UI Suggestion: Soldier Icons

[sixgunninja]

I started playing the Kickstarter build the other day and while good I had a hard time remembering which soldier was equipped with which weapon. Something that I think could greatly improve your ability to asses what you have left to do on your turn is to have a customizable icon for each soldier next to their Number where they're listed at the top of the UI element at the bottom of the screen during ground combat. If there were say a dozen or so Icons that indicated a Sniper with a Crosshair, Anti-Tank with a little rocket that you could set on the Soldier screen then at a glance you could see that your sniper and one of your rifleman has moved, but your shotgunners and anti-tank still have AP left. This would be further improved if you could choose the color of those Icons, red for Entry Teams, Green for overwatch, or whatever you wanted the colors to mean. I think this would make it much easier to manage your squads in combat.

This is also a problem in the Dropship screen, Icons would help to put the guys you want at the front where you want them without having to refer back to the Soldier screen to see who has what.

PS: What about turning a portion of the little Green AP bar next to the Soldier's number yellow when you've set it to be saved for reaction fire?

[Gorzahg]

This is also a problem in the Dropship screen, Icons would help to put the guys you want at the front where you want them without having to refer back to the Soldier screen to see who has what.

Yeah it's annoying trying to remember who had what without switching back and forth between screens. It just needs to show the primary weapon the soldiers is holding.

[erutan]

This could probably be tied to the 'roles' for switching out equipment loads - when you create a role you can assign an icon to it, and when that role is applied to a soldier they inherit that icon.

[The New Romance]

Roles and role badges are actually planned. I hope Chris doesn't forget them over all the Kickstarter fervour at the moment

[cybrbeast]

Yeah it's annoying trying to remember who had what without switching back and forth between screens. It just needs to show the primary weapon the soldiers is holding.

Exactly, the only thing you really need is a small icon of the main weapon the soldier is carrying. Shouldn't be hard to implement, right?

[Chris]

Yeah. There is a soldier role button planned but I guess we could stick a weapon icon on the portrait that pops up when you mouseover the quickbutton too. I'll put it on my list of beta UI tweaks.

[sixgunninja]

Yeah. There is a soldier role button planned but I guess we could stick a weapon icon on the portrait that pops up when you mouseover the quickbutton too. I'll put it on my list of beta UI tweaks.

I'm glad to hear it, thanks for letting us know! (To be a bit of an jerk) I was thinking something that you didnt have to mouse over so it was more of an At-A-Glance thing, but you are the man with the plan.

The other thing I want to suggest again is being able to put soldiers into Color coded groups. Its standard practice in Real Time Strategy games like StarCraft to be able to group your soldiers, I'm not suggesting that you command multiple soldiers as a group. What I'd like to be able to do (during the Ground Mission) is say "These 3 guys are going here so they're Red Team." and "Those four go that way so theyre Blue Team" and then later on grab two guys from and make them Green Team.

I suggest this because in playing the Kickstarter Demo I've found that split my troops up into different groups going different directions, but who goes where depends on the map. But then its hard to keep track of who is with who at a glance because they're all just Numbers on the quickbar. I think Color Coding would solve this issue pretty easily.