Unit recognizability at distant zoom

look on the left hand side of the screen, should show unit icons including engineers if you scroll down, if you double click on the unit icon will center the camera on their location. Hopefully this should help with locating specific units such as engineers or tier 3 units for the time being until they improve the UI.

Thanks. I had noticed that, recognized the feature from SOASE. My problem is still with trying to find engineers which are already close to what I want to build. In SOASE there were planet icons in the unit list that gave you some indication of where the units were before you clicked them. Haven't played AotS long enough to remember if there's a similar thing in its unit list.

It is something we are concerned with as well.  It is, in fact, the hottest topic here.  We want to convey useful on-screen information but we don't want the game to look like some grognard tabletop war game.  There's a delicate balance involved.

Definitely post your feedback and suggestions on this.

Thanks for the reply!

I'm a long-time player of large scale RTS games. SoaSE and SC:FA primarily. Supreme Commander can have several thousand units on the screen at a time. Granted, at that amount of units, it's really more akin to playing a slideshow. AotS fixes that problem at the same or greater unit counts, which in my mind is the primary improvement over its predecessors. You've fixed Real Time. You've also improved graphical quality by an order of magnitude.

But to effectively construct a playable Strategy game, the player must be made aware of unit positions in the game world at a glance without the overhead of mental context switching. Sorting through a list of units won't cut it. Neither will just displaying the units themselves onscreen at distant zoom levels. It is my opinion that there really isn't going to be a compromise that can tell the players what types of units are located in the world they're looking at without implementing a unit icon overlay.

This is where I get frustrated about game design priorities. Despite being tasked with designing a strategy game, the designers of AotS seem to be prioritizing aesthetics in a higher category than strategic playability. When you're thinking about unit strategy, you're really not concerned about lighting or particle effects. In reading through the threads about these topics, though, there's almost a dogmatic aversion to even talking about an icon overlay like it's an option.

Why? Icons work. They (usually) work really well.

Now, playing devil's advocate, there are some usability concerns with an icon overlay that aren't strictly aesthetic. With fixed icon sizes, and at the scale and tight unit clustering that this game features, icons would overlap and end up being indiscernible from one another anyway. For a great example of this, check out the unit overlay icons in Planetary Annihilation. Holy crap. Icons are totally worthless when there are that many, that big, and that close together. This is a tough problem to solve if you want to place icons in correct geographic relation to each other.

I've seen a few suggestions for intelligent grouping of icons. For instance, push the icons apart from each other when they start to overlap. Combine icons for lower level units. Use some kind of hover/key combination to expand a radial menu of specific types of units in a combat group. TBH, I don't care as much about individual land unit types in combat groups. But engineers and air units are different enough that I don't believe they should be lumped in with land combat units.

I've only been thinking about this for a day, and I'll continue to do so as I'm playing the game, and probably in all my spare time I'm looking forward to seeing the solution to this problem, maybe even contributing to the thought process behind it.

how about placing building blue prints on the ground and the closest idle engineer will commence building it?  if there is no idle engi the blueprint is added to a queue  and a voice note appears.

not just that it is very lazy  - huehuehue - but if i were from the future I'd handle my production exactly that way:

plan the structure layout then let the ai handle the details.

tho this would probably need a whole new set of code to realize :/

an easier fix to support the good old 300 apm fun our fellow asians will love so much( im sry =D)  is to clean up the left panel.  i know the building queue can be bunked up.... but still  we are talking numbers in the hundrets, i don't think it is fitting for a game of this scale to display a single icon for each unit being build or in queue . ( my building queues are about 300 units long for each factory right now)

why not have the good old one icon per unit type with a nice little number underneath kinda thing?

the same goes for groups. if I ctrl+1 a huge meta unit the left panel explodes...

also can't we just create smaller build queues which we then loop with a repead button? (sorry if i havent found this feature yet while it is already there)

theres also the good old idle engineer warning that can help you keep your production managed ( not sure if that isn't already in place, but if it is - it is too subtle).

also may i ask how fixated you are on the current UI and is your budged already fixed for such? cause I have some really nice design ideas in my head regarding unit management and would love to share, but im not willing to make the effort drawing it all up and writing it down if it's in vain. Cause this shit may need some heavy coding, I only just started studying IT so I wouldnt know in detail how much programming is actually necessary.

but figure a slide board  representing a selected meta unit. you can slide around units already present to change formations and create your own, or you leave it at auto and the AI will just do what it is already doing.  but you can click and drag a unit onto that slide board to add it to the meta unit, while on auto it will of course be assigned to the right spot else it'll land where it is dragged.  but that's just a gimmick and some quality of life stuff. the point of this slide board is to actually have a good overview of that meta unit, using smaller very simple but RECOGNIZEABLE strategic zoom like icons or whatever representing units or batches of the same units, to give an abstract of the fleet and the shape of it's formation.

yeah i have had the same issue with engineers sometimes i just build more lol..not very efficient thou.

In a Different post I spoke about when you zoom really out you units color glow, so you know where they are but, it does not say anything about what kind of units you have, I did that because I do not want any icons on the screen. so how do you find out what units do you have? Easy you just click of them and you see that:

First Concept

Second Concept

What i am trying to explain is:

So Every time you create 1 Meta Unit an Icon will appear automatically on the left side of the screen without any need of ALT number any meta unit.
that i will make it easier for all of, and when you click on the any icon then the info of that meta unit will appear on the top left of the screen

Anyway you still have the option to ALT number any unit or Meta Unit you like.

So you have the Color Glowing when you zoom out and at the same time you have the left side of the screen than gives you of the info of all the units you have on the map.

You have 2 options, one: move the mouse over a Meta Unit to show its info or, Two: click on the Meta Unit to show the info on the left side.

Guys remember this is just an Idea, i am not in anyway asking the Dev's to change it and do it my way

Hope you guys like it and i will be waiting for your opinions.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that is better to have 1 icon of each kind of unit with the number of many you have inside a Meta Unit, or the group of units that you choose. doing that we can save a lot of space on the left side of the screen.

I'll add my support for icons as well.  When implemented well (SC:FA) they really do work.  I understand that graphics are what make this game shine but if you think about a real-world scenario, viewing a battlefield from a high enough position would lose any real unit definition and you would at best be able to tell what it is by its rough shape.  With SC:FA, you get the added benefit of an icon: a simple image recognizable at a high altitude.  You zoom in and you see the unit.  It works really well.  I know there's an ideological aversion to icons with the game designers but sometimes you have to concede that the approach just is the best one given what you're trying to accomplish (ability to quickly identify a unit and select it, or select a group of units of a particular type in one area).

If we're going to have a proper strategic zoom, along with that has to come some way of easy at-a-glance unit identification.

Quoting ASADDF, reply 8

In a Different post I spoke about when you zoom really out you units color glow, so you know where they are but, it does not say anything about what kind of units you have, I did that because I do not want any icons on the screen. so how do you find out what units do you have? Easy you just click of them and you see that:

Reduced 68%

Original 830 x 152

First Concept

 

Reduced 68%

Original 830 x 153

Second Concept

What i am trying to explain is:

Reduced 85%

Original 174 x 514

So Every time you create 1 Meta Unit an Icon will appear automatically on the left side of the screen without any need of ALT number any meta unit.
that i will make it easier for all of, and when you click on the any icon then the info of that meta unit will appear on the top left of the screen

Anyway you still have the option to ALT number any unit or Meta Unit you like.

So you have the Color Glowing when you zoom out and at the same time you have the left side of the screen than gives you of the info of all the units you have on the map.

You have 2 options, one: move the mouse over a Meta Unit to show its info or, Two: click on the Meta Unit to show the info on the left side.

Guys remember this is just an Idea, i am not in anyway asking the Dev's to change it and do it my way

Hope you guys like it and i will be waiting for your opinions.

 

EDIT: I forgot to mention that is better to have 1 icon of each kind of unit with the number of many you have inside a Meta Unit, or the group of units that you choose. doing that we can save a lot of space on the left side of the screen.

oh the beauty of it *-*

very tidy and well done, yes please =D

I'd still prefer overlaid icons, as they tell me where the units are and what kind they are, at a glance. I think the "at a glance" part is the most important aspect to me, strategically. Otherwise I still have my initial problem of searching through groups of units one at a time, only now instead of needing to zoom in on them I have to click them. Arguably better, but still not what I want for planning battles and finding units quickly.

Something like this would work great for if they decided to go for combining units at distant zoom into meta-icons, though I would still prefer to see a large primary icon with smaller icons representing each present unit type & count directly underneath it, just to make it easier. Effectively what you designed, but with slightly smaller icons, overlaid directly onto the battlefield when zoomed out.

Thank you, its good to know that you like it, now i hope the Dev's can look into it and give me an opinion hehe.

I think i do know what do you mean with it, I have an idea i want to show you later tonight, still at work and i will be here for at least 7 more hours, when I get home I will work on something interesting to show you, you guys make like it...or may not.

I really like the look of the second idea by ASADDF. However, the numbers are too tiny for me to be able to read, which is not ok b/c I need to be able to *quickly* determine my group compositions, I shouldn't have to squint. This being said, I love the overall idea.

Thank you scotttaysom, what I did was just some really fast idea, of course the numbers are very tiny because I could not get a bigger or better quality images, and I wanted to show the most real example as how it will look in the game, the text and number can be fixed really easy, but I guess the Dev's will have to make a better example using the in game UI, maybe a new UI Concept.

And I have something new to show you guys later tonight about how to better understand units when zoomed out, i will show it when its ready. Thx again

Click on view image to see it bigger.

Hello I did something really fast here with the units info, how it work is really easy and fast, without the need to be clicking anywhere.
So how it work is you just move the mouse over any unit or group or alt group or meta unit and then the info of that specific unit that you choose will pop up giving all the info of it.

you can click on this group to keep showing the info while it move around the map or just move the mouse over it, for it to show the info

And another way is to show the info not in the middle of the map but on the top left side of it.
I Explained the 3 ways to get the info it need about the units with having a hard time. (Circular Info, Square Info, and Top Left Info.) Witch one is better?

Ohh BTW this is Just an idea, i tried to make it as nice as possible, the text on the unit count can be much better but i just did it as an example.

Awesome! That is really pretty much what I was going for.

I definitely would prefer the info be placed on the screen where the (meta-)unit is located, just like your example. The whole purpose, for me at least, is to see where in the world a given unit is. This plays nicely with strategy, planning, and leverages what little spatial memory I have to make finding units easier. Nice work!

Well not really, let me explain why.

• The first option is a to move the mouse over a unit or group for you to get the info, ( it means that you cannot have more than one popup info at a time, lol you only have 1 mouse)

• The second option is that when your mouse select a unit/group then the unit popup info show and stay up till you deselect that unit/group, by doing that you can keep adding units/groups with shift and more popups will appear on the screen at the same time and in real time moving with the units, so my answer to that is make the UI kind of intelligent, so to make the popups move to different places without mixing it or overlapping each other ( i can make another example concept of this second option by putting a bunch of groups and units in the same area with popups)
  
  
• The third option is to put the unit/group info on the Top Left part of the screen, more groups you choose more of those square info will popup on the Left side. ( if you have nothing selected then nothing will show on the Left part of the screen )

Sorry i am still trying to learn how to put a picture correctly in this forum, I think i did fix it this time, let me know.

Be ready to that it may not be possible. Tabletop games (including chess), battle maps and modern military Command and Control systems have such look for a reason. Strategy is more convenient to devise when you have all the battlefield data before you at the same time. Icons are clearly not the best solution at such scale - even in SupCom they were unreadable beyond distinction of some unit types (land unit, ship, submarine, bomber, interceptor, gunship, building, experimental) - but even such an amount of info is a lot. I'd propose a full map zoom-out with area-coloring a player's continuous presence (i.e. an army) with an additional per-army chart showing unit type composition. Basically, minimap almost does this - it's just too small.

Still playing around with ideas but thought I'd show you some of the things we had played with.

I think we had a pretty good setup in Sins of a Solar Empire.

I have mixed feelings about SoaSE's UI. Responsiveness problems aside, zoom was reasonably good, yet I've read indicators wrong frequently. Determining where my fleets are sometimes turned into a challenge. Empire Tree wasn't really helpful in this - too many small, frequently changing icons to be readable, a noble cause to unite control over everything under single interface made it bloated. Also, I must admit that visual complexity of the SoaSE interface and amout of small detail in it scared me off once or twice, and I've got into the game not from the first attempt - it just looked like ages needed to just grasp the UI and start playing.

I think that main viewport should focus on information aspect, acting as an all-level navigation and info map from entire battlefield to small region, while additional panels that appear on selecting something should provide control features. That's exactly what SupCom got right, not the icons - while suitable for basic overview, at the more granular level they've suffered from the very same problem that severely limited usefulness of the Empire Tree (one who will try to find SMDs on a tightly packed large base in SupCom using icons may need an ophthalmologist's aid after that).

I was playing so understand bether the selection tree , will not be easy to find a solution.

I've been trying to find some ideas like you all are try, but we will have to all work hard on this  no doubt this will not be easy ..

One of the big problems we have at the moment in every battle is easily and quickly select a certain number of units and know where the  ones we want quickly.

I think the solution is to find an effective method throughout the tree on the left.

With colors  it will be very confusing.

Maybe the separation of the units by tech in the selection tree of the units should be different, but  we do not want to have a huge column we need is to find and select as fast as possible.

 Try to select between the asf  (Air) diferent units not so easy ,but let me tell you guys make a fantastic job with air bether then FA by far.

Air its just amazing well done.