Unit Selection Area UI

[WhiteTreePaladin]

We are interested in seeing what some players prefer. If you have specific reasons, please post why you like it one way or the other.

Some examples:

Age of Empires 2, The Age of Kings: the main icon was hidden when more than one item was selected.

Age of Empires 3: the main icon was visible even when multiple items were selected.

[frapell]

can you provide further description on what you mean by "main icon" ?

[Titus Ultor]

_

Edited November 17, 2013 by Titus Ultor

[frapell]

Are those the *only* options ? i would prefer the AoE 3 version, but without the large box...

Actually i like a lot how it is done right now, with the small boxes in the upper section of the screen, just below the resources...

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Titus Ultor is correct.

Feel free to suggest other options also.

[sbabbi]

Hi,

imho in aoe3 was useful to have the main icon visible in the case you have some artillery units in your selection. In 99% of the cases you really don't care (can't care) about the HP of every soldier in your selection, but it's very important to have good visibility on the artillery HP. I think that this was the main reason which lead the developers to choose for that UI. I really appreciated that feature in aoe3, but i don't know if artillery (catapults?) will be so fundamental in 0ad (never played a real game actually).

[Mythos_Ruler]

I never found it useful because invariably I'd rather have some other unit as the "main" unit.

[omicron1]

I'd suggest an "overview" icon. EG, rather than just having a set of icons for each unit, utilize a larger icon that contains a representative icon: say, if you have only/mostly horse units, a picture of mixed cavalry shows up. This allows at-a-glance identification of a group or hotkeyed-group's intended purpose - much as the hotkey-group banners in Age of Empires 3 did.

The health bar on this icon should be an average of all the selected units' health. This is important - it provides visual information on the overall state of the entire selected force even if a large number are selected. Possibly additional information (average attack power? Average/min/max range?) could be displayed in this space as well.

[comp3820]

I like the idea of knowing how many of each unit I have. Maybe the UI could show a medium size icon for each type (infantry, cavalry, siege) or each unit (different types of infantry, cavalry or siege equipment).

I like omicron's idea of showing additional information. Maybe you could show total attacking power (add up all attack) or attacking power vs types of units (780 attack if against horses, 500 attack if against infantry). Maybe that's unusual, but it might be a good benchmark to determine quickly where your troop's talents are.

Continuing on that thought, maybe a little graphic could show the same thing, but make it easier and quicker to see.