colored units

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cooly
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colored units

#1 Post by cooly » Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:41 pm

just played my first against bots game to get used to the web interface.
Thanks for all the effort which have been done to this platform!

I'm having a hard time to find out to which country the units on the board are belonging, since they are not colored in the country color.
Instead all fleets are grey, all armies are green - no matter which country. Also the supply centers (the round spots) don't have the ownership color.

By looking closer I now see and understand that the colors of the provinces are changing to reflect their ownership. Also there is a color spot under the unit to reflect the units ownership.

When coming from the Parker board game with colored units and colored supply dots, it seems not intuitive to understand the unit owner, or spotting stalemate lines, since my eyes are used to connect units of the same color and not equally colored provinces.

Would be great if the units would colored also in the ownership color. However then the contrast to the province in the same color would be less.

Wonder if nobody else ever had issues with this (was searching the forum, but no match).

Drawback of coloring the units with ownership color: to determine which unit is a fleet or an army, their shapes need to be quite different. On the large map, sometimes the province names are written above the units, which might make it hard to see the shape of the unit if it would be in the same color like the province is.

My vote: let units be in front of the province names (we know them by heart) and let units be colored in the owner color.
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Claesar
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Re: colored units

#2 Post by Claesar » Thu Jan 07, 2021 8:43 am

Yes, people have struggled with this before. It takes some getting used to, but after that we feel this is the best representation we can provide.

A lot of people don't know province names by heart ;-)

cooly
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Re: colored units

#3 Post by cooly » Thu Jan 07, 2021 9:32 am

Claesar wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 8:43 am
Yes, people have struggled with this before. It takes some getting used to, but after that we feel this is the best representation we can provide.

A lot of people don't know province names by heart ;-)
Thanks for following up! Just my feedback: coming from the board game with colored units, doing your first games here its not intuitive to guess the ownership. you need to look twice.

About the province names I don't mind this is just a second unrelated issue to the coloring. When I wanted to identify what kind of unit (army vs fleet) is in this province and the unit was covered by the province name.

Likely you are correct: after some time we all get used to this coloring scheme. It might at least initially be a little confusing for board game players being new to the webDiplomany map layout. So it might block out some users and let them select a different platform.
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captainmeme
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Re: colored units

#4 Post by captainmeme » Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:00 pm

This is absolutely something the site should change, but I think they're looking to do a lot of improvements at once (with regard to making the map bigger and more readable) rather than one change at a time. This means it might still be a way off.

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Re: colored units

#5 Post by Brumark » Sun Jan 10, 2021 3:28 pm

I would also add that as a convert from another site originally (that had coloured units) I too felt your pain - however that quickly passes and I have no problem seeing and know who is where (except for retreating units) even on a phone - so just stick with it my friend.
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Re: colored units

#6 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Jan 10, 2021 7:47 pm

We're looking into map redesigns, but that's an absolutely massive project so it won't be for some time yet.

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Re: colored units

#7 Post by dargorygel » Tue Jan 12, 2021 1:21 pm

A Captain Obvious comment... the national colors could be shaded slightly, differentiating between land-colors and unit colors.

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