GUI Focus Group: Right-Hand Sidebar

[Stoh]

One problem I always had in AIW1 is how to figure where stuff is.
Like you have huge blobs at several places on the map, and thing you have to target first, class of ships that you have to counter with other class of ship... and sometimes it's very tedious to know where you have to send which ship.

I'm talking about this kind of situation : https://youtu.be/F4x40z78Ofw?t=13m30s

As the side-bar is focused on having a good summary of the situation, I think it would both fits its role and be a great asset to be able to strongly highlight every ship/structure whose icon you're currently hovering on the side-bar. It's already what the game does in the video, but it really should be more visible. I mean there should be some way to quickly visualize the whole situation because that's the kind of the decisions you need to do all the time (unless you revert to "let's just bring more units because I have no idea how to control them efficiently").

I hope I'm not too much out of topic !

[Dune]

be a great asset to be able to strongly highlight every ship/structure whose icon you're currently hovering on the side-bar. It's already what the game does in the video, but it really should be more visible.

That's an interesting idea.  We will add it to the mix of ideas being worked on.  Thanks!

[etheric42]

Just throwing this out there, but what if it also highlighted all opposing ships it was strong against in green and all opposing ships it was weak against in red (both on the map and in the sidebar) when you hovered over it?  Would that be too much noise or useful info?  (Don't know how feasible it is, but if people like the idea, I can ask.)

[Dune]

Would that be too much noise or useful info?

I think that could be very useful once people got used to it.

[Elda King]

I think highlighting enemy ships on the map based on their strength/weakness to your selected ship would be really useful for finding targets or avoiding enemies. It could have the potential drawback of inducing players to focus too much on micromanaging weapon and armor types, I'm not sure how it would work out. Maybe it should be available but disabled by default, or only show when you press a hotkey (like showing the range of ships in original AI War).

Highlighting on the sidebar I'm not very sure about. I don't think it is of any use at all without map highlighting, but if you have it on the map might as well have it in the sidebar (to make it easy to find the ships there and read the tooltip if you want).

I see two ways it could work though: when you select a ship and when you mouse over the ship type or the control group in the sidebar. Doing it for selected ships would have the advantages that you don't have to keep your mouse anywhere and you don't need to select the ship afterwards (in case you don't want all ships of that type)... however it could get confusing when you have multiple ship types selected. The second option would make it harder to see tooltips for the highlighted types (as you are mousing over one already), but makes more sense as the information is about a ship type and not specific ships/groups and makes it easier to see information about the strengths/weaknesses of AI ships.