Yeah that's why I'm waiting for the tutorials. I'm hoping they will help me make sense of what I should be paying attention to, at the start.
Makes sense. Although to be honest, I'm kind of nervous about the tutorials since it's a lot to potentially convey. I'm better in a written format, hence the For Returning Players section, but I can't lean on that alone. If you and other folks who are having trouble feeling lost are able to give me some pointers as I get further with the tutorials, that would be super duper helpful.
The main reason there is that I'm too close to it. I can either explain the whole idea to you in detail, which is way too much detail and likely to be unclear from simply from being overwhelming. Or I explain it at too high of a level, accidentally making assumptions that you'll connect certain dots but not everybody will. Which isn't an insult, but rather is a matter of we all bring assumptions with us to any new game, and it's hard for me to distance myself enough to see what I'm not seeing there, for instance. For example, coming off AIWC is actually probably one of the
hardest ways to approach this game, because you think you know how things "should" work, but a lot is different. But coming off of some other game series would give an entirely different set of assumptions that I have to account for, and that gets overwhelming for me fast when trying to be brief and find the common things that most people need to be told in less text than I just wrote here.
Honestly for me the problem isn't the LACK of ship models, it's that the ship models and the icons interfere with one another for attention. With fleetballs in AIWC you knew that 1 object = 1 ship, and at some zoom levels that object was a sprite and at others it was an icon. In AIW2, 2 objects = 1 ship, always. I could turn off icons, but at least right now and from what I've seen of the art style likely also in the future the ship models aren't sufficiently distinctive to immediately identify what they are. I could turn off ship models, but that undermines a good chunk of the visual consistency of the game.
Bear in mind we're out of artists, it's just me. There is more art I can do here, but there's a limited amount. And the fact that we have a million bajillion variants of ships means that even having a lot of semi-unique icons doesn't work the best.
I was really tempted to drop down to a much smaller number of types of icons, particularly for smaller ship types, like just having "small fast strikecraft" and "small slow strikecraft" and "medium strikecraft" or something. Something where there's like 10 icons and no flair for all of the main strikecraft and frigates, and then still having unique icons for the capturables and whatnot.
I'm not sure about that approach, though. It comes with its own cons.
It's an issue I identified back in October here:
https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/initial-feedback-on-the-graphics-details-and-style/
At the time I was bouncing off the visual style but my comments downstream about the icon clutter are essentially the same ones I'm making now. The switch to fleet-based gameplay was a MASSIVE change that wiped out a whole lot of my concerns in that thread. In fact, the fleet solution is essentially what I thought would be the best way forward graphically. The problem is that the visuals didn't really change to fit the new gameplay model. Everything still clumps (and clumps double in AIW2) on the screen, making discernment difficult.
Glad that you're enjoying the new fleets concept, even if there are other problems that remain. In terms of the ability to still see all the ships individually and control them, I think that's pretty key to this keeping on "feeling like AI War," which is a nebulous concept in general. And AIWC tended to feel cluttered from the sheer amount of stuff. Also pretty much the only valid way to strategically play it was from way zoomed out, straight top down, icons mode. So that was... inherently limiting. This sequel makes zooming in more valid to do, and you get something a bit more cinematic, but it comes at the cost of doubling all the things.
The screen in front of me at the start of the game doesn't give me the information I need to know in order to determine which things to click.
That can be solved by tutorials, but it shouldn't have to be. What I see on the screen the moment my game starts should be sufficiently clear for me to be able to point to each thing and say, "I think I know what that does when I touch it."
Yeah, I wish for that also, but I'm not really sure if it's possible. By keeping all of the strikecraft icons to being really small and unobtrusive, and then focusing on the icons for the main unique ships and structures, that might help. But I don't know that there's an easy solution given that then those become even harder to manage... though certainly you could stick to mainly fleet designs as your way of managing them.
I'll go back to the comparison I made back in that other thread. Sins of a Solar Empire gets the relationship between models and icons pretty much right:
https://www.gry-online.pl/galeria/html/pliki/209713267.jpg
It's uncluttered, even though each model has an icon and vice versa. Compare that to a selected fleet in AIW2:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1829888544
Not really being a Sins player, I will note that I can't really grasp what is the significance of any ship there either, but I can tell which icon goes with which ship.
One choice that they clearly made, which I wrestled with, is that all icons are on top of all ships. Right now we have ships mixed in with icons, if that makes sense. A ship can be closer to the camera than some other ship's icon, and thus partially or fully occlude the icon of the other ship. That gives a sense of depth to our scenes that is lacking in the Sins scene. I think Sins is not even shrinking the size of the icons based on how far the ships are from the camera, which again has pros and cons.
The icons are too far away vertically from the models, such that the only way to be sure you're looking at the right ones is to play the game fully top-down. Look at where the cap ship's icon is - it's a fully 20% of the total screen distance away from the model.
The reason for this, for good or for ill, is because of the thing I just mentioned about ships and icons being in the same physical space. Ships would sometimes occlude their own icons, or otherwise get in the way of other ships' icons (when small ships are near a giant one), which is because the icons aren't drawn in a layer over everything else.
Drawing the icons in a layer over everything else would be easy, and is how the game originally worked. But it can be... well, very jarring. Particularly in very side-on views.
Having icons disappear when you get to a certain shallow pitch angle or zoomed in a certain amount would solve the problem to some extent, and moving the icons down to literally the position of the ships would make sense and be easy (all icons are on top of all ships at all times and thus no bad clipping ever happens), and would be more like AIWC. But it would also take away your ability to see things like health for the ships and thus your ability to on-screen manage much -- again, more or less like the same problem AIWC had.
If the sidebar were more useful, showing ships in groups and with health percentages kind of like the selected window does, then that might not matter anymore and the main view can just be either cinematic or icons depending on your zoom level. I've considered this, and it might feel a lot more natural, but it's a kind of big change. It's where I've been leaning lately.
Also, the selection rings around each squad are bright and too dominant. Those are the two most jarring things I've noticed and that's within 30 seconds of opening a game. In the middle of a combat I imagine the visuals get even more confusing.
The selection rings thing is definitely easy to tone down, although I've been trying to think if there's a way to make them also portray more info (like health in a ring or something, but the math on that gets tricky and it could quickly look like a circus.
