Welcome to World War II online - Battleground Europe : Free community contributions to a new User Interface design

Oct. 2009

Please sit back, relax, throw some food to the fishes, and take a hour to discover the content of this blog.

The purpose of this input is to introduce new gameplay concepts that could contribute to a fix of persistent issues highlighted during the last couples of years, with a special focus on the User Interface (UI).
Though it will confuse established players, I believe it will be alot easier for new players to understand.

The blog (creative) layout has been designed to make the reading more comfortable (you can easily pause your reading thanks to feature #IDs) as to make search & discuss easier. Use the labels to select a single part, or use the tree on the right to find a specific feature back.
If you are in a hurry, you may just have an attentive look at the screenshots which should be intuitive to understand. The text is just pointing out drawn features or detailing the context.

All opinions and suggestions are welcome. Please, provide feedback (here) in the official forum . Remind that the whole content is a free gift to Playnet.

Since English isn't my main language, please apologize for the mistakes. I hope you will still enjoy the reading.

ZEB
-Un0fficial gameplay architect, advises concepts since 2002-

1.3. Side HQ - Town selected


[SIDE HQ]
    - Welcome screen
   - Squad selected
   - Town selected
   - Platoon selected  
[PLATOON HQ]
   - Mission member display
   - Mission leader display 
[BRIGADE HQ]

____________________________________________________________

    The current design displays a map where you can right-click on a town and display a list of deployed brigades. Though this is an interesting feature to join a defense and should thus be kept, it doesn't allow you to get the same situational awareness for an offensive event since you need to jump into every surrounding brigades to find missions currently aiming at the enemy. Furthermore, there's currently no mean to get a quick overview of air/naval forces also involved in this area, except by going back to change your persona and start looking for these missions into the different brigades.
The new design suggests a new filtering feature that will improve global situational awareness, coordination and mobilization capability, both for players and leaders.

 
Typical side HQ display when selecting a specific town

#29. When selecting a town (by either clicking it or finding it with the search menu as shown in the screenshot), brigades hosting forces currently involved in that area will be filtered on the left.
This would include :
  • If friendly town selected:
    - Brigades currently parked there
    (because of their permanent defensive support mission);
  • If enemy town selected:
    - Brigades with an attack AO on it (if we image that multiple brigades may set their AO on a same town);
  • Both:
    - Brigades hosting at least one mission targeting a building that belongs to the selected town
    .
If a brigade is hosting missions which are not aiming at the selected target, these are displayed as well but with faded colors, though they can still be selected and joined.

No-man's land battles would become easier to manage since you currently can't easily know from which brigade(s) troops are leaving from.
Since support missions don't specify an objective, they're never taken into account in this filter.

#30. Jumping from one branch to another (feature #5) will not cancel the town filter. This means that you will display in turn ground / air / naval forces currently involved in the selected area only. Again, missions which have no link with the selected town are faded out.
Notice that the display filter content and the persona rank will change according to the displayed branch. I adapted some informations such as brigade AOs since it's only available to ground brigades. Maybe we should consider to fuse ARFR and BEF ranks to avoid complications for a multi-countries side.

 
Example of screen display when jumping to 
air forces while having a town selected

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