody just OK with this?

Who I am: I'm a novice RTS player. I've never played one competitively, but I enjoy the genre a lot.

So I've been playing PA since Beta, and my first impression of it was "hmm, this is cool, but the UI needs some work. I'll wait until they figure out the UI and make it require less micromanagement and mental math." So I waited. And now the Galactic War came out, so I figured I'd give the game another shot.

And I was shocked to find that basically nothing in the UI flow has changed. So now I have to question - do you guys even notice what's missing? Or have you been tolerating the unfinished UI for so long that you can no longer see its faults?

To be fair, there have been some significant improvements:

1. The economy bar's color coding is now based on storage, not net flow (the latter is a very poor representation of the state of your economy)
2. Picture in Picture mode is nice. Still needs some work, but it's a step in the right direction.
3. The alert system is a lifesaver.

But it's still lacking some really crucial things that help take unnecessary cognitive load off of the player:

EDIT: It's been pointed out that most of these things actually are possible. See my admission of wrong and follow-up argument a few posts down.

EDIT 2: And it's been brought to my attention that this post and most of its follow ups are unnecessarily hostile. So I've backed down a bit and wrote up a few constructive suggestions for things that I think need improvement at some point hopefully soon.

1. It's not visible at a glance how many resources a given fabricator/factory is consuming. The only place to find this information is to click on it, then look at the really tiny text in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
2. It's impossible to tell how many resources a fabricator/factory will consume if you're not currently running it (unless you look it up on a wiki, which is unacceptable; I play games to avoid homework)
3. Similarly, it's impossible to tell how many resources a factory/fabricator will consume before you build it.
4. Even if you find out where the drain is coming from, you can't do anything about it (i.e. pause the factory) without cancelling your entire build queue (and the button to do the latter is in a place that I completely forgot about until I went to write this rant)
5. Speaking of a build queue, it's not possible to run a factory infinitely like in Supreme Commander - this was the defining feature that made those games possible to play well
6. It's not possible to determine at a glance if a factory is currently running at all if it happens to have just finished building a unit. In other words, factories look idle without any of the iconic green spray while a unit is coming off the assembly line.
7. There's no way to quickly identify idle factories or fabricators
8. Mostly unrelated to other gripes: Even though scouted buildings appear outside of vision range, they don't show any icons, which forces me to go pixel hunting for dark buildings on a dark background. Why would the icons not appear in this case? At the very least, the icons should be darkened or half-transparent in this case.

I really want to trust Uber to do this right, and I understand that this is not yet a finished game, but it's been like this for so long that I'm starting to wonder if anyone even realizes these problems exist.

so what you're saying is that it IS possible. Also, mousing over the fabber/factory has the same effect. I would MUCH rather have this than something above every single fabber in my base telling me how much of my resources they're using.

Factories generally don't use up so many resources that it should be a problem, and as a general rule, basic fabbers use around 10 metal and 1000 power.

Also, on your economy bar you've got two numbers beside each resource, your income, and use for both resources. It's much easier to just look there when you're low to see what you need than to sift through your factories. You shouldn't be worrying about having placed too many factories, or build too many fabbers, what you should worry about is weather or not you have enough economic structures. Remember, more is better!

Just turn of the power. It saves the cue, and stops the factory. Controlled by the large lightning-bolt-shaped icon on the command bar.

Yes it is. This has been in for a while. There is an icon that looks like an arrow with a line through it, right under the power controls when you select a factory. Click it and it turns into a loop. Your factory will now infinitely build your current cue. You can control-click on units to place them at the front of the cue and not be looped if necessary.

When it's not building something it's not running. When it's not building something, but still has a cue, something will be rolling off of it. It's pretty easy to tell.

"F" is the hotkey for idle fabbers, and there is a complicated one that you can now change for idle factories.

Currently under consideration, I think it's a good idea, and I think most people do.

Hope this helps, and welcome back!

Just for the record, you can set up a factory to endless building. And there are shortcuts via Keyboard that allow you to select idled factories.

A lot of these aren't really problems if you ask me. I mean I'm not a hyper-pro or anything but I rarely care what one single unit/factory will use in terms of economy. At least not until I start building T2.

All it really comes down to is "Yay, I'm in the green " or "Oh no I'm in the red " or "Well damn, I'm in the blue :/"

Unless you're addicted to efficiency in which case it comes down to "Yay, I'm in the green " or "Oh no, I'm in the red " or "OH NO WHY THE BLUE! I'D RATHER BE IN THE RED! GOD DAMMIT I'M WASTING EVERYTHING!!! WHY AM I IN THE BLUE?! GOD KILL ME NOW!!!!!!!!"

Well, looks like I'm partially wrong.

Everything I thought was impossible - yet wanted to do in the middle of a game - is actually buried deep in the UI and keyboard shortcuts. I appreciate the help that you guys have given (so now I can actually play the game), but I'm not convinced that I should withdraw my complaints. The UI should be highly readable and intuitive, and if people can't find these features (I assume I'm not the only one having problems -I think it's a reasonable assumption), then they effectively aren't there.

Let me say that again - if I as a new player can't find a feature I need in the heat of battle, then it doesn't exist. This is not my responsibility as a player to RTFM as it was in the 90s; game design has evolved since then. It's now the responsibility of the game itself to teach players how to play it. Also note that there is no M, only a convoluted series of changelogs (and may the Progenitors help you if you miss a few months' worth), and a sad excuse for a "tutorial" which is a YouTube video that boils down to "just build stuff and smash planets".

Unfinished as the game may be, in its current state the design is hostile to new players. That's an acceptable state for a game in alpha, maybe even beta, but now that we're in a brand new (and basically made up) "gamma" phase of pre-production before release, it's time to start moving towards a UI design that's more intuitive. I've seen no movement towards this goal and, based on what I've read in this thread, a fair bit of movement away from this goal.

I'd also like to respond to this post directly...

Really? I personally find it impossible to formulate a strategy without asking the basic question "can I afford this?" If I will send my economy into a nosedive by clicking a button, I want to know before I click the button.

Now, you've played the game a bit, so you have an intuitive sense of how many powergens and metal extractors you need per factory, fabber, etc. I don't. I'm mainly going on trial and error here, and I can't begin to express how frustrating that is.

Funny you should mention that... both of us happen to know that "blue" means wasting resources. You because you already know how to play the game, and me because I used to study strategies for SC:FA before I gave up playing that game for similar reasons that I'm complaining now. Would anybody else know that? Blue is normally a positive color. If I recall correctly, this used to be orange a couple of patches ago. I'm guessing they changed that because wasting resources isn't always a bad thing.

It's kind of obvious. Simple math, really.

"The bar is full, but I'm still gaining resources. Where do those resources go? They're probably being wasted! I better start spending more!"

I personally think that the game has been out long enough that they should have a pop-up in the factory menus that give you all of the relevant stats for each unit when you hover your mouse over them. I'm talking about everything that you see on PADB, like Metal Cost, HP, Range, DPS, Splash, Speed, Vision Radius, Radar Radius. I personally think it is a bit frustrating to have to wait until someone has extracted the information from the game, after each build, and posted it online somewhere to know those basic things about each unit. At the very least, they could add a unit stats section to the Armory, so that it would be included in game, and you wouldn't have to do the research offline. In that way, if balance changes were included in a new build, they could simply say to refer to the Armory to the highlighted units to see how their stats have changed since the last build.

...Why those?
What usefulness would those stats provide to a player?
The numbers that designate speed and vision radius are calculated using the game's scale.
Unless you have the mind of a computer those numbers mean nothing to you.

If by that you mean click one thing and that's that, then yes. But that's not what I would call "bruried deep"

First of all they are too busy working on the actual game to work on the tutorial atm. Second, the game is changing constantly, so a detailed tutorial would be a bit silly to have if you have to change it constantly. Finally, if you are a new player, I'd assume that you took a moment and figured out what things do beforehand. It's kind of silly to assume you can just instinctively "know" every minute detail about the game just by glancing at the UI, and not clicking on or mousing over anything, because, I should add, all of the different commands and UI elements give a description if you mouse over them. Just like in any other good game. If you took a moment and explored the game before hand (takes 5 mins and a sandbox AI) then you wouldn't have had this issue.

You don't need to "afford" things. You afford everything. As long as you keep building resource structures you won't encounter most of these problems, since everything still runs if your economy is low.

Once again, mousing over things is an amazing feature that exists in most games. The UI is quite intuitive in general, and the tutorial gives a decent overview of how the game works. All of the commands are pretty obvious, and anything that isn't has a tooltip when you hover your mouse over it. Even when I started in beta, the UI was quite easy to understand, if anything, it's gotten clearer now.

The speed and vision radius of each unit are fixed values. The only thing that changes with the game's scale is how long it takes you to get around the planets, or how much of the current planet that you are able to see relative to it's size, but those values don't change. So, essentially 100 meters is still 100 meters, in any scale.

Also, the speed and vision radius of a unit is vastly important tactically! For example, if I know that my Commander can outrun vehicles, then I won't necessarily need to send help to him to allow him to escape being overtaken and destroyed by them. Also, if I know that my tanks can see and shoot bots before they can see and shoot my tanks, then I can micro the tanks just outside the range of the bots to completely take them out without taking any losses! To ignore those values is to ignore your tactical advantages, or disadvantages, which could lose you the game.

You don't need to see the stat for vision radius if you can actively see it ingame.... The stats I think are important are mainly health and DPS...

I think that all of the stats that I listed are important in one way or another, some more, some less, depending on your personal strategies. In terms of vision, it can be hard to compare the visual ranges of 2 different units by just observing them in game. Sometimes it's just easier to see the numbers to quickly make an assessment, rather than having to test everything in-game. I'm personally a numbers guy. However, if you are not a person that likes to do the math, or to micro your units, then vision probably doesn't matter to you. I think that if you are going to list some, then why not list ALL of the unit stats? The room they take up is of no consequence in a place like the Armory, and the stats are in the game already, so how hard would they be to just expose to us there? Having said that, I could see an abbreviated list of stats, for reduced space, in an in-game pop-up window (like HP/DPS/Speed/Range).

In the armory or something, not really an issue, but at that point you might as well just look it up too, not really any difference.

I agree that it's not a huge thing, but it's just more polished to include that kind of stuff in-game somewhere, like most other RTS games do. Makes it easier for new players, who aren't familiar with where to find the info. Also, after a new build comes out, it can take some time before someone gets around to posting that data. I haven't seen an updated PADB for the last few builds, for example. Also, if they provided that info. in-game, then you know it would be accurate.

I am in the blue a lot, and I notice its nearly better to be red. If humans weren't so deep, the standard should be blue is red and red is blue.

I try to build a lot of expensive jarble at the moment when I'm blue. Storages, fabbers, even unnecesary t2, I click the idle fabber button and assign them to build something right beside them until I'm red. Yes, red, not green, so I have incentive to dig myself out. Also, if red, I know how big my eco is. If 70 stall, small. If 97 stall, huge. That's cuz 200 metal deficit causes a 4 percent stall if your 3k metal.

I don't think most of your points are valid really. You can't just expect to hop into a game (especially one as complicated as PA) and have everything be intuitive. Go in the a game with a sandbox AI and get a feel for things. Go into the key bindings and look around, you might find a few useful commands that you might have not even known existed.

Maybe watch a few videos from one of the many casters around here. Some of the tips they give have been extremely useful for me.

I would absolutely love to say that the UI is only a placeholder until they get around to do something, but I can't say that anymore after they basically kept the concept and put a bit of polish on it. To me this says Uber is sticking with this concept now, but will probably improve it here and there.

To be fair, it's not half as bad, you have everything in front of you to play the game immediately, no need to read manuals or dig into the absolutely huge hotkeys section, but I agree that some things are a bit less intuitive than they should be.

Yes, persistent icons of scouted buildings is one thing, I would add orbital icons that stand out in contrast to icons of ground and air layer to distinguish them, and also, a way to control a whole planet as 1 unit, with all it's capabilities available after 1 click of selecting it, once you own the thing completely.

To be honest, this is something I both agree and disagree with at the same time.

When it comes to being a fairly experienced player of any sort of games, I agree with you, this is something you do usually when you fire up an RTS.

But when it comes to being able to sell a game to millions of people, a good learning curve and intuitive controls are an absolute must to not discourage new players, those who are needed to make a project like this profitable. My favourite example is Stardrive. Excellent concept, ok execution, but a miserable failure at accessibility.

nah we actually had quite a serious debate going at the time @Culverin was around.

You're definitely not alone in this.

IMO current PA's UI just wants to weigh you down with as much chains as it can lay hands on.

Extra clicks galore, discusting slimy icky sticky simplicity/uncluteredness....
look up the threads culverin started about UI you won't be dissapointed, there's at least three good ones.

I'm not overly good at RTS games, but I do enjoy them, and I've been playing this one off and on since the alpha. I come back every once in a while to check the progress. Came back for the galactic war and I KNEW that features such as a looping build queue and following a unit with PIP was possible. And could not find a way to do it. I knew the feature was there and still could not find the buttons to make it happen. That I would say is a problem. Some of the OP's complaints are valid. Though I think it's more of an issue of making things findable than overhauling the current UI. For instance why do i control everything to do with a factory EXCEPT the power on/off and infinite build options from the window at the bottom of the screen? Why are those three options off to the right? Took me three battles to figure out where those were. Still haven't managed to figure out how to control the PIP properly, though I admit with the huge number of crashes since GW showed up it's barely possible to finish a game and I haven't put that much effort into researching it.

TLDR: If you already know these features exist and still can't find the UI elements to make them work... There is a problem with your UI.