[Mark]

Hey all,


Here is a first look at the Tactical Op UI.



As you can see the UIs will share many common elements, including the primary circle design.

There's still a lot of work to do, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[Blaze]

Well, now I can be of some use. My primary station in Artemis is the Tactical one, so I'll shoot all of my questions.

Operatives

• What can you tell us about Operatives?
• What for and how will they be used? You said something about away teams, but where will they go? Planetside? Boarding enemy ships and stations? Does that mean the Tactical Officer is in charge of the marines?
• Do the operatives operate ships' weapons, are there other people on the ship for that or are they fully automatic?

Contacts

• What will be listed here? I can see ships, a station and an escape pod. What other entities will be there?
• I think we spoke a bit about this, but my memory is fuzzy. Will there be a tooltip for the contact type when hovering over the filter icon?
• What are the sort options "SIG", "Title" and "Type"?
• I guess A, B and C are the ones we've targetted. Does that designate our turret targeting them? How will we know what enemy we're targeting with the torpedoes? How do we change targets and choose which turret is attacking them? Can we point multiple turrets (on the same side of the ship) at one target?
• Can we target on the Contacts panel?

Main circle

• Can we target enemies on the main circle?
• It would be helpful to have distances on the circles on our plain. Maybe not on each, but on the most inner and outer one definitely.
• An indication of which enemies can be targeted by which turrets/torpedoes would be helpful.
• Will we see incoming enemy torpedoes on the main circle? Will we be able to hit them with the turrets?
• Will we be able to target a point in space that is not an entitiy, and fire a missile there? This would be useful for firing a missile in front of an enemy, as a warning shot, or in the middle of a group.

Left panel
It's empty now, but I expect to see turrets and operatives' commands there. Can you share what your plans for this space is?

[Grey]

Well,
I can't be of use here, because Blaze asked all the questions I can think of.
:S

[Mark]

Well, now I can be of some use. My primary station in Artemis is the Tactical one, so I'll shoot all of my questions.
Excellent.

Operatives

• What can you tell us about Operatives?
  Operatives (which I have also called Away Teams) are crew that you assign to missions off ship.
• What for and how will they be used? You said something about away teams, but where will they go? Planetside? Boarding enemy ships and stations? Does that mean the Tactical Officer is in charge of the marines?
  Operatives are special ops teams, filling the role of both spies and marines.
  You can assign them to neutral or enemy stations. While on the station the Operatives will gather information on the enemy, anything from the flight path of ships leaving the station, to intercepted communications. As well as that the Operatives can, based on happenings on the station propose missions to the Tactical Officer. An example of this is if the Operatives have the opportunity to turn a bridge officer from a Centauri Alliance destroyer. It all feeds into the "information war".
  Operatives can board disabled ships to gain intelligence and potentially salvage/steal technology. At present I have no plans for Operatives to be able to disable an active ship.
  All of these missions are procedurally generated, and play out as "choose your own adventure" style stories where the Tactical Officer is given choices.
• Do the operatives operate ships' weapons, are there other people on the ship for that or are they fully automatic?
  Weapons are fully automated, I have no plans to have Operatives interact with them.

Contacts

• What will be listed here? I can see ships, a station and an escape pod. What other entities will be there?
  Only active entities will be shown here, basically anything Tactical might interact with. Weapon fire and torpedo/missile will be shown on the radar, but not as contacts because they cannot be targeted.
• I think we spoke a bit about this, but my memory is fuzzy. Will there be a tooltip for the contact type when hovering over the filter icon?
  Yes there will be tooltips for absolutely everything on the UI.
• What are the sort options "SIG", "Title" and "Type"?
  Energy Signature strength, title of the contact in the list, and type of contact.
• I guess A, B and C are the ones we've targetted. Does that designate our turret targeting them? How will we know what enemy we're targeting with the torpedoes? How do we change targets and choose which turret is attacking them? Can we point multiple turrets (on the same side of the ship) at one target?
  The Tactical Officer groups turrets into firing groups (this will be on the top left panel). Each group, represented by a letter, has their own weapons lock. So you can have all weapons in one group, each in it's own group, or a mix (based on location, as per your question).
  Torpedoes are their own fixed firing group, effectively, and can target in the same way as any firing group.
• Can we target on the Contacts panel?
  Yes, the Contacts panel and Radar have the same functionality (other than sorting). The filters above the Contacts list also filter the contacts on the radar (though they don't disappear on the radar, they become semi-transparent instead).

Main circle

• Can we target enemies on the main circle?
  Yes, as above.
• It would be helpful to have distances on the circles on our plain. Maybe not on each, but on the most inner and outer one definitely.
  Yeah I'll definitely add this. The Tactical Officer will be able to choose the view range of the radar, basically like zooming in and out.
• An indication of which enemies can be targeted by which turrets/torpedoes would be helpful.
  I have this for weapons groups and their current target lock, but I'll look into doing it this way too.
• Will we see incoming enemy torpedoes on the main circle? Will we be able to hit them with the turrets?
  You will be able to see them, but not lock or fire. Perhaps at a later stage I will introduce point defence, but it's not in the current plan.
• Will we be able to target a point in space that is not an entitiy, and fire a missile there? This would be useful for firing a missile in front of an enemy, as a warning shot, or in the middle of a group.
  I may do this at some stage, I like the idea.

Left panel
It's empty now, but I expect to see turrets and operatives' commands there. Can you share what your plans for this space is?
This panel will have the firing groups for turrets, and the torpedo bays firing group. It will give you info on each of their statuses, and allow them to be fired.


Excellent questions, I hope I've answered everything.

What are your thoughts on my plans?

[Mark]

I missed something above, in regards to operatives.

They can/will be used as part of missions in scenarios and the campaign. You might be required to deploy operatives to a station to rescue someone for example.


In order for operatives to board a station or land on a planet you need to get within a certain range (the range of the shuttle the Operatives use). As well as that the closer you deploy the Operatives the less chance they have of being detected (though this increases the chance of your ship being detected).

When Operatives have been deployed in their shuttle you can fly away and let them do their thing. To get them back you can either go get them again, or have another ship pick them up. The second option saves you going back, but costs both renown and time.

I feel it is important that the ship has to go to the station/planet location to drop off Operatives, but then they can do their thing while the ship and crew does theirs. Having to go back and collect Operatives every time would, I think, be annoying.

The idea for Operatives first came from watching a documentary on how the Russians used submarines to drop off spys on the U.S. coast during the Cold War.

[Mark]

I like most of your plans, all except for the inability to target and fire at enemy torpedoes. But this might be due to me being used to Artemis, so it might not be something one would want in UoN. If the helm can do evasive maneuvers to evade the missile, that would be very interesting.
You got it in one, Helm can use evasive manoeuvres and flak to defend against missiles. I am open to adding point defence at a later stage, allowing missiles to be shot down, but we'll see how it works out first.

The Operatives sound like such a cool feature. What do you mean by "The second option saves you going back, but costs both renown and time." What kind of renown will we be collecting, and what time exactly are we talking about?
You have two options when picking up Operatives after a mission, one is to go and get them, the second is to have them picked up and delivered to you by another UNION ship.

Renown is a kind of currency you earn, you can spend it on missiles, systems and upgrades at UNION stations. The idea is that you are being rewarded by UNION for doing well.

Also, when sending the Operatives on a mission, do we choose how they should behave or what type of mission it is, or is that automatic? For example, we might want to just collect intel from a station, so going in guns blazing would not be a good idea. But on some occasions, we want to take over and kill most of the enemies, so that's exactly how they should be going, and would need extra equipment.
I realise I wasn't clear about what Operatives are. Each Operative represents a team of 5 people, the one shown on the UI is their leader essentially. They can board and take over communication arrays, which are small stations manned by a skeleton crew, but they cannot take over a full station.

They are special ops, like Seal Team Six, but with a greater focus on intelligence gathering.

When you place Operatives on a station they enter covertly, spying to gather intel. The Tactical Officer will have choices here, like what area of the station the Operatives focus on. A low risk choice would be to put them in the docks and they'll gather info on ships coming to and leaving the station. A high risk choice would be to have them attempt to access the station's comms array to intercept messages directly.

While on the station the Operatives might propose missions based on opportunity. Again these missions provide the Tactical Officer with choices.

Can several ships all deploy their Operatives on a single entity at once? Basically, if we want to take over a station, sending just or 6 Operatives might not be enough. Sending  20 of them would be.
As above, Operatives are agents rather than an army. They do not assault planets, stations or ships. Multiple Operatives on a station won't give any bonus, as each Operative team acts as an independent cell.


Assault teams, where you do assault stations or ships with personnel, might be added at some point in the future. But I have no plans to add them at this point.

I'm open to change on this, if you have any suggestions.


I'll answer the rest of the questions in a separate thread.

[Blaze]

Ah, now I see what the Operatives are for. Thanks for explaining it.

I now have an idea of what the left panel will be, what data and options it would show, but I'll wait until you create the draft, in order to ask questions about it.

[Mark]

Are you happy with my plans for the Operatives?

Missions can have you do very different kinds of things with Operatives, they are not limited to a specific set of actions. For example a mission could have you send Operatives to negotiate a cease fire with an enemy faction.

With modding they could easily be turned into away teams ala Star Trek.

[Blaze]

Yes, I'm happy with the plans! They make a lot of sense. Especially them being teams of 5.

That reminds me of another question: can the teams loose members? How do we replenish them? Same questions for Engineer's Technicians, if they are also teams.

Modding is really going to be a tool that enriches UoN. You should support it officialy in some way. Perhaps by featuring the best mods on the homepage or in the game, or something like that.

[Mark]

To keep it simple you can only lose team leaders. If you do lose a team leader (or, demote one) you can recruit another from a selection of eligible enlisted personnel on the ship.  You could also wait until you dock at a UNION station, where you can purchase new personnel with renown (and then promote one to team leader).

[Mark]

In regards to modding, we will be using Steam Workshop and people can see the most popular mods on the game page in Steam. I can't promise much more because we have very limited resources.

We'll be giving modding a lot of support though, we'll have a wiki dedicated to teaching people how to mod.

[Blaze]

That's a neat way to solve the team member loss problem, yeah.

And what I thought about promoting modding, would be something like a weekly news with one highlihted mod. Or whatever suits you, at the time. But having a wiki is a great idea. People will update it themselves.

[Mark]

Honestly, I'm just not sure how much time we will have to play and select the best mods.

We will add a lot of content to the modding wiki ourselves though, I want to make sure that modding is as accessible as it can be.

[Mark]

I'm still working on the top left panel, but I wasn't happy with how the radar looked so I have given it another pass.

My main issue was that it was rather flat and empty, and it blended too well into the rest of the UI, so I have gone for a more radar like design:

[Blaze]

I don't like it. The first one seems more like part of the rest of the design, while the second one seems like it's from a different type of design, something like a classical radar without technological advancements.

But I do like the extra space between Sort options.