Ashes: Extreme Zoom-OUT

Hi!

Here's a splurge of ideas!  Figured this way you could pick and choose items from all the ideas!

1)  Adopt a zoom function similar to what R.U.S.E had.  As we zoom out, individual units "morph" into a bigger single unit (representative of all those units).  More units equal a bigger stack.  I could see this working when you have armies with t3 in them, where you could zoom out, and you would just see your big t3 ship.  When you hover your cursor over this unit, you could see its exact composition (like a fleet bar in Sins of a Solar Empire).  Armies without a t3 could simply be some representative tank or what not.

I think this would work very nicely with the meta unit concept.  Also it is by far the "most realistic" in terms of what an actual general would do.  For example, a war room might have a single ship to representative a certain fleet, and use this macro view to determine where to position the fleet.

2)  Go old school.  Upon zooming out make meta units blocks, just as it would be done in a battle back in the day.

Something like this: http://www.britishbattles.com/waterloo/waterloo-map-2-cavalry-attack-l.jpg

Then, upon zooming out more, have a big block for the army (pretty much just #1).

3)  Make regions exact exactly like planets in Sins, where each region would have a "fleet" bar showing what is in that region.  However, I hope that this does not become the bread and butter mechanic as this is just "boring" to me.  

Ideally, what if we could zoom to a level where several regions are morphed into a "territory", and then this territory could have a fleet bar showing all the units that are in that territories respective regions.

4) A heat map.  Greater concentration of units would equal more red in an area, while deserted areas would be "cold".  While not ideal for the actual overall strategic zoom concept, I think this would be great if we could "toggle" the world into a heat map at will.  This could give a unique and easy to see view of where armies are.

As a side note, I hope AoS has quite a few toggle options such as this.  See #7 for more.  In FAF, the map had quite a few neat toggle switches.  I hope to see something similar!

Other thoughts/questions:

5)  Any chance we could have some form of an arrow mechanic as in Ultimate General Gettysburg?  Something that looks like this when we move armies from a zoomed out perspective? 

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51cabf8ae4b043b66a22b6b9/543fc2e2e4b0d6a781076a7c/543fc395e4b07a3fedf560bf/1413464994060/Devils+Den+Battle+3.png

6) Please allow us to "draw" on the battlefield for multiplayer.  This is a feature that started in Rome 2 Total War.  If you clicked a button your cursor in game literally became a marker, and you could draw lines onto the field of battle for your allies to see.  If you don't know what I am talking about let me know and I will clarify!

7) To steal another feature from the Total War series.. In Medieval 2 TW, you had a button you could click that would highlight friendly and enemy troops.  When clicked, every friendly solider would have a green flash under his feet for a few seconds.  Enemies would have a red flash.  Allies would have a blue flash.  This was amazing useful when there was a massive brawl going on, and you wanted an abstract view of how the battle lines were formed, where the line was thinner and might need re-reinforcements for example. Turned the brawl into a "green vs. red" concept, highly useful!

I'm suggesting this because given the scale of the game, and the current "run through" problems, this could be a godsend to see what units are where.  Especially right now when we only have 1 race and it seems that the friendly and enemy units are colored exactly the same (no differing trim colors as each player would have in FAF for example).

8)  I do think we need icons to represent the meta units.  I hope this is not a complaint for you guys?  I can see why individual icons would be a bad idea, but i see no problem for meta units.

9)  I absolutely think all engineers need their own icons.  I can already see from how this game plays that AoS will not have the engineer problem that FAF has, where in late game you might have anywhere from 300-700 engineers (depending on the map).  Seems that right now, if I imagine how huge one of the huge maps will really be, we would only need somewhere around 70 engineers max?  That's doesn't seem very resource intensive to have 70 icons are so displaying.  And I want to know where all my engineers are!  

Yes I know I borrow alot from other games, but I've played so many strategy games, and every one usually had some amazing feature that no others games had.  Always thought it would be neat if a game one day combined all these.  Why not AoS?

I don't know if we want to see 70 engineer icons...but I totally agree with these two methods. Another idea very similar to 3 and 4 of shurtugalll's post would be to color the regions that your forces occupy, and have the color darken as the concentration of forces in any given area grow. Along with a break down of what is in any given concentration when you hover your cursor over the area. If I was producing the game, these are the methods I would use, until I found something better. But I really want to be able to know how many battle groups/meta units I have on the field at all times.  

Hello Frogboy and Founders.

Here i will give you guys my idea, and i think its very easy to manage without icons, make Meta Units Color Glow each team when its zoomed out from 70% or more. Here i will put some example pictures that i made.

In this first picture you can see how the blue Team Meta Unit have a glow around it vs the red team with the same Color team Glow.

A small red Meta Unit Color Glow.

This Picture Show the Blue Team Meta Unit with Glow and the Red team with Glow without a meta Unit.

This Picture show Glow colors on Red team vs Yellow team when zoomed out. look at the Mini-map too, you see those small color dots.

The last Picture show different Glow Colors on the Meta Units. same with the mini-map, you can see the small color dots of those meta Units.

I think i went very far by adding to many Pictures, i am sorry and i hope it wont bother anyone.

What i am trying to show you guys is Glow on Meta Units, my example is a cheap and bad one but at least you can look at them

So when you zoom out and you start loosing the units them that Glow appear on your units or Meta Units. The Color Glow should be the same Color of your Structures to make it easy to find, recognize or see.

so to make everyone understand it, if you zoom at 70% or more you start loosing your smaller units and cannot see them, at that time a small color glow will appear around those units or only around the Meta Units and when you get up to 100% zoom and you can only see the T3 Units in small size then a bigger glow will appear on that meta unit, so without seeing the unit you know that you have them there because of the Color Glow.

And on the Minimap you will have just a small color Glow dots of each meta units, being yours or you enemy meta units.
I guess those Color Glows with replace the icons on the map when zoomed out.

Thank you.

Another thought!  Again, just throwing all this out there..

Perhaps a system similar to what was used in Hegemony: Ancient Wars of Greece.  In this game when you were zoomed in close you could see individual soldiers, cities, trees, trade routes etc.  However, when you zoomed out far enough, the world literally became a paper map and everything was represented with "monopoly icons".  Armies became big soldiers, cities had a building icon, towers had tower icons, mountains were a series of carrots etc.

And the best part is that you can zoom between these 2 at will!  Going from microing an army to a macro view.

You can just search gameplay of the game to see how this map idea functions

I'm in favor of merging unit icons into one big "Fleet" icon when you zoom out.

I like the way that sins handled the camera and elements of that can certainly be applied to AOTS.

Always be mindful of immersion, it has to be smooth, and simple.

I kinda feel the way RUSE/wargame did it seams to be what you want in ashes of the singularity.

Even though i dislike it quite a lot for action packed micro RTS´s, honestly i still dont understand what type of game you want to make, it seams you want a bit of everything which sometimes doesnt really work at all.

Can we get a clarification on what kind of game you want to make, i mean do you want micro to be a thing?, do you want just epic scale battles and no early game rushes? i cant make a suggestion about Zoom when i do not know if you will be required to micro individual squads for example.

But anyways looking at that picture i cant see or identify each unit properly, i feel better decals below the units themselves with respective team colors can help a lot.

You can also scale the unit up a bit more when you zoom out like in wargame.

Also if you want a microless RTS you can always merge the squads when you zoom out to just be 1 unit representing it, and the further you zoom out things get even more merged into the largest unit in the area.

Hear is an idea, what if you did a supcom type strategic zoom but had a small UI element that displayed when there where icons on the screen, this popup would have overlay buttons in it so you could display only certain elements if you wanted to, like only capital ships, or only structures, or only engineers, ect, so if you where looking for something you wouldn't have to sift through a sea of icons.

Prose and cons of strategic zoom so far.

(1) Cons: There will be to many icons for the UI to handle.

(5) Prose: Adds immersion, makes navigating large maps much smoother, gives you the maximum amount of intel in the simplest way, you don't need to have a second monitor to get the full experience or and experience at all, giving units long distant move orders quickly and accurately.

Solution for Con, merge many units or a fleet into one icon.

Did I miss anything?

If I am remembering correctly when you zoomed out in Supreme Commander 2 an army of many units turned into a bubble-like graphic with the number of units written inside the bubble. Very neat and easily selectable by just clicking the bubble. Of course that could be improved upon with some info, perhaps in graphic/icon form in the bubble giving a rough make-up of the army there in.

Heatmap and WWII blobs\blocks are my personal favorites.

I like many of the ideas above.  If you can integrate at-a-glance number of unit info, strength of unit info, role of unit info, and health of unit info, that would be great. Here is a mock-up of how you might be able to add some extra unit context in a zoomed out strategic view.

At a glance you can get a good idea of what this group of units is capable of doing (its role, so to speak), and how strong it is. I admit the dot idea is inspired a little by the game agar.io, where bigger dots means stronger. Perhaps you could have one of these figures per region, or one per battle group.

I know my diagram could be better both in art and style. It also probably has the problem that the units don't necessarily fit into the three roles I created (short range direct, long range indirect, anti-air). There's probably plenty else you can pick apart, but anyway this is my idea, maybe you can make something useful out of it.

Thx tatsujb, well i spent like 10 minutes doing them, i used only 15% transparency and it was just a fast idea, if i sit for an hour i can do something much better.
My original idea for the meta units is that when its zoomed all the way out you start seeing a color blobs glowing around each Meta unit, each meta unit with respective team colors, it does not give any information whatsoever on how big is the meta unit or what kind of units does it have. its just to know in the map where they are, just the location. i did not think farther than that but, the best is when you click on a Meta Unit all the way zoomed out it may show you on the top Left of the screen all the info of that meta Unit something like that.

Ala Sins of a Solar Empire, so you click on the color blob glow of the Meta unit and the info will show at the top left.

So again those pictures are just a demonstration of my idea, they are not optimized in any way and of course if the Dev's are interested in that Idea they have to work a lot on it to make it look really nice on the Meta units.

Thx

I like the ideas here.  

So I've mocked this up:

The first thing to understand about that icon is that it's larger than a dozen T3s put end to end.  That's why we can't just display units as icons themselves.  We have to be more abstract than that.

Even in this screenshot, I didn't fully zoom out.

I really like the idea of heat maps for unit strength.   

I think in this game, we should go the route where Ctrl-Keys are exclusive.  What I mean by that is that in Starcraft, I Use the 1 key to select an entire army, the 2 key to select one part of that same army and the 3 key to select another part of that army. But in Ashes, you won't ever have that kind of micro management for obvious reasons.  Instead, we should encourage players to think of their hot keys as representing true armies and carry that forward through the UI.

So Ctrl-3 woudl select the third army and its icon (whether it be a shield with a 3 on it or show its leader remains to be determined).  We also could have the size of the shield be based on how strong that army is as well as display an overall health of it.

I really like the color map idea (I'm assuming that this would only appear at a certain zoom-out level). And having the density of color denote the strength of force in that area is really handy. What I think would also be useful is to have the units in the meta-unit show up in the sidebar when you click on a meta-unit (like ASADDF suggested with the Sins bar comment).

This is looking good, and exactly what I was hoping for, it will give you full battlefield awareness and maintain a clear view of whats going on.

Something you could do is make the outline of the heat map brighter so you can have a lower opacity in the body of it so you can see the terrain better.

Also a directional arrow that pointed in the direction that it was moving might be handy, though if you have an overlay when you press shift or something like supcom that showed move orders, that probably wont be needed.

@tatsujb move and attack orders I would guess...

I like this. Even in micro heavy games I prefer to keep units in single control groups in order to keep it sorted out in my head. If that means using 3 commands to send three groups to the same location, I'd rather do that.

A few thoughts. First, I think "unit strength" must factor in hit points and upgrade/veterancy level, and any other factors that are relevant to strength, not simply number and tier of units.

Second, using opacity to denote strength is not going to serve you well here, IMHO. A fully opaque blob is clearly stronger than a mostly transparent blob. But it will be difficult to compare the relative strength of a blob that is 50% opaque and one that is 70% opaque if they are not right next to each other. Furthermore, comparing opaqueness of different colors is also not trivial at a glance. It's highly dependent upon the color of the terrain and the faction colors. Things get confusing when two different blobs meet. There looks to be some blending so that some areas look purple. What happens if there is a third faction colored purple!?

Third, there is no indication of the blob's specialty. How good is it at direct fire, indirect fire, and anti-air? If the red blob is all anti-air it would presumably get decimated by blue blob if blue blob is mostly direct fire. Yet the similar opacity would imply the blobs are of about equal strength. Furthermore, if battle groups employ a "stance" tactic (e.g. defensive, chevron, etc.) which impacts how a group handles a particular role, that would affect the unit's relative strength, but how would you be able to assess that with heat maps?

I think these are all relevant factors that I'd like to see from a strategic view. But if your vision is just to help the user figure out where his units are and whether they are significantly stronger or weaker than other blobs, independent of unit makeup, and make him zoom in and examine all the units to figure out whether it's going to be a favorable matchup, I guess this will do.

Its really nice that you guys like it.

In this Picture that i am showing there is 2 ways of glow

1.  Is a glow that each unit get when is zoomed out
2.  Is a glow that you get around the unit inside and out

Witch one will be better? sorry a couldn't get a good zoom out picture with units to give a better example.

The thing is that the example that Frogboy gave is awesome but its way too much, i think it will be better to use a tune down colors with some good transparency, no one want to see hard color glow on the units.

So i will go for No:1, because you still see very well the blobs glowing at the same time you see the units.

My original idea was just to add the colors to the units because you cannot see 70% of those units when zoomed out.
Having a bigger meta Unit will make the team color glow bigger, while a small group will have a smaller color glow on them.

All that with no information at all on them, no icons whatsoever, but when you click on 1 of them, then you will see the Meta units info on the left top side of the screen.

I think there will be no need of icons on the screen when you zoom if you have other ways to know where your units are and what units you have on each group.

What you describe seems like the Sins way of doing things. It works there because you get to see all the enemy units in a system, even those on the other side, allowing you to make a quick and accurate determination of relative strength. In Ashes fog of war obscures nearby enemy units, so you cannot get that accurate view until all units are visible, and by then you are already engaging.

Also in Sins, you do not need to click on individual blobs to see what units are inside as you get to see all the units in a sector. What you are describing seems to be click-intensive as clicking a blob gives you no indication of what you (or the enemy) have in other nearby blobs. I just don't think your proposed method, as I understand it, gives enough information to allow you to make good tactical decisions e.g. retreat, reinforce, etc.

Yes eviator, i took some of my ideas from Sins of course but, not the same way of Sins.

Sins and Ashes both of them use fog of war but in a different way, because of the Fog of war you cannot see what its coming, maybe if you build a radar.

Remember that the color Glow only work when your zoomed out. so when zoomed out you will see your blobs right? but not the enemy blobs because of fog of war, and that how it should be, that why you need to build Radars and have Scout Units to know where you enemy is.

When Zoomed out in the screen you don't see anything just your grouped units glowing in the ground and the info of those units on the left side.

But when you see the enemy meta units somewhere in the map using scouts or a radar then you go ahead and click on that enemy meta unit to see what kind of units it has in it, and that info will show in the left side of the screen till it disappear from the map because of fog of war or you destroy it.

ASADDF thanks for helping me understand. So the picture you have in reply #19, does the left side info include all units visible on the screen? Or just the units in whatever blob you click? Or the blobs you do a click-drag select? Asked another way, what do you see is the optimal left side unit list in a variety of zoom-out and unit grouping situations?

Ok lets say you zoom all the way out on the map, when you do that, you will see 12  enemy meta units red Blobs and 15 friendly meta units blue blobs. That's a total of 27 meta units Blobs on screen, if you think about it it will be crazy to see all 27 Blobs unit info on screen at the same time, you may get lost with all the info that each meta unit blob will give you, so my personal opinion is to click on each meta unit Blobs to see the info of it or maybe a better option y to move the mouse over that meta unit for it to show you the info without clicking, it may save some APM

1. so first idea is to click on each Meta Unit to see its info
2. or second idea is to just move the mouse over that Meta unit to get its info without clicking, at may be faster and use less APM

all that its because it will be better to keep the whole battlefield clean without all the units info on screen at the same time. And only show you what you really want to see depending on the Situation.

Here is my latest Example of units glowing at a higher zoom

Without Glow:                                                                                                                            With Glow:                

 Click on view image to see it bigger

Hope you will like it.

you should give unittypes in the zoomed in level unique icons...e.g. a circle for tanks, triangle for rocket launcher etc...

if you zoom out further and there is a clumb of same unit type just keep one circle instead of dozens but put a unitstack next to it.

let people combine those units types to a fleet and just show the unit composition and strength.

like for example in red dragon: http://grogheads.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AirLand-Battle-AAR-Image-4.jpg

but more futuristic: just make the symbols easy to read...and look cool, like a HUD display icon.

Very interesting.  Over the course of the beta, we will probably try a few different things before we nail down it.

Right now, the plan is to let the player hit the space-bar and show a full situation map so that players can easily keep track of what's happening and decide which areas require their personal attention.

Wanted to add on here that the game Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of influence uses a "block" mechanic that I once suggested  here.  When you zoomed out far enough, your units (which in this game consisted of several hundred to several thousands men), became blocks as would be shown on a military map.  Works nicely because the game won't tell you what kind of enemy you are facing unless you have direct intel, so if you have no intel, you just see enemy blocks.  

Just wanted to give you the game name so that you could look into it yourself and see what I mean.  And that it works very well!

Just a suggestion mate