Galaxy map info request

[BadgerBadger]

Stuff like the Nanocaust or the Marauders that can try to conquer the galaxy absolutely need to look and behave more like player factions than anything else, in terms of changing planet colours, attacking, etc.... Factions like that  are things the player needs to opt into explicitly too.

[kmunoz]

Stuff like the Nanocaust or the Marauders that can try to conquer the galaxy absolutely need to look and behave more like player factions than anything else, in terms of changing planet colours, attacking, etc.... Factions like that  are things the player needs to opt into explicitly too.

I did not opt in. I destroyed something that the tooltip said might make something weird happen, and then a while later the nanocaust stuff happened, but I haven't done the hack that puts them on my side. So no, I did not "explicitly" opt in to anything, which means that as far as any new player is concerned, the unknown things that are taking over planets and making them blue and causing waves that aren't anywhere near the player's systems are a glitch.

And then there are those times when I'm fighting off a nanocaust attack in one of my systems and from looking at the wave alert I absolutely cannot tell which side is stronger, because they're both almost exactly the same shade of blue, and I don't know which side is on top and which is on bottom. And no, the answer is not to go to that system and check, because the whole point of the wave alert squares at the top is to provide me with meaningful information that I can decide to deal with now or later. If I *have* to deal with it now just to figure out which shade of blue I'm looking at, that's a UX failure.

[BadgerBadger]

Nanocaust behaviour isn't going to change, but we can try to improve the documentation to change player expectations. I wish we had some sort of Journal that I could use for flavour/mechanical descriptions.

[kmunoz]

I don't want nanocaust behavior to change, I want the UX surrounding their appearance in the game to change. And really, it's just the specific default color that's problematic. If I fiddle with a custom game I can make sure none of the colors collide, but a default start makes the human player and the nanocaust faction almost exactly the same shade of blue. In some elements of the UI there is distinction based on the border color (human: white, nanocaust: orange, if the defaults are the same as the defaults for a custom start), but not in enough of the elements.

The easiest way to fix this would be to put border colors on the warp lines (on the galaxy map) and strength counts and/or strength S blazon (on the notification shields). And wherever else it's not immediately apparent whether one is looking at the human player or the nanocaust faction.

I hate sounding grumpy or like a broken record, it's just frustrating how readily apparent these issues are and yet here we are at 0.897 and no one's brought them up, let alone solved them. I can't be the only person who noticed.

[BadgerBadger]

Unfortunately there's no current mechanism to allow in game faction colour changes (which I think would be worth asking for).

In the meantime, it shouldn't be too hard to change the Nanocaust default colour.

Including border color on the warp lines or strength blazons is much harder and would be a Chris thing.

[kasnavada]

I learned something in this thread, that red was for "hostile" and blue for "ally".

That said, I got to echo (and add stuff to) some of kmunoz's remarks.

I think the lines should just reflect the colors of who controls neighbour nodes, and either some icon (like shield in the middle of the lane for ally, sword for enemy) or changes to the line pattern (like broken in the middile, dotted, zig zag, or whatever, and so on) should represent hostility. Or, maybe it would be possible (and not ugly) to make the border of the lane reflect hostility (red sides if hostile, blue sides if ally, or something like this). Or make it pulse from its color to another color to make hostility. It looks like hours of tests to make it clear to the player though. Sorry.

The number of factions in a game can be high rather fast and, to be honest, I'd just like to be able to play as "red". I'd prefer if lane colors just represented faction ownership, and nothing else.

[kmunoz]

I learned something in this thread, that red was for "hostile" and blue for "ally".

That said, I got to echo (and add stuff to) some of kmunoz's remarks.

I think the lines should just reflect the colors of who controls neighbour nodes, and either some icon (like shield in the middle of the lane for ally, sword for enemy) or changes to the line pattern (like broken in the middile, dotted, zig zag, or whatever, and so on) should represent hostility. Or, maybe it would be possible (and not ugly) to make the border of the lane reflect hostility (red sides if hostile, blue sides if ally, or something like this). Or make it pulse from its color to another color to make hostility. It looks like hours of tests to make it clear to the player though. Sorry.

The number of factions in a game can be high rather fast and, to be honest, I'd just like to be able to play as "red". I'd prefer if lane colors just represented faction ownership, and nothing else.

If you set up a custom game you can select all the colors of all the possible factions. I discovered that today.

I agree about the warplines - they can hold a lot more information. The dotted lines showing destroyed warp gates is a great start but there's a lot more that can be shown, as you suggest.

Another possibility would be to have a background shape behind the planets, as for example:

Circle - player
Square - AI
Triangle pointing up - other human factions
Pentagon - some other thing
Triangle pointing down - some other other thing

And so on. The galaxy map can hold a lot more information than it currently does without increasing the noise level very much.