Showing defense ratings on units.

[Dragon Master]

I like the dial that is a bar which changes from red to green across the circle best. The ones with little counters won't work becuase I'm not going to take the time to count every little dot. The red-green energy bar-like dial is best for a quick glance at defense.

[Naeddyr]

I like the dial that is a bar which changes from red to green across the circle best. The ones with little counters won't work becuase I'm not going to take the time to count every little dot. The red-green energy bar-like dial is best for a quick glance at defense.

The bar and the dots share one thing: length. They're different in that the bar uses colour, and the dots use their number to show the same redundant information - and the pips are better for knowing exactly (because 1 pip = 10%). If you can learn to recognise DR by the length and colour of the bar, you can also do that with the pips, and with the pips there's less of a learning curve.

[Darth Fool]

I would personally vote against this, although my objections are not very strong. I agree with Boucman that this is an easy task to code so my objection is not on any code maintenance issue, merely as a UI issue. Of the proposed solutions, a dial of some sort is definately the best idea, however that adds significant clutter. Either it will hide the movement ball indicator, which is arguably much more important, or it will add to the hex area covered by status icons of one sort or another. Putting it on top of the movement ball also causes a dissonance because it means that the ball no longer serves one function, but rather is serving double duty. If you add color changing to the defense dial on top of the color changing ball it would be even more confusing. Since after selecting a unit, the footprints show the defense rating of the terrain, this really only serves to identify enemy units that are on poor defensive terrain. It seems to me to be a far better idea to just have a button that displays the defense percent for all units on the screen. Something like how you can display all hexes that enemy units can reach. just my $0.02

[JW]

100% with DF.

[zookeeper]

This looks great to me. Would be good to have as an option IMO (although I can't be completely sure until I'd see and use these in-game). I'd be inclined to wait until we get the graphics engine rewrite before adding things like this though, since then we can position them much better and so on (now the hex is getting a bit too crowded).

[Lord_Aether]

My favorite so far

[Elvish_Pillager]

Indeed, very cool.

[Zhukov]

100% with DF.

100% with JW.

It's a pity, because the last version looks awesome.

Perhaps as Zoo suggested this would be sufficiently cool to overcome the hurdle of OAB...?

[Eleazar]

I tend to think that there are better reforms that could be implemented for the orb.

But in the interest of making the proposal the best it can be, all the bars should be the same color at any given defence rate. (Otherwise there's too many colors.) And possibly other colors should be used so as not to interfere with the color identity for health. Also i would only show the bars (or whatever indicator) on mouseover.

Also note that the current example violates the hex boundry.

[Naeddyr]

Here are two further proposals; the first is 70% defense (the dial around the orb), a general unit (golden band down the hp/xp bar) and with a little hp lost and a little xp left for next level.

The other is an ordinary enemy unit with 30% defense rate, low hp and xp.

EDIT:

hm, a darker shade of bluish and...

[Airk]

100% with DF.

100% with JW.

It's a pity, because the last version looks awesome.

Perhaps as Zoo suggested this would be sufficiently cool to overcome the hurdle of OAB...?

I too am in the "don't clutter my display with this" camp. I -do- like the idea of having a button I can push to get all units overlaid temporarily with their defense values though.

[XJaPaN]

stardial.gif looks best imo

[Kestenvarn]

I'm with the camp that doesn't like these. The numbers are simple enough to understand, but the dials are too fancy and minute to glean info from at a glance.

[Ken_Oh]

Dials are cool but I wonder how easy they are to see on different terrains (but I'm not wondering hard enough to photoshop it myself right now )

[Tomsik]

Too much stuff on the screen = bad, it makes important informations harder to separate from non-important ones.