Number of Selected Units Should Show

[zombie]

I noticed when I select units, it does not show the number of them that are selected. I think it would make organization better if that feature was implemented in the game. Exactly like AoE 3 does.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Agreed. One icon for each type of unit, plus a white number over it.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Having actually implemented it both ways and played multiplayer both ways, I definitely prefer the current behavior. In the AoE3 style GUI, units cannot be removed from selections, and no information about individual units health is available either. I like this AoK style better personally.

I had the AoE3 style groups implemented and kept it that way for a month or so, before making it work this way recently. The code is already in SVN under a previous revision. I found it to be counter-intuitive. It's open source though so you can make it work anyway you wish. I am going to leave it as is for now, but I'm open to more discussion. There may very well be better ways than either method, or maybe there are other reasons and advantages to grouped units that haven't been considered.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I really have no strong feeling.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I just want something that works well; I'm very open to other designs. Some things I did like about groups were that they provided a quick unit count which was useful. Also, they allowed easy switching between unit types in the GUI. This was useful for switching to a unit that could build buildings when the primary (first) selected unit could not build buildings. There was the issue of keeping track of different ranks of a type, but with some effort, I think that could be resolved.

I think the main reason I feel we need to keep the selection GUI the way it is for now, is that it provides the only way to view the health of the selected units all at once - this is important in battle to get a feel for how the battle is going. You don't want all of your units to die all of a sudden without any warning. It gives you time to retreat if necessary.

However, that may not be an issue once the floating health bars are reimplemented. When that happens, we might find that grouped units work well and switch it back to that.

[Ykkrosh]

Maybe the unit icons could be sorted by their type, so all the units of type X are next to each other followed by all of Y etc? That might make it easier to visually determine the set of units you've selected - currently it seems random (or probably based on entity ID) and you have to search through every single icon to count how many there are of a given type.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Currently, it's based on the order that they are selected, which in a box selection doesn't make a lot of sense. They could be sorted and have builder units placed at the front the make it easier to build things.

[chess007_phoenix_clan]

I prefer the way it is now. However, why not make it a choice in the options screen? Of course one of the options would be default, but it could easily be changed in the options screen.

[Ykkrosh]

Options mean twice as much to design and implement and test and maintain and understand, so there's a fairly significant long-term cost, and they should only be added if they're going to be sufficiently valuable. (I have no idea if this is one of the cases where the value outweighs the cost, but I'd probably prefer to err on the side of simplicity.)

[Alpha of the Eagles]

Concerning floating health bars, would it be possible to implent such healt bars as in Settlers 3/4 (just a small square which changes from green to red as health diminishes) instead of a rectangular bar, which I think looks awful.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Many things are possible. I don't think we had any other designs except the standard bar, so if you have suggestions for something different, we would be interested. I'm not familiar with settlers - can you elaborate and maybe provide a screenshot?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Yeah, a screenshot would help greatly.

[Shield Bearer]

I like the way groups work. each icon shows the average health of all the units in the group. And when the floating health bars are implemented it won't be a problem. At least it wasn't for me in AOE3.

Well the square thing from settlers would be a bit confusing coz u have to look at the color and all. A circle around the base of a unit showing its health would be cool...something like this

[WhiteTreePaladin]

I thought about that circle idea, but that's a good bit of work for something that is not always easy to see if the units happen to be close together. When we get some sort of floating health bars (or whatever shape), I'll revisit the grouped units in the GUI.

[Jeru]

That circle looks like a plasmid