Health bars are hard to see
The idea of integrating cooldown timer indicators and health bars into the selection ring is pretty neat! That said, in its current state, I find these indicators very difficult to discern, especially with many small units that tend to clump up and obscure each other.
It gets even worse when cooldowns begin to be displayed. These indicators are simply too small and too unremarkable for them to be easily noticed. Other RTSes and MOBAs alike show health bars prominently—in many cases they're the one thing that pops out the most on the screen—and for good reason! Being able to quickly see which units have low health during an engagement is extremely useful information.
I don't think the placement of the health bars necessarily needs to be changed. Indeed, in an RTS context, having huge health bars tends to cause problems as well—too many big bars obscures what's actually going on, and it makes targeting units difficult. Instead, one of the most useful indicators of a unit's health is color. The universal code of “green == good” and “red == bad” seems to work pretty effectively when trying to convey information as quickly as possible. Having the size of the bar is useful, too, when comparing two units of similar HP, but the color lets the brain chunk units into groups without a second thought.
Frankly, I think the whole UI is a little bland in the color department right now. I think this has been mentioned elsewhere, so I won't harp on it, but color is an extremely useful indicator. Even if it isn't as aesthetically pleasing, making important information pop is helpful. Keeping the blue default isn't out of the question, either—some games have pulled off the “blue == good”, “red == bad” color scheme as well.
This also raises the question of usability for those who are colorblind; I'm not, so I can't really speak to how to solve this for those people. But I think colorizing can't hurt, and indeed, I think it would help a significant portion of the population.
Comments
Bars: I was confused during the first 10 minutes, but i got used to it.
Overall many element in UI are small, like the glass cannon is less than a half inch big on my screen (i am 1920*1080 on 15" ... so my setup makes this worse, are you playing on 22" inches screen at Artillery ? )
Nevertheless i think that making the health bar a bit thicker wont hurt - while keeping the same thickness to the cooldown. Each team as a color so i am not sure this is a good idea to use color code for each bar.
Good feedback!
Even though we've spent a lot of time working on the teamcolors and health/cooldown visibility, I don't think any of us would say that it's final. We're pre-alpha and everything here is subject to change (hence the secrecy about the playtest), and we'll definitely refer to comments like this when we revisit UI/UX.
It's interesting that you mention the teamcolors -- we have at least one colorblind person on the Artillery team, and for a while we even had a colorblind mode you could toggle for teamcolors. The current scheme (cyan/green/read) seemed to be the most pleasing to everyone, but we're definitely not 100% content with the result.
I found it hard to keep track of bars just like @lambda. I hope this is eventually improved.