Readability and Color Maps.

[CMDR Duck]

I've been playing AI War since 1.03 and am amazed at the progress this game has made. After playing version 3 with the add on I'm finding myself really missing the simplicity of the earlier graphics. I'm torn, the new artist is amazingly talented but with all the players using the same ships and all the ships being multicolored it's getting harder and harder to tell whats going on when zoomed in.

Specifically, the Level 3 cruiser has a large red center section that is the same size as the teams color badge. And the zenith ships are all different colors. Fighters are too small to really make out at my resolution. Many close battles are fought around the command stations, the station icons are so HUGE on the tactical display that often the only way to get a gauge on what is going on is to zoom way in and pause the game.

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a batch image editor to remove the colors from the ship icons?

[Zitrax]

I am new to this game and really like it, but I agree that it's very hard to see the which player the ships belong to when zoomed in. I feel I keep zooming in and out more than would have been necessary if the difference were easier to make out.

[Jesterman]

i play the game usually 80% of the time zoomed out a fair way. everything goes into that icon mode and is super easy to see and work with. Otherwise, for me to get the actual graphics, i have to zoom in so far i cant see whats going on. It cant be that my resolution is maxed out no?
Either way, its easier to be tactical at a further zoom in my book.

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah, the reason is that the ships have brightness and saturation all over the place, not really matching with each other and some have colors of their own... Someone could open them in photoshop and just hit shift+u , shift+l on all of em ;p

Gets rid of colors

[Echo35]

i play the game usually 80% of the time zoomed out a fair way. everything goes into that icon mode and is super easy to see and work with. Otherwise, for me to get the actual graphics, i have to zoom in so far i cant see whats going on. It cant be that my resolution is maxed out no?
Either way, its easier to be tactical at a further zoom in my book.

Ditto. This happens to be the case with a lot of games I play. I usually leave Homeworld 2 out in sensor mode (Though that's largely due to the absolutely horrid camera) and large scale games like SupCom usually stay zoomed out. I've been debating creating something along the lines of the NTDS icons for AI War ships, but there's so many different kinds of ships, I figured it would either be extremely hard or useless.

[Lancefighter]

I usually find myself right at the boundary between 'ship mode' and 'icon mode'..

Alternatively, I just zoom all the way out and hold down z the entire time while ordering stuff around