It is my understanding that the devs are trying to come up with a system to represent units at extreme zoom levels. The main issue they're having is that they want to preserve at-a-glance information while avoiding turning the screen into a sea of icons, a la SupCom. I think I have a good solution to this that addresses these issues nicely, while giving other benefits, too. My idea in a nutshell is to use a coalescing function to merge unit icons together, while simultaneously providing information about the unit mixture represented by that icon.

Now before you say, "Scipi, we already thought of merging icons, and it won't work for this game!" hear me out. I believe it can be done in such a way that it complements Ashes gameplay nice and cleanly while providing certain advantages that aren't in the game currently. Before I go into detail, though, I want to deconstruct exactly what kind of game I find Ashes to be, and what kind of info the player wants out of the interface.

Ashes is what I would consider to be an Operational Level game. By that, I mean by the definition, "On a large enough scale that the tactical factors, such as line-of-sight and the time of day, are not recognizable, but smaller than the strategic scale, where production, politics, and diplomacy come into play." Certain factors such as positioning and weapon range, while sometimes needed, are not critical to success in-game. Instead, unit composition and cumulative firepower are what's important in an army. As such, this is something the interface should communicate clearly. This is a pitfall Supreme Commander has. In Supreme Commander, it can be difficult, particularly for newcomers, to determine what a force is composed of and what it's overall strength may be.

This is because at far out zoom levels icons clutter up and partially obscure one another. While an experienced eye can parse out this kind of information, it really should be communicated directly by the interface. In any 4X game, such as Sins of a Solar Empire, I can find the composition of any force or base through a click or two. From there I can make an estimation of the relative strength of the force and make an informed decision. In 4X games, I would also consider the actual combat to be Operational level combat, much in the same way Ashes and SupCom are. Ashes could very well benefit from making use of this kind of information in its interface.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have R.U.S.E. Which in many aspects is the opposite of SupCom. RUSE uses a coalescing function which makes the battle field very neat and easy to parse, however it also completely obscures unit composition.

You can see what the most relevant unit is in a stack, but beneath that you must zoom in in order to determine what units are there. This is something we want to avoid doing in Ashes, as it defeats the purpose of strategic zoom. On the plus side, merging unit icons together can make the map much cleaner. Unfortunately, this kind of stacking only communicates force numbers, not strength. So only coalescing units and nothing more is not going to work for Ashes because we care about what units are beneath the icon.

In the middle somewhere, we have Wargame: Red Dragon.

In Wargame, icons are concatenated horizontally and reduced to barebones information. While this game suffers from clutter, it is easy to understand the composition of a force you control or one you are engaging. This kind of information is beneficial to Ashes as, like Wargame, unit counters are important. When I play Ashes, I want to know how many Brutes do I have in a force? Do I have adequate Apollo's? Do I have a critical mas of Artemis's? It doesn't matter so much where they are in a force as it does that they're there.

So where am I going with all this rambling? Well I think my idea can combine the at-a-glance information of Wargame, with the tidiness of R.U.S.E, at the strategic zoom of SupCom. While avoiding each of their drawbacks.

(This is where I should put "TL;DR")

So remember back at the beginning of this overly-long post I said, "... in a nutshell is to use a coalescing function to merge unit icons together, while simultaneously providing information about the unit mixture represented by that icon." Well, I didn't say exactly what information should be shown. My idea is, at farther zooms, to represent groups of units in a local area by a single icon that communicates clearly the total combat strength of the units as a combination of their health, energy, and firepower. Next to that icon either always visible or as a tooltip there should be a breakdown of the total number and relative frequency of each unit represented by the icon.

What does this do? First and foremost it eliminates clutter to a handful of icons. It can also scale to insane zoom levels relatively well. Additionally, it gives direct at-a-glance information about the force beneath the icon. I can see from the icon itself the combat strength of my force compared to another I scouted and see if I can take on that force to begin with. Additional information about my force which gives me critical information about my unit composition is also available without the need of zooming back in. What's nice about this system is that it can be implemented on top of the dev's heatmap idea to show relative positioning and concentrations of units. Remember, Ashes most resembles Operational Warfare, in which we don't need to know the exact positioning of each unit. So icons + heatmap wouldn't affect gameplay negatively.

Why isn't a heatmap enough? Using a heatmap only communicates unit concentration, which to a player would be nearly useless. What I want to know out of an interface would be, how many Artemis's are there? Is it mostly T1? Does it have a Dreadnought? A heatmap would communicate exactly zero of this information. meaning most of game would be played without it. That's why I find the current strategic map largely unused, even if it's a nifty idea.