UI mod guide for the improving player

[Katharsas]

@Blackheart

Advanced strategic icons are actually 3 entirely different set of icons in different sizes. The middle and bigger setting lead to overlapping symbols.

The mex symbol gets overriden in my case by the EcoManager (which i only use for the mex symbols, no other funcitonality), so i dont get to see the mex icons from the icon mod.

I have a video here but its only campaign gameplay, not even trying to play competitive here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xCMVlqNtGg

In general i dont think that small strategic icons are too bad. It not gonna become a better player by swicthing to default icons. I will just die more often to nukes or defences i wanst able to see because default icons look all the same.

[Box-]

@Blackheart Fair point, I guess since I am primarily a setons player, how many t3 mex my opponent has is of utmost importance (lol). I always have found it annoying to look at the white dots for mex to see its tech, since the white dots on mass storage blend in, so this is just my personal change. I will also reiterate that the mod is really good once you personalize it to your liking, even if to change 2 icons (smd, sml) like you mention.

[epic-bennis]

I use eco manager for only for mex overlay. That's very useful.

[arma473]

@Blackheart said in UI mod guide for the improving player:

Selection Cost UI: Not relevant.

I use this when I'm watching replays. It's nice to be able to do things like quickly find out the cost of a particular unit, or to select my army and see how much it cost, and compare that to my opponent's army. I can then quickly tell if his army is 20% more expensive than mine, or something like that.

I made a simple edit to the mod so it only shows up when I'm watching a replay or if I'm an observer, because I don't want it while I'm playing a game.

If you're interested, the edit is described here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1122/selection-cost-v-7-ui/4

Also, I made a mod that adds a sound notification for some chat messages (not global messages, not messages you send, only messages to allies or direct messages, and at most it makes a noise about once per second, even if people are spamming the chat). It's in the vault as "ChatBeepLite." Do you think that would be useful for the developing player?

I often miss chat messages while I play. I notice them for the first time when I'm watching a replay. And then I think "it would have been better if I noticed that while I was playing." Like when @harzer99 told me 3 times to finish making a 90%-done T3 pgen in our TMM game. I guess not everyone overlooks chat messages. But is this a mod that you would recommend to developing players?

Or let me ask a different way: even if YOU don't want to use this mod, do you want the people playing with you to use it?

[Blackheart]

@arma473 cost of stuff might be nice to know for satisfactory purposes, but it doesnt matter much for analysis purposes. What you need to know is the relation of unit costs (e.g. brick ~percy, tank = tank, ...) for which this is not very useful.

Chat notification sound: 1) My post was concerned with 1v1 improvement. For 1v1 a team chat notification sound obviously isnt relevant.
2) I personally would hate the mod, since i generally ignore my team. Thats the reason I also wouldnt care if any of my team members do have that mod - if I think its worth communicating with them, I ask them to go on voice. My recommendation to someone trying to become good in teamgames would be finding a fixed teammate and playing with that person on voice chat. If for some reason you have voice chat phobia, I probably still wouldnt recommend that mod. You should try to get to a state where you can read the game yourself and dont rely on ally analysis. If you need it, you can ask ingame and then you pay attention to the answer. Generally the advice given by your team is useless and should be ignored in favor of your own analysis - if your analysis happens to be wrong, at least you learned why it doesnt work (this is for your own improvement, not for optimal game results).

[biass]

Advanced Strategic Icons mod enjoyers get coal and hellfire for christmas.

[Reckless_Charger]

I think they come with age and the inability to see tiny monochromatic icons without developing eye strain

[maudlin27]

I find idle engineers really useful - e.g. if I need engineers in an area to build pd in an emergency,and I have a mix of T1 and T2 engis, I can find the T2 faster with idle engineers; while the right hand default UI for idle engineers is it only (I think) allows all idle engineers across the map to be selected by tier, not idle engineers only in your screen

I also find advanced strategic icons REALLY useful for detecting TML and SML at a glance (and every second counts if you don't have defences up), as well as enemy radar.

Then again, I'm nowhere near 2000 1v1 rating (but I've found my performance notably better with these two UI mods.

[Blackheart]

I think what plenty people get wrong with "my performance is better with those mods" is that while maybe for their current state the mods add, lets say +100 rating, they hinder long term improvement. And that is the point here. They hinder the development of game sense, they hinder the adaption in your brain that is necessary to read an entire map from icons alone, etc. When you learn to ride a bike, eventually the training wheels have to come off - there is no way around it. As another example you could perfectly learn Sentons only, air slot only, seraphim only, perfect 15 min build order, strat rush only, and jump easily to probably around 1700 rating (or even more). That would have the same problem: You dont develop the skills and adaptive abilities necessary to perform in ladder/tourney settings (where different maps are enforced, faction bans, people will know your replays, etc).

Maybe I should write a guide on how to improve in games in general.

[Swkoll]

@Blackheart said in UI mod guide for the improving player:

Maybe I should write a guide on how to improve in games in general.

I'd read it!

[KolmarEye]

I have seen many high rated players whose pop up a sentence on bottom screen which warns the completion of a t2 mex upgrade, for instance. Is it a mod that allows it?

[Tagada]

I think it's a part of UI party.

[RubberN]

Does anybody have a working link to a "Advanced Strategic Icons" mod?
It appears that a link to the old forum doesn't work anymore

[Amygdala]

seems the old forum are currently down. If you decide to use it, i suggest only using it on small size and modifying it heavily to your needs. otherwise the icons will clutter up your screen quite alot as mentioned above. you can delete all the icons despite a few useful ones like tmd/tml, smd/sml and so on.

[Sir-Prize]

@RubberN Here's the installer I have on my PC, definitely only use the small icons. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UAtkRXufjEihQhT61N6kWll9UAeX26CP/view?usp=sharing

@amygdala said in UI mod guide for the improving player:

you can delete all the icons despite a few useful ones

How do I do this? Overall using these icons makes it way easier for me to see various important things (quickly scouting mexes and easily telling the difference between T1 arty and T1 tanks are actually the biggest things for me - dunno why I find the T1 spam so hard to read normally) so I find the mod to be a net positive - playing with small icons removes most of the problems imo. But I would really like to be able to edit or delete some too.

[Amygdala]

@Sir-Prize There is a file named "Advanced strategic icons" in your installation.
You can open it with a file-archiver program like win rar or 7-zip and delete the icons you dont wanna use. You can also open the icons within using e.g. irfanview with a plugin to see whats what.

[RubberN]

@Sir-Prize Thanks you a million

I hoped that someone will have it on a local machine and will be able to upload in Google Drive

[biass]

Why are you distributing the mod on a thread where it says that getting it is super bad

[Leonid_Frost]

@sir-prize many thanks

[epic-bennis]

This post is deleted!