I loved that the APs were abstracted into areas on the map (ressembling Firaxis’ XCOM) and a AP bar, instead of numbered APs as it were on the original X-COM. But for me the actions bar having the same color scheme as the AP bar is somewhat confusing at a first glance.
Correct me if I’m wrong… I get that the blue icons on the actions bar are actions associated with the currently active equipment (weapon, medkit…) and the yellow ones are related to actions tied to the character. On the AP bar, I understand that it being on the blue part (the character inside the blue area on the map) means that I still have APs available to perform at least one main action associated to the currently active weapon/equipment. For example, I could fire the assault rifle or reload it.
The issue for me is that the color scheme being the same on both bars gives at first the impression that when the character is still on the “blue zone” it can take any action, including the ones represented by the blue icons, and when its on the “yellow zone” it could only take actions represented by yellow icons, and it’s not true. In both areas of the actions bar there are actions that cost AP, free actions and actions that cost Will instead of APs. Rest is yellow and stills consumes all your APs. I can move to the limit of my APs and still take an overwatch action that is blue, as it costs 1 Will point and not AP.
Maybe only the actions that could be taken when a character is on the blue area should be colored blue. The other actions should have other colors. For me the lines are feedback enough to know if an action is tied to the character or the weapon/equipment.
I agree that the action system has some issues in clarity, I would like to see something list what all of the actions cost and what your total action pool looks like numerically myself.
Agreed, the colours of the icons should either accurately reflect the action colour usage, or just be different.
At the moment I am fairly keen to make action costs either 0, 25%, 50% or 75%, with them being numerically represented that way. Plus, the action bar on the bottom to have 4 subdivisions labelled this way.
Oh, I like this a lot! That would make it intuitive to plan your turn around taking multiple actions without having to worry too much about how exactly they’re going to add up. It feels very “clean.” Even if you couldn’t make everything a multiple of 25, it’d make life better to have a rule with five or six exceptions rather than trying to memorize the exact value of fivescore weapons and actions.
Hopefully they also add in tooltips for simply scrolling over an ability instead of having to actually select it (or a UI toggle for tooltips on mouseover). Since it’s the pre-alpha it doesn’t bother me but it would bother me in the released game if I had to select an ability just to see what it did.
Tooltips would be nice. I’m counting they will appear in a future build. Keyboard shortcuts for the actions would be nice too. Number keys, or something like number keys for characters actions and Ctrl+number key for equipment actions if they want more than a total of 10 actions to be possible.
There will be tooltips. However, we also have to make the interface work for a controller, so it is highly likely that the tooltips would just repeat the information you get from clicking on the ability icon.
Yea that’s all I would expect from the tooltips, I just don’t like having to click the ability to see the TT as I then have to exit out of the ability and risk accidentally activating it somehow. Thanks for the reply.
Maybe an adjustment in colors would help avoid confusion about the OP “blue actions” and “yellow actions” vs “blue zone” vs “yellow zone”. Having slightly different colors for zones and actions would avoid that confusion.
In general I like the idea that interface highlights movement range reserving the AP for the chosen action. Provided some tooltips will come, I believe players will pick it up quickly enough.