Ok forget all these suck asses wooing the devs with "wow I love all the changes great ideas" blah blah blah. I'm a founder and I'm glad of it. I spent good American money on this game. I love it already.
But I will require full strategic zoom. It's in every large scale RTS. The mini-map sucks. You steal Sup Com's maps, now it's time to steal some moar ideas, mainly nukes, monkeylords and FULL STRATEGIC ZOOM.
You need to do this.. like now devs. NOW. YOU HEAR ME. Like the black guys who said "givus us the free" in Amistad, I'm saying "givus us the ZOOM".
Thank you.
I think you should go play TA. The UI, pacing, and depth don't hold up as well as you might think.
Re: Camera controls.
Conceded. However, the default keys as stand are a nightmare and this company has a long history of sub-standard UIX design. Sorcerer King would have been an all-time classic if they had just quit jerking the UIX around. Same goes for Sins (which I do love)...their empire browser / tree thing actively fights you in big battles ( I could describe exactly how to fix the issue but they don't care).
Does everyone not see that this is basically Sins of a Solar Empire redesigned? There must be a ton of code reuse under the hood. It even play at the same deliberate pace (a big positive, btw).
The menus along the bottom are jaggedly aligned, this is not conducive to good reading. Look at starcraft 2...the bottom, while not 100% linear layout is very clean and exposes controls in a symmetrical manner. This is done for a reason, the same reason I have called out before. Human brains process edges first and foremost. Jagged edges work against you for reading information...do not do it.
On the other hand interesting outlines work well for masses of objects, especially small ones. Look at Radar displays, each kind of aircraft and situation is very distinct and clean. You're basically asking someone to look at HUNDREDS of items and make pretty quick decisions, so bland or similar outlines between craft is not going to aid this on bit.
I challenge the design team to go back and look at Sins. Every ship is clearly defined on each team. The outline of each ship is very distinct and it's clear beyond a doubt at almost every scale what is what. Another game that does an excellent job of this is TF2, the UIX in that game is highly underrated...one of the best you'll encounter.
Look, I own almost every game these guys sell on steam but I am constantly disappointed by decisions the company makes. It's very disappointing to see the same patterns being followed in the beta.
Latest example (not on topic, but it proves my point):
Stardock sells a nice desktop background animation tool for windows. I wanted to try it out. So I click the download trial link to check it out. And...get this..it takes me to Download.com. Download.com has long been known for injecting malware into their downloads / installs and has a terrible reputation online. So the product will never be downloaded to my machines, ever! The company builds the product, then puts it out on one of the WORST download sites possible. AWS and Azure offer excellent / inexpensive containers for your downloads, but instead they make a blindingly stupid decision like this.
I won't be responding any more. It's not an argument and I'll hold my steam review for the final 1.0 release...perhaps they'll surprise me in a few months.
The highly competitive RTS players, like chess players, generally care about abstracts more than anything, and the casual RTS players don't really need to play the game optimally, they can always zoom in merely for watching some detailed battle scenes, so it seems the most people annoyed by “icon wars" are people in between, are they really a particularly important portion of the potential consumers?
If they are, then from a design perspective, I still think it is better to make close-up views a need by adding a little micromanagement that better be done in close-up views than simply restricting the UI (either forced or encouraged by some default rules that would apply to all players in the same multiplayer game). Both would require more input from the player, but micromanagement, when done right, is certainly more interesting than moving the camera.
It is always important to remember that your views are your opinions. Not objective reality.
I have to do that myself since, to me, your posts merely come across as being aggressively wrong. But then I remind myself that that is just my opinion.
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