Lots of people call empires an FPS-RTS but the RTS element is mostly removed from the average player. The most the average player sees is buildings on the minimap and attack orders on the map. The player isn't privy to all of the information the commander can see on the fly. Suggestion: Add more RTS-style projections to the on-the-ground player's UI. Rationale: Being privy to what the commander and game-ifying ingame tasks like seeing radii and completion bars and actual percentages engages players more. This would include showing building progress/health bars while looking in the general direction of a building (like seeing player names in the general direction just thank). This would also include the radii of friendly buildings and marked enemy buildings. Seeing those radii would give players perspective into the current field of play and how their actions and assets directly affect the landscape. This would lead with using turrets and cameras more effectively and possibly coordinating better with their teams tldr: add bars when you look at friendly buildings/vehicle/infantry at range with percentages. add projections of the effective radii of turrets and cameras and radars for players on the ground. this would make players more involved in the RTS aspect of empires ------------ bonus UI things to consider: adding a squad number to the simple "A" or "B" or "C" on the minimap. this would let the comm or squad leaders or teammates refer to people by reading the minimap without having to directly observe names. you can read to know WHICH member of Charlie squad is on the defensive wall formation and which is breaching the barracks just by adding an identifier. you know where specific players are in the map. member 2 of charlie squad, or CHARLIE-2, invincible soldier harryhoot1 is overlooking your position from the cliff ramp. etc, etc. or CHARLIE-5 is a deadbeat located in SW totally alien to the rest of charlie squad and isn't helping. you readily boot them instead of asking comm to ID them. exposing enemies when they fire within a certain radius of a player, the radar, or engineer detection equipment. this would give kind of a scale to how big fights are going on without the inherent need for cameras and could facilitate communication where cameras would complete the whole picture.
aside of that this are UI suggestions and we all know what this means, im so damn parted concerning this player see building radii. on one hand im ofc pro more info, information is crucial, on the other hand though, all this cicles and health bars and whatnot idk ... ... if UI is no hindrance any more, this should be either on holding a button or toggle.
I think you could have a "HUD" or "Tactical" view that shows this information & maybe other important game metrics. I'm not sure I would want it on all the time but I'd love to see the effective range turrets, etc.
I've always thought you should be able to see the effective range of your turrets and cameras when looking at it, I mean even after playing this game for years it's hard to be sure that your camera will have enough range to spot enemies where you want it to.
Perhaps a Journal could be introduced. Somewhere where you could see what the commander's desired actions are for each squad. Updated in real time anytime. This way the comm wouldn't need to repeat on mic, spam in chat all the time also for new players that joined in mid game.
one could add a chat filter option to filter all babbling and only leave comm orders and text (if this isnt possible already) - the chat has a history. if its presented like chat-channels in MMOs (so a neat button to switch) it could be quite handy.
Yeah but a separate window on top left corner looks more important and official I think. And the orders would be visible at all times.
there isnt much room left on the screen to put windows. i mean in the end you want to play a FPS, not look at stats like in idk ogame or smthg ... top left already contains the squad thing and above comm and cv info. the fullscreen-minimap would also be a good place to show comm orders with icons, but the minimap is said to be among the worst pieces of code in empires.
the map shows/can show a lot of the information your journal is suggesting. that's about as "other window" you ought to get when you open the full version
Sincerely I cannot imagine the minimap providing so much info. Like, it lags like hell. I can't picture it working like a C&C game. Perhaps, the minimap could just be redone and provide little info but when you open the map, the journal and other stuff appear. That would work imo because you would only need to press M to see commands etc and maybe the minimap could inform you that new commands have been posted in the journal. Edit: Wait, "Other window" you meant what I just said right? Duh sorry
unless i missed half of it, last time someone tried to make the minimap perform better, it turned out worse. forgot who it was, but the codebase was said to be mixture of magic and ducttape. its probably a bit like in this one simpsons episode where burns goes to the doctor and they find out he only still lives because his illnesses balance eachother out :D
Why can't we have these things? That Journal or Tactical screen could let newbs see what the commander is up to, what they should do and other cool things. Like, adding big shared notepad for the team to access to.
Because, extracting information and presenting it nicely is not that simple and the devs are otherwise engaged for the time being I suppose.
