Developer feedback requested: Ship Icons.

[Wanderer]

*waves* Hi guys.

On the subject of 'on screen icons', I would fall into the more recent posts lines of thinking, but possible for different reasons.

Assuming Gameplay hasn't completely and utterly changed from AIW1, it's fleetballing.  Yes, I understand it's more squadron based now instead of a few hundred little units, but it's still going to be a fleetball due to user levels of information maintenance.  I never, ever, really cared about what a few dozen tiny ships in a fleetball did until the aftermath for logistics of rebuilds.  Oh, their health was useful to know at a glance which can be handled with a simple bar over their heads, but other than that it was more important to have my micro figured out... bombers on 2, fighters on 3, Maws/Blade Spawners on 4, etc.

Because of this, any high-cap ship shouldn't really ever have an on-screen icon in my mind besides a healthbar..  Why?  I'm selecting them en-masse or there's few enough of everything that I'm going to be right up on the action anyway.  The sidebar should tell me what I need to know about my hotkey so I can *see*.  There ARE ships I want at-a-glance information on while I'm controlling *another* unit however.  That's the key to on-screen icons for me.  What do I need to know while I'm working with another unit in micro.  Keep in mind, even that was a rare concern, as fleet support positioning usually was more important than unique maneuvers.  Keeping the Bombers from getting swarmed by fighters required your missile frigates to screen, etc.

So, even then, they're clustered groups, but there are a few exceptions.  Let's take a typical AIW setup: Cloaked starship + Raid Starships, working around towards the "back" of a planet for the ion guns/mass drivers while a Bomber team works on a shield up near the "front" because you're pressed for time.  What do I need to know?

I need to know if A) The cloak has broken.  B) Roughly how many bombers are left while working with the Raids.

That's it.  Everything else I can get with an inspection and not be overwhelmed on screen.  Simple on screen 'mass size' should tell me B.  A can be done with say the pretty purple whisker blinking and fading with a small blip of some kind (since my eyes are busy I need to know I need to look).

Add to that you guys are putting a LOT of work into making the models pretty (Yay!).  If all I will typically see is an icon while I'm zoomed out, that seems superfluous.  They could be Mario SNES characters underneath the icons for most tactical control views without it making a difference.  The really pretty icons should be saved for superweapons.  Equivalent of Spire and golem level ships.  These are things you want CONSTANT status updates on, because they're flagships.  If you have a mass of flagships, well, tough, live with it, you're probably at the point where you're considering them like fleetships at that point anyway (*Ahem*, 8 homeworld FS games).  They should also be slightly off to the side because I want to SEE the pretty ship.

Due to this personal preference, icons should be saved for important things.  I haven't played AIW2, so bear with me, but here's some 'at a glance' icons I would have LOVED to see in AIW1.  EMP, Gate, Suicide, Gravity, and Tachyon Guardians having some kind of on screen icon showing me they were hiding in a pile while zoomed out.  Raid Engines, Neinzul Spawners, and other extreme bases being incredibly obvious compared to their counterparts. 
A Carrier's existence (which was mostly dealt with because they were displayed on top of the visual stack) should never get hidden beneath a fleetball on spawn up, so if flagships aren't riding 'on top' of the visual pile, they should get some kind of indicator too... perhaps a small line leading to an external icon from the blob so you can target it without having to fish around through visual clutter.

You'll notice all my on-screen concerns are about the enemy.  The sidebar should give me plenty of information about my friendlies, and I already mentally know where, and what, they are in general.  A quick glance should make sure I hit 2 for my raids instead of 3 for my bombers, a quick glance at the screen will give me a very broad sense of their life expectancy (still cloaked, covered with shields, and hit points), and if I need to drill into the information, I click on the icons on the sidebar and drill into a particular ship or stack.

AIW1 had way too many different ships to try to care about who was where without unique hot-key controls.  There was no way I could care about screen icons to specifically select units because trying to grab them out of a fleetball was a pointless exercise except for unique large ships.  It was always 'select everything' and then CTRL-CLICK the pieces I wanted, set group, and move them.  Even starships in the fleetball became much more sane to grab this way. 

What the icons did do was allow me to play at extremely high zoomed levels without losing the physical models completely.  Trying to see a bomber flight without any icons at all while fully zoomed out would have been a disaster of trying to scrape the screen looking for the gnats.  The Homeworld series suffered from this concern too, and they were a full 3D pathing game.  Heck, finding your frigates could be a nightmare, nevermind the fighter/corvette squadrons, but this was solved with a simple command.  Ctrl-A, select all ships (I think that was the keypress, anyway, been ages).  Oh, look, health bars over here... ah, THERE they are!  Drag select, re-hot-key, annnnd, done.  Off you go.  With the sidebar, even easier.  Ctrl-A, find Fighters, click fighter icon(s), hot key, annnnd, done.  So, if we have an easy way to find our ships, the icons are less important than keeping the screen clear of superfluous information so we can see the important stuff.

[Tridus]

One thing that I think no one has mentioned yet, the fancier icons above would be great for big things like starships, guardians, structures, etc at full zoom out. That would make them really easy to pick out at a glance, something that's critical to evaluating a situation and determining what needs to die (or what you need to pull out fast). It also is visually pleasing, and I know I at least enjoy watching my bigger ships go to work.

As for the fleet ships, will the ships still be rendered at the minimum level of detail? Because if that's the case, then that alone lets you get a sense of where your ships are, and then I'm inclined to agree with some of the above that summary icons for the each type of ship as a whole in the fleet would be most useful and functional. Basically it would be like having the sidebar information in the midst of your combat. You could select all of the mkII fighters in the area and have the peel of to get the enemy bombers, and at the same time if you want or need more individual control, you are going to need a control group, as finding those ships in combat will be difficult at best.

To be sure information would be lost in that approach, but you probably still wouldn't see that one fighter off on its own with the missile frigates. And if the icons only summarized ships within some radius, you would see separate groups fairly easily. Finally, if might be a worthwhile option to have this versus every ship has a icon be some sort of setting/hotkey toggle that can be done at will and as needed.

I tend to agree with this. Icons with more info are awesome for Golems and other really big things.  For a squad of fighters... eh? If there's 200 fighters there, I don't need 200 icons showing me the same thing (or even 50, for the squads). If you combine them into a couple of them for all the fighters that are doing the same thing, then it reduces the clutter and it's more useful information.

[Aotrs Commander]

Mmm. Reading through this, I have to concur with the recent posts - do we really need (detailed) icons for the majority of units at all? One of the first questions I asked on the kickstarter was how AI War 2 was going to handle the icons, sine my (thusfar) only game was spoent entirely zoomed out ao i never ever SAW the starship models EXCEPT as Icons... And that seems such a waste for the fancy new graphics.

The more I think about it, the more I think some sort of sidebar of info screen for selected units would be a better way of displaying detailed information; aside fom a health bar, an icon for every ship is liable to get in the way if we have thousands of ships.

I apprecuate that the icon is a sort of centre-point marker from the squad (as I understand it, where the "real" mechanics are calculated from with the graphical layer being mostly pretty onto of that), so I guess we sort of have to have something like that, but it probably ought to be as relatively unobstrusive as possible; as has been said, maybe all we need for that is the hit points and maybe the mark.



I will, just for the record, note that I had suggested that (prior to learning that squads were planned) one thought might be to have scaled the actual ship models on zoom function (with the "centre point" being the game-mechanic-important bit, and the ship being aethsetic).

I suggested this, as I had recent cause to attempt to imagine how one would display this information on a real starship, and concluded that one might have all the vessels shown as the real-time images, grossly oversized for human vision - assuming that the vessels would actrually be "real" space distances apart (i.e. thousands of kilometres), rather than "Hollywood" cinematic liscense. But with the ships being several thousand kilometres apart, the display could scale up the real-time images safely relative to the "ground scale" as it were - because with the distances, vessels coming close to have their blown-up images intersect would be extremely rare. One would then append the the relevant data to the real0time images approproiately.

Which would, you see, then give the same sort of EFFECT as one might get looking at a computer game (or a tabletop starship wargame!)

It is probably not a way you could easily handle it in a computer game, but it is an interesting line of thinking, is it not?

[Toranth]

Hey, Wanderer's back!  Good to see you here again.

For the most part, I agree with what Wanderer said, but I'll bring up again what I mentioned earlier - There MUST be some easy way to pick out important and high-impact units from the fleetmass. 
On my side, I want the status of the Ark to stand out, and maybe some other unique or important units (Flagships?), too.
On the enemy side, I need to be able to identify and locate priority targets and threats.  Right now, Guardians are the end-all and be-all of AI system defense.  Yet finding one to target it can sometimes be very difficult, as it is hidden in the mass of fleetships it launches.

One idea is to allow the use of the sidebar to toggle a "Highlight" option, which would cause that unit type to flash, or have an aura, or be drawn on top of everything, or something else to otherwise make it stand out.

As a less gameplay, but just "fun" standpoint, I LIKE having huge masses of icons moving around - it really gives the impression of massive fleets and huge battles.  Not to mention the satisfaction of watching the AI's fleetmass get wiped away (or the despair of watching yours get killed).

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah Toranth, when a sidebar is in you are still going to have your (toggle) far-zoom blips, wouldn't be visually interpretable without those. You'd have to know what is an enemy and what isn't at the very least.... for this, simple small EASY to read icons are required. And as for sidebar stuff, when a control group (or selection) contains flag ships then these should (with toggle) always display status and position. What you experience as fun wouldn't go away, it'd just not involve icons larger than a few pixels. And they would not tell you anything aside from (GENERAL) type and MK level.

Flag-ships in a control group should imo be the center of the selection icon. If there are 2 or more and they are overlapping then things can get way more confusing though...

I have to admit though that for me, seeing the battle is one of the reasons I play these games. I don't want to see icons, I want to see beautiful streamlined models, explosions, weapon fire and debris. As I said elsewhere, if the combat in this game isn't "WOW" then why am I doing battle 99% of the time in it?? ;P

I am not saying a side-bar would just magically work, sidebars require a lot of information filtering and sorting, context and order. Of fixed visual order and no chaos at all (which means, AI War 1 "sidebar" (more like side-block) should be burned and never reused as an idea... ,p)

Ps.: I wouldn't be against healthbars on selection btw (on damaged ships), but they'd have to be extremely well designed and not clutter the view extremely hard. (Hah, now there is a design challenge)

[keith.lamothe]

In general, this is the conversation we need to be having. There's a reason why a totally redesigned UI was such a big part of the pitch for the sequel. So the point isn't to recreate what AIWC did, but rather learn from it.

It sounds like a good first attempt would be:

1) Proceed with figuring out how to do freefloating-icons-with-info for things that will definitely need it. Start with the Ark, for example, and probably the guardians.

2) Work out a left-side-of-the-screen vertical sidebar showing one section for each control group, one section for "everything of yours not in a control group", and one section for "everything AI"
- so each section would have 1 sidebar-icon for each unique type of ship (so mkI and mkII fighters would be combined into one icon, while bombers would be a separate one)
- each sidebar-icon would have some set of info, as worked out in detail later. That would be a good place for the FRD/etc indicators, I think, rather than trying to show them "on the map"
- each siderbar-icon would be robustly interactable:
-- mouseover to get a tooltip AND get some kind of highlight of the units themselves "on the map"
-- left click to select, if friendly, with support for shift (additive) and alt (subtractive)
-- right click to give an order to attack, if hostile, or "move to" if friendly (for instance "everybody get back to the Ark")
-- etc, ideas welcome

3) Still have _some_ kind of on-the-map icon for stuff that is so small that it's not reliably visible at the current zoom level, so that you can tell relative positions and densities (and changes in densities, so you can see when a formation is getting "thinned out" by casualties) at a glance. But this would be a _small_ dead-simple non-perspective silhouette of the ship type done in the team color, not trying to communicate any info at all other than:
- what team is it on
- where is it
- what type of ship is it

 
@Wanderer: welcome back The Nightmare Death Machines missed you, but all their cards were returned as undeliverable.

@eRe4s3r: a sidebar mock showing your specific ideas would be very helpful, if you have the time.

[eRe4s3r]

Mhh, this is the best I can manage without making actual graphics for that (which would take a huge amount of time)



Ps.:
Yes, icons should denote MK level, not text anywhere in this sidebar.
HP/Shields on capitals should be either bars or %, but somehow with an icon...
The sidebar is scrollable

Pin -> Pins current planet info to the sidebar, until pin is pressed again on THAT planet.
Planet search (gives us a quick drop-down of all planets where we got stuff)
Condense (Condenses the small icons, default is 1x (1 icon = 1 ship) then 5 -> 10 -> 20 -> 50 -> 100 and however far you gotta push this to maintain readability at 1080p ;p

In this, it's sorted like this
# Planet (everything US)
# Enemy (everything ENEMY)
# Control group
# Selection (I want selection below, but it should be thought about what order to keep)

Anyhow, I didn't spend much time on icons, these are just concept boxes, not icons! The orange thingy changes color depending on order, and blinks when in combat, the blue thing is something only visible when cloaked.

Size is not to scale ;P

Ps.: without text, and example of enemy vs own (really really only conceptual ,p) Sins of Solar Empire did this already, so that is the best conceptual example, but I don't have it installed

[treyra]

-- mouseover to get a tooltip AND get some kind of highlight of the units themselves "on the map"
-- left click to select, if friendly, with support for shift (additive) and alt (subtractive)
-- right click to give an order to attack, if hostile, or "move to" if friendly (for instance "everybody get back to the Ark")

Those in specific seem extremely useful and intuitive to work with.

 

You'll notice all my on-screen concerns are about the enemy.

My thoughts exactly! I think we need to tell at a glance what nasty surprises are coming for us.

Someone mentioned customizing what the UI does and doesn't show, and while that is probably non-trivial, it would probably go a long way to making every player feel comfortable.

Overall Kieth and eRe4s3r's ideas seem very user friendly.

[Wanderer]

Is it possible to put icons "under" larger ships that haven't faded due to zoom yet?  This would be an interesting way to more easily locate guardians, flagships, bases, etc.

Here's what I have in my head, anyways:
You're at max zoom, no icons needed.
You zoom up to just where fighters become gnats, but you can still make out bombers.  Only fighters would get their tiny icons.
Zoom up to Starship/Maw/Blade Spawner size, everything gnat sized is iconed but these aren't.  They stand out because the icons flow 'under' them.
... continue to base only visibility.

@Wanderer: welcome back The Nightmare Death Machines missed you, but all their cards were returned as undeliverable.

Thanks.  I've learned never to leave a forwarding address when nightmare death machines are involved.

Regarding MK on screen.  Do we truly ever care?   Yes, we care that we HAVE the marks, but how often will you seriously care "Okay, Only the MK II bombers!".  I personally almost never have.  I care a lot more about ship type and volume left than I ever will about which MK it is when I'm sending it off to combat or focus-fire.  Sure, when I'm organizing hot-keys and the like, I might get particular organizations going, but not in general combat.

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks very much for putting together the mockup

As far as making a UI that actually accomplishes the goal of genuine usability, we're largely reliant on y'all for ideas, evaluation of ideas, and evaluation of implementations. It's our responsibility, of course, but we can't do it alone.

I should also note that aside from some very basic input handling (raytracing the mouse to figure out what entity/planet you're hovering over, how to handle clicking them, etc) all the UI layout and implementation is handled in xml and external C# code that can be modded or replaced. I don't want folks to fragment into various non-vanilla UIs since that doesn't help the core experience, but the structure will make it easier for the industrious among you to test and share your ideas in a concrete form.

[Toranth]

Regarding MK on screen.  Do we truly ever care?   Yes, we care that we HAVE the marks, but how often will you seriously care "Okay, Only the MK II bombers!".  I personally almost never have.  I care a lot more about ship type and volume left than I ever will about which MK it is when I'm sending it off to combat or focus-fire.  Sure, when I'm organizing hot-keys and the like, I might get particular organizations going, but not in general combat.

In AIW Classic, in close battles, there are reasons to care.  Of course, most of the time, everything on a planet is the same Mark, so it doesn't matter much... but when defending, especially against CPAs, it matters.  Targeting the right Mark of starship can be important, as can being able to identify Threat strength quickly.  You can get the same information through mouse-over, but that's time consuming and inconvenient.

[eRe4s3r]

I also care about MK levels btw far bigger problem is what happens when you have 50 capital ships.. because I do not want 50 capital ship icons in the sidebar (neither mine nor the enemies) and with 8 players this could easily happen in the "allied" field of the sidebar, so this needs to be truncated somehow, with those ships in combat and lowest HP getting pushed to the front (with a [ + ] and a [ - ] button to open the whole "list" and close it so it doesn't make side-bar entirely unusable in battle, imo you could fit 3 or 4 cap ship icons next to each other (I didn't do this in my mockup because I was lazy and didn't want to think about HP, Status, Cloak and Shield display too much ,p, but in theory 4 next to each other should fit) And x should be the limit for the planetary display (x being a custom thing we can set, but I think 8 is optimal) Seeing more than 8 capital ships in teh sidebar (for each category, ie. per control group) would be sensory overload, and just seeing the "worst" damaged capital ship first in the list for example, might be really useful.

Generally I also think all tabs in the sidebar should be minimizable. And this I end with a question to people who played the Alpha, do you think you could get "around" seeing how a battle goes by seeing your fleet icons in a sidebar turn grey as (whatever condense value you set) ships die? Or would you want actual numbers, and would it be OK if these appear on mouse-over the side-bar relevant icon / ship type?

What else do you want to do with a sidebar that could (in theory) give you a lot more information on mouse over. Do you want a mouse-over to mark the ships that a part of a "condensed" icon on the screen? Do you want to select ships from within the sidebar (and how do you think that could work easily if you want to "open" a condensed icon to get 1 ship and not the condensed icon value (5 or 10 or whatever)??

Cloaked and whether engaged should be part of the icons in the sidebar? Is that even needed?

Also I totally forgot to say this, PIN adds a new data tab (OWN / ENEMY / ALLIED) for the planet your are currently viewing (only it then pins it), at the TOP of the side-bar, you can have unlimited pinned planets, but I guess this would be really useful to (at a glance) still have an eye how your ARK defenses are doing or something (on an abstracted info level) while doing something else ;P

Ps.: And I just had a great idea, there should also be a "max" condense option, which reduces all matching units (of same MK) to 1 icon in the sidebar, and denotes in text simply the ship count in that group (without mouse hover) this would allow you to quickly see how many of what you have in a quick selection or on the planet, or are facing in an enemy raid ;P (obviously MAX condense disables historic data, unless you lose ALL ships at once of a type and MK level ,p)

PPs.: And when in doubt, always copy Sins of a Solar Empire GUI elements You won't find a better sidebar in a game than that one. And I think it could be improved, but to even get to that level where Sins is at will take huge effort.

[yllamana]

Sorry I'm late.

People have been touching on what I want to say. I think the most important thing here is aggregation. I don't care about individual ships (unless they're really big, and sometimes in AI War 1 even the really big ships can end up in fleets of really big ships). I care about the strength and health of groups of ships. I don't even really care about the mark level in most cases, since a Mk II thing is usually just a Mk I thing with more attack and health.

There was an interesting stat in AI War used for the wave strength display at the top of the UI, something like "strength as measured in Mk 1 fighters." Maybe this selection group has 800 Mk I bombers' worth of attack strength and 500 Mk I bombers' worth of durability left.

I think maybe it is worth thinking about this in the context of the gameplay. As players, we tend to manipulate everything through big blobs of ships, often in control groups. I can tell one bomber to go somewhere, but that isn't really useful in the game mechanics. The lowest level I'll usually get is selecting all of one kind of ship, or splitting off half the ships in the selection. Maybe it'd be worth designing with that in mind? You could design the game around controlling groups of ships rather than starting with individual ships and then adding awkward methods to control groups of them.

When I see an AI attack wave, it's not necessarily all that intelligible with single icons. Okay, often they spread out enough that it sort of is. They don't always, though, and what was one icon arrives at its destination to spread out into an incalculable mass of ships. I don't think you can solve this without providing some form of aggregated display of what the ships grouped up there are. Not just condensing the icons, but telling me what is going on. This is 140 fighters, 200 bombers and 40 frigates. The fleet that just came out of the other wormhole is 353 raiders and a flagship. In AIWC I have to divine that from the sidebar because the masses of icons aren't really useful, but they could be.

The obvious problem is that the minimum unit of organisation in the game is a ship, so you're left trying to figure out how the heck to combine the dozens, hundred or thousands of ships on the screen into meaningful groups to convey to me. Maybe ships aren't a good minimum unit of organisation for the game? Maybe you need to dial back a level to have both the player and the AI operate in fleets, even if those fleets can be split into smaller ones easily.

I don't think you can do meaningful work on the icon style until you've solved this problem.

[treyra]

The obvious problem is that the minimum unit of organisation in the game is a ship, so you're left trying to figure out how the heck to combine the dozens, hundred or thousands of ships on the screen into meaningful groups to convey to me. Maybe ships aren't a good minimum unit of organisation for the game? Maybe you need to dial back a level to have both the player and the AI operate in fleets, even if those fleets can be split into smaller ones easily.

I think the idea behind squads as a design decision was to increase the minimum unit of ships in the game. Honestly, if the squads are at defaults of ~10 ships, then even with a thousand ships on screen, that only comes out to 100 icons. Messy, but a lot more workable.

[Wanderer]

We've gone deeper into UI elements than simply icons here, but I think it's a necessary conversation to have.  So, I'd like to offer an alternate way to think about it. 

This entire discussion actually hinges on a Data Warehouse Design and Reporting concern... Drilldown vs. aggregation data.  What I'd like to do is back this question up slightly (as long as Keith and Chris don't mind) to a more 10,000 foot view of the question of icons in general and where they should go.  Once we have that, the decision of what icons to use would be more intelligible.

The first question you always ask when designing cubes (typical warehouse overlay holding the aggregation vectors) is "Where does the unique data becomes less useful than the aggregate?"  That discussion always opens up the next concern: "What questions are we trying to ask of the data?"  This leads to vociferous debates between different parties in the organization.  ALWAYS.  Kind of like what we're doing now, just not analyzing it quite that way.

There are some general questions here I think we all should think about.  I'll put the questions I'm thinking of first, and then the answers *I* prefer down below with why.  Also, we've been thinking around an all in one UI/Dashboard sidebar.  Would a sidebar with details on my ships, and an InfoBar of some kind down below for enemy/ally ships work better?  Keep in mind while thinking about these questions what you really NEED during a fight that you can't pause, and what you'll want in drilldown/other reports/dashboards for quieter moments that you can spend time investigating.  To keep this from being a text wall, I'll only answer the first two for now as it pertains directly to on screen icons unless this approach gains some traction with everyone.

• What does the screen need to tell me during combat operations about my ships?
• What does the screen need to tell me about my enemies during combat operations?
• What does the Dashboard (aka: sidebar) need to tell me about my force composition?
• What does the Dashboard need to tell me about my allied composition(s)?
• What does the Dashboard need to tell me about enemy composition?
• What information do I desire to have with this accessibility that I DON'T need during critical decision moments that can be moved into other windows, screens, or drilldowns?

My personal answers/preferences:
My Ships during Combat:
During combat, in the combat arena, I need to know:
What I have selected for current orders.
If a friendly status effect I expected a ship to have changes (aka: Cloak -> Uncloaked. Shield fell down.  Etc...)
If an enemy status effect has occurred. (ie: Parasites, Engine Death, etc...)
Where my flagships/specialty ships are (Golems, Cloakers, Transports, Neinzul Factories, etc.)

Finally, general location, density, and health of ship types in a particular blob.  (IE: One blob is all fighters, another is Frigs and Bombers, I need to be able, at a glance, to tell if my second blob is now 95% frigate due to losses, particularly if they started as a 50/50).  I don't care about an individual Bomber in a pack of 200.  I care what their overall health is compared to how they started the fight.  This, I assume, could either be associated by how many are on the hotkey or since the last time it was selected, or just by ship cap.

Anything else to me is too much data to process during anything hectic enough that I'm using the screen *only* for my inputs.  This is my primary argument about "Do you really care about the MK on the icon?"  I'm also leary about the ship type in general, overall, because while yes, the ships perform differently, when I group things, you're either a Bomber, a fighter, a frigate, or a specialty case.  Raptors, Fighters, Warbirds?  Fighters.  Anything that blows up shields and repels fortresses?  Bombers.... etc.  However, before I actually die on that hill, it leads into what I need to know about enemies... and really, how many different screen icon styles do we want to deal with?

Enemy Ships During Combat:
Here I agree more with wanting to see Marks, particularly due to threat, special forces, and released 'drifters' before they join up with the threat fleet.  You could be fighting on a MK II world and suddenly have MKIV 'friends' arrive that you need to know about as you watch them pour through a wormhole.  At the same time, with everyone piled up on each other, it was impossible to figure out a I/II/III mix without going to the sidebar from just screen data.  Something has to end up on the bottom of the stack.

Also, that ship type suddenly becomes more important because while my three fighter types *to my playstyle* are equivalent for my usages, their hull types become tremendously more important when deciding what to counter with... except for one thing... they're almost always going to be mixed, so you'll need a little of everything to deal with it anyway... so, is it a moot point?  I'm not sure.  I just know, from AIW1, a blob of mixed everything was impossible to not just blob vs. blob under most circumstances, so it really didn't matter WHAT was coming in.  The only two questions I really cared about, by the time things were said and done were: Are they bigger than me?  Are they stronger than me?  Do I think I've got a good enough strategy to counter the problem if the answers were Yes.  So, no, I don't really care if the *screen* icon shows me marks.  Or even, really, ship types *per ship*.

So, what do I really care about enemy ships:
Where are they, and what are they (Guardian (& type)/starship (& type) or fleetship (mixed/mono)).
How powerful are they, and how numerous is the blob.
Are they active?
What base are they guarding/surrounding.
Basic current flightpath.
Overall Health.

Because let's be honest, every fleetball in this image circled in blue is nearly useless for knowledge, and I'm SURE we can come up with a better way with how much experience and heartfelt appreciation for this game we all have.  The only information you can get (without pausing and deeply drilling into it) is owner, size, and general health.  I grabbed the first screenshot I found off google with something going on, and there's what I'm pretty sure is an Exo wave coming in and I can only kind of tell which ones are which after I'm staring at it for a minute.

What I'm thinking is each of those blobs could have an indicator bubble of some kind around them, with icons for starships/flagships, and general information in small indicator bar surrounding it somewhere.  I'll try to come up with an actual graphic at some point for what I'm thinking about, but me and art are NOT the best of friends.