Distinguished Players using same race

I was doing a challenge where the other player had the same race and a very similar set up. It was hard to tell what was going on as two similar sets of frigates were going at it. Which one was mine? Is his the one being destroyed? I know you can click on them, but this was a massive battle and I wasn’t getting good overall feedback.

I was thinking of having two colors per race but that seemed like a lot of work that wouldn’t have a good payout and might look awkward. Then I was thinking if your ships had a soft glow around them, but that would interfere with the authenticity of the spfx. So then I came up with a better solution: Pin-striping!This would be basically like a flag or a banner that would be placed somewhere easily recognizable on the ship. Maybe one set of ships would have a blue stripe down either side of the ship, while the “enemy” ships would have a red stripe down either side.

Something like that would not only look pretty sweet if done right, it would give players more of a feel like “these are my ships m****r f*****r!”

OMG Custom Ship Banners FTW!

The ability to upload a custom, low filesize jpg, banner that was stuck on each ship would be amazing! This wouldn’t work for fighters of course.

how about “painting” the fleets like in Warhammer/Dawn of War

The base colors would be the same but the fighters and the pinstriping could be customizable

I loved that customization in Dawn of War. I could see it being very useful in this game for multiplayer, too. Even something as simple as a re-tinting of the existing art assets would be helpful to distinguish the fleets from each other.

But badging and more detailed paint jobs would be pretty fantastic. Probably a lot of work and something that would be low-priority for Cliff right now, but I’d sure enjoy it.

Indeed, I LOVE the idea. Now I just need enough hours in the day!

If an ‘overlay’ could be added to every ship image in software, that’d be great. So long as it clips on transparent areas of the ship image, and gets applied at 50% opacity, we could make one set of racing stripes and have them on all our fleets!

Edit-- Cliff, how about decreasing the lighting effects on all enemy ships by 20% or something if you’re fighting the same race? That way the enemy could be all dark and scary…

We don’t want to force the average player to have to photoshop their own badges. There should be an easy to use system or there should be a large set of defaults

Definitely. A nice pile of default color schemes/designs for quick use, and of course options for players to customize to their hearts content and ability… sounds awesome.

Something like Homeworlds ‘Badge and Color Scheme’ would work well. You could see your ships and have a little picture on all of them. :stuck_out_tongue: