Oftentimes, when I'm leading a squad, I find it hard to indicate the position of opfor using LEFT RIGHT FORWARD BEHIND or OVER THE HILL or OVER THERE. Cardinal directions? Who's damned to look at the minimap at their tiny arrow? Infantry need a universally relative means of communicating close locations of stuff. On the bottom of the screen between health/stamina and ammo, the HUD should display the player's direction. A dynamic compass. I recommend a bar-type system that turns when the player turns. One system involves directions being relative all over the map with cardinal directions. For example, they would see: W...NW...N...NE...E N - player directon W - player left E - player right As they turn, the bar shifts. When the player turns to look at NE, they see: NW...N...NE...E...SE NE - player direction NW - player left SE - player right Another system involves squads and the squad leader. Here, we use clock times to indicate direction. One method is imposing the squad leader's direction as 12 o'clock for all members. Looking in the squad leader's direction shows 9...10...11...12...1...2...3 Alternatively 9......12......3 12 - direction 9 - left 3 - right Facing the squad leader's left, the player sees 6......9......12 Because the squad leader may turn a lot and isn't too consistent, another method is designating the direction of the squad leader relative to his move order as 12 o'clock until he reassigns it. This direction would remain when the commander gives attack or move orders. This is useful because it is relative and relevant to the player's current situation. Additionally, basing it on the squad leader forces squads to stick together to be effective in calling out threats.
I wouldn't mind having this. Im shouting stuff all the time too and telling my squad of soldiers to watch out for a battalion of APC's that are coming around the hill from the south would be damn hilarious as I watch them all do circles trying to figure out where south is IF it was soo damn sad to watch us all get mowed down like the blades of grass we are.
Have you tried using North, South, West, East and so on directions based on minimap? I do that all the time and when it comes down to spotting targets or giving move orders I'll, as squad leader, give a move order there or just spot the target and tell SHOOT and that's it. And it's actually quite surprising that when you are a squad leader and your squad gets filled with almost first time noobs, they will follow you very closely when you spam move orders and attack this target/location commands. Otherwise the squad will just spread out like an explosion.
i think most comments here are pretty ignorant. if you want to have teamwork, you might as well provide more then enough tools to do it, so that every squad leader can use the ones he likes a compass isn't hard, to code, and looks pretty cool even if it does turn out useless
I would like to see a compass in the game. It wouldn't take much and make things a lot easier. Myself, I hardly ever use grid references, but I always use cardinal directions. "Empires is not for people who can't find the direction of North." Is an utterly ridiculous statement imo.
You already have a compass, your arrow on the minimap, combine that with the most rudimentary sense of direction and navigation occurs. If you can't remember which way is up on the minimap when there's an arrow telling you which way you're pointing and you can see all the terrain around you then I don't think you're going to be able to do very much of anything in any game, and no amount of compasses will help you. So it's a fairly accurate statement to be honest.
As long as it doesn't clutter up my Hud I wouldn't have objections to this. You can't say that it has any detrimental effects, and anything to help with order giving isn't to be sneered at.
Empires already has too much HUD, adding more HUD is going to make it more confusing and reduce the space available for the game to occur in. That's a detrimental effect.
I like the idea a lot. Reminds a bit of Crysis (Looks like: http://img39.picoodle.com/img/img39/6/10/27/f_Crysislowm_ba44e2c.jpg) Also there is space left in lower mid, GUI need an overhaul anyway (its..bad.)
Chris you seem damn determined against this. I like it, its simple and means I dont have to sift through the minimap for my arrow. It would also help the annoyance of spawning backwards in a rax (yes) and having to run around it. Also, there are people who ask which way west is, and sometimes its easy to get mixed up when rotating comm view, etc.
I sometimes get north and south mixed up on perfectly symmetrical maps (money) for about one second when I rotate the comm view, but other than that I simple do not see the need for a compass, it doesn't matter which end of the rax you go out of, you're not going to die from walking out the other exit. In order to make it more easily visible than the already quite obvious minimap icon, you're going to have to make it big, and that means it's cluttering up the already messy hud, and I don't want more hud clutter, especially useless hud clutter which serves no purpose.
Why does it have to be big??! Just a small little thing above the health would work fine, you only need to see it when you're looking at it.
plus having a notch on it to show the squad leader could be one more 'soft' way of encouraging squad cohesion (in addition to squad move/attack orders being separate from com ones, but that is a new topic).
I guess a general compass is good. I always tell people that I need men in the West and they end up going East. Learn2Geography.
Because you already have something you can only see when looking at it, the arrow on the minimap, if people can't see that they aren't going to see a piddly little compass.
Prefer the clock direction compass because it would orient squad members to where they should be looking. Additionally, one can use simple left/9 or right/3 on the fly instead of contextually insensitive northwest, north, south, east, etc.
