What I could offer to the project...

[xiane]

Hmm. A bit better proof reading might be in order next time. Well it's very late here in the South Pacific so as exciting as this is, I must sleep.

[Dominique]

Xiane,

sorry to disappoint you, but compliments from ME don't count as much since I only joined the project some days before - wait for Mark's or F_Smith's comments...

Anyway, your idea of those "impressive arrows" is not totally new; the computer version of Axis & Allies uses them, and they slow down the game considerably...

Anyway, I agree with you that these look quite good, and since we do not have an irregular map (like Axis & Aliies), but one in square / diamond tiles, this should be feasable whit much less computing power. Would be nice, I think.



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If somebody asks you "Art thou a god?", you tell him "YES!"

[Peter Dobrovka]

The idea of having generic graphics for displaing armies is OK, I remember it worked well for Conquest of the new world, Lords of the Realm and Imperialism.
As we can see in games like Civ it is impossible anyway to display every unit of a tile on the tile itself. Therefore a secondary windows can show the details of the tile, if it is selected (or pointed).

But you should use different graphics for displaying army's technology level (like in Imperialism) and for displaying the amount of the units in the army (like Lords of the Realm II). I think this is a very important information that should be available on a single look.

Peter

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3DTT - the 3D sequel to Transport Tycoon - demo 4.0 coming soon
Path of Mankind. Turnbased Civ-like game - demo 15 coming soon

[Dominique]

Peter,

you can see that I by no means have played all strategy games out there by not being aware there ARE "custom unit" models out there

Now, this of course let's me think "obviosly, it can't be that bad an idea"...

As for representing the number of units in any given unit icon, I'm afraid that's next to impossible here, looking at the VERY different types of armies being represented, i.e. ancient phalanxes, modern aircrafts, tank divisions... and those are mixed, too!

What would be a number indicator suited for being represented in the unit icon? The number of units alone? So a legion with 6.000 soldiers is more than a platoon of Leopard II? Come on... or should i be based on strength? What about special abilities (bombard, stealth, paradrop...) then, which influence the REAL value of the unit quite a bit, while not adding to any actual combat strength?

And the, there's of course the issue of the graphical representation in itself - it's not that easy to create those icons proper if they are to look good, in the first place... but including a possiblity that there are 5 or 7 of them in one tile? Uh-oh... I do not say this isn't feasable (as you point out, it already has been done), but it's hard. I agree with you that there should be an easy to understand way to see at a first glance whether there's only a small group of scouts or a massive army fgroup which is represented by any given icon, but I freely admit that right now I have no clue as to how this can be done convincingly.

Furthermore, one has to distinguish between a unit as seen by IT'S OWN player and how it is seen by the enemy - without very good reconnaisance, the enemy shouldn't know about the exact strength of a unit, but only get a general idea, based on sheer size of the formation.

Sure, it would be easy to simply include a colored bar (or whatever means you prefer) to indicate the strength of a formation, but I see the big problem of no fix maxima here: A full length bar would indicate maximum strength, but WHAT IS "maximum strength"? Wouldn't this value fully depend on the epoch, on the size of one's army, and, of course on modifications done by a scenario editor?

The only - maybe - solution I have for this is to make a graphical indicator which represents the unit number / strength / combat value based on THE AVERAGE UNIT's value, i.e. each turn a statistics calculation must be done: The strongest unit there is on the map gets the "full" bar, and all others only a percentage of this. Ideally, this comparison would be based on units known to the player (reconnaisance range) only, so he doesn't know if somewhere across the ocean someone has built an army twice as strong.

So, to put that clearly: If a graphical representation of a formation's strength is needed, I propose a "relative strength indicator". De facto this would mean the following: In anciant times, I build a phalanx, being the most impressive force known by my people. The bar is at full length. I meet enemy's units - they are weaker than my phalanx, so I still have the full length bar on my phalanx. Unknown to me, my enemy develeoped legions in the meantime and built such a formation, effectively twice as strong. This doesn't influence the strength bar of my phalanx, as I do not KNOW that legion. Some turns later, confrontation happens: The nemy legion comes into sight, and - damn! - my phalanx' (relative) power bar drops by 50%. So seemingly it's not the "King unit" anymore...

To reflect lack of reconnaisance, power bars on enemy units could be split in two different areas: Area1 colored in, say, green, meaning: "This is that unit's definite minimum strength we can assume" and area2 (say, yellow) meaning "...but maybe it's even THAT strong, we don't know for sure until we find out".

Just my two cents...


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If somebody asks you "Art thou a god?", you tell him "YES!"

[Peter Dobrovka]

Please, not so complicated!

The more details, the more complicated graphics.

Of course you can make a generic graphics like a flag with player's color or you can display every man and device and every wounding and damage on them.

But there is a possibility in-between (only a suggestion made within 5 minutes, so don't expect much):
For stone-age-armys you can use this nice little warrior. For large stone-age-armys you can use graphics displaying two or tree warriors. ONE graphics for these groups, NOT layering 3 single warrior graphics.
For ancient armies you can use graphics with the style of a greek phalanx or roman centurio.
Ships will be available, too, now.
An army on horseback would be good, too.
Then there will be armys with fireweapons: musketeers or riding shooters.
At last there come the modern armies: infantry with machine gun and grenades
automobile-based units (tank)
flying units

Summary:
- Stone-age:
1. warrior
- Ancient:
2. legionaire
3. ancient ship
4. knight
- early fireweapons:
5. musketeer
6. ship with cannons
7. cavalrist
- modern
8. marine
9. gunship
10. tank
11. plane

11 types with 3 'sizes' are 33 images - too much for you? Think about it.

For mixed armies: the unit type that is most contained decides the icon. In doubt the strongest unit decides the icon.

If you have 6.000 spearmen and 1 tank, this will display the '3 warriors' graphics. But who will mix his army this way?

Peter

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3DTT - the 3D sequel to Transport Tycoon - demo 4.0 coming soon
Path of Mankind. Turnbased Civ-like game - demo 15 coming soon

[Dominique]

Peter,

I absolutely agree with you that the graphics mustn't get too complicated - be sure that's not what I intended.

For one, the thing with the "power bar" may sound complicated, but in the real game it would be the simplest thing possible: A relative power measurement, so no abstract number or the like, but the only thing that's really important to the player: "How strong is this formation compared to others?". I think that's the most importnat thing, don't you think so?

Of course I've seen the approach you're suggesting before... but I never liked it, for several reasons:

a) not exact enough - if you say e.g. 3 sizes, then necessarily you will have WIDE ranges represented by the same graphics. "size 2" could be anything between 100 and 2000 mounted warriors. Let's assume I have a formation with 105 archers (100 being the lower limit for size 2, 2000 is upper limit). Yes, one must draw a border somewhere - but wouldn't these 105 archers for me, the player, count as "a small force" when I have several armies with 1500 people in them around? So I look at the map, see 6 2-guys icons... and am unnerved every time I click on the "105ers", because although they LOOK the same, they are far less then the others. This system is neither exact nor intuitive.

2) The graphics - whatever you try, you will end up doing the graphics either too small or too large. I've done this. I got frustrated. Remember, I have to do the unit icons in such a way that I can stuff 3 of them in one tile. And don't tell me that I could either 1 larger spearman, or 2 medium-sized or 3 little ones, because that wouldn't be intuitive, either: If you want to represent the strength of the unit even roughly by a number of soldiers in the gfx representation, these must be of more or less the same size so get an instant feeling of "these are more than one alone".

3) The limits - doing it the way you propose means having defined limits. The program must know the exact number /power value for which it uses the different images. This means a loss of flexibility OR makes things very complicated for the coder. How many warriors are needed to get a size 2 icon? Okay, 100. How many tanks? And shouldn't same "image sizes" show even ROUGHLY comparably unit values?

Sorry, Peter, I simply don't see that feasable this way (i.e. I never did, because there ARE games using this technique).


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If somebody asks you "Art thou a god?", you tell him "YES!"

[Blade Runner]

My idea is the next:

1. We have different pictures only for land, air and sea based units. (If I count well this will be 3*5=15 picture only)

2. We have a military window somewhere on the screen. When the player move the cursor over the unit, this window will show the exact unit mix with type, strength, readiness and anything what we want to include in the game.

3. When the player right click his/her own unit on the screen the military window stay and he/she has a possibility to modify something or start to fight with the enemy. (In the same time the battle screen popup too. )

4. I think we need to change the use of the air units.
a. The player can not mix air and land units. b. The air units can fly over the enemy cities and enemy or own units. (In the own cities they can refuel and stay)
c. The air units can fight each other or they have a possibility to bombard the enemy units.
d. Special land unit(s) can fight against the air units. (SAM, Air defence canon?, etc)
e. The bombardment can not eleminate completely land unit mix and the special land units can not eleminate completely the air units.
f. Maybe we can use special air unit to refuel an air units stack on flight?

Blade Runner