UI differentiation between a selected and non-selected unit.
Hello folks, first of all thanks for the opportunity to participate in this very early test. My feedback is regarding the UI that deals with army selection. I do realize the UI is in a very early stage but I felt that it was hard to tell which units of a group I had successfully selected, be it via boxes or control groups, which made micro difficult for me as I'd sometimes think I boxed a unit to have it retreat, then find it was not the case and the unit would die.
I noticed after a bit that there is in fact a thin ring but this frequently gets lost when there are several units around. My suggestion to fix this is to maybe use a different color for the ring/healthbar element of selected units and offer stronger visual cues, maybe thicker outline to help for instance in combat scenarios where there might be effects that obscure which color is the outline of which unit.
Another related detail I was missing (or maybe it's there I just didn't notice, would have to play more games) is a ui element showing which units I have selected. What in RTS games usually occupies the center area. I feel that in busy situations this ui element is invaluable for micro as it provides a way to select hurt units when there's a lot going on on the screen. It also provides feedback to which units I have in a group, like if I made Tier1 unit control group but mistakenly added a fragile T2 unit, I'd be able to notice it when I select the group and make adjustments.
Comments
Awesome feedback. Thanks!
You're definitely right -- it can be pretty hard to tell what you have selected when you're in a big battle and especially when your teammates are around. We've experimented with a lot of different selection indicators (both on the unit and in the UI, like you mentioned). We'll definitely spend a lot more time on making it more readable, and when we do we'll take feedback like this into account.
I was actually thinking about making a similar post just the other day, thanks for bringing this up Alyosha.
I agree that some solid visual "pop" is needed for selected units. Take the two below screenshots for example - can you quickly glance at them for 0.5sec and tell me which army units are selected? I certainly can't
I need to take a good ~2 seconds to visually identify who's selected in each shot, and that makes it difficult to pull off micro decisions real-time with confidence
Hah, statico got in just before me :D
I'd just like to echo this as well, though I hadn't noticed it before. While in-game I can usually tell if I have a unit selected because it'll follow my orders properly, in Cerebral's screenshots I had a really tough time understanding which units are selected or not just from looking.