"Fleet View" UI Enhancement Proposal

[TheFurTrapper]

The "Fleet View" table has some problems that, if fixed, would considerably increase the usability of the screen.

As someone who has played a lot of videogames and seen a lot of user interfaces, I can say with some authority that UA:D Campaign has the worst user interface of any of them. Nothing that you want to do is easy or intuitive. Something as simple as moving an entire task force takes five clicks (count them) when it should only take two. The rest of the campaign UI feels like hastily polished developer tools used to test the campaign mode rather than an actual cohesive interface. But I'm not here just to rag on the UI. I have some things that I think would considerably increase the usability of the campaign mode without actually changing too much. And I'm going to start with the Fleet View.

The Fleet View

the current fleet view

The Fleet View is the view that comes up when you click the "Fleet" header button. The majority of the screen is a table with information on every ship in the fleet. At the bottom we have some more buttons for taking actions with selected ships. These buttons activate and deactivate depending on the action and which ship(s) are selected. The table entries are ships in the fleet, and the table is composed of 18 columns each showing some property of the ship, except for two (Role and Crew Action) which are buttons for further ship actions. Columns can be sorted, and sorts are "stable" which allows for subsequent sorts to be combined into a more complex query (show me all my BB in the North Sea - sort by area, then type, scroll to the BBs in the table - all the ones in the North Sea will be in adjacent rows). When hovering over a cell (including over the button columns) a large tooltip is shown with additional information about the ship; we’ll call this the Ship Tooltip.

the ship tooltip

The Ship Tooltip shows some identifying information for the ship (name, class, owner), status information (ship status, crew count, crew training), and information about the ships speed, armament, defenses, and general construction. It is used in a few other places in the campaign UI; notably in the task force and port dialog boxes in the Map View, and in the after-battle table. It also shows a list of flaws at the bottom. The list can get pretty long sometimes.

the great Massachusetts, a Flaws-class battleship

Although the combination of table and tooltip does show a great amount of information on one screen and are reasonably accessible for examining any given ship, both elements are quite poorly organized and I think I can do better. This isn't my ideal interface for the game, but it is one that doesn't majorly expand on the UI concepts that the game already has, and thus should be relatively easy to implement and easy for existing players to adjust to. Without further ado, TheFurTrapper’s Fleet View:

the redesigned fleet view

The Information Pane

The most striking difference here is the addition of the detailed information pane at the left, so we're going to start with that. The table is good at providing access to lots of information quickly, but it has its problems. Mainly, it is limiting in that you have to show the same information for all ships at all times. With the information pane, we remove the necessity for unnecessary information to be present in the table (if nowhere else?), and only put the important stuff that we might want to sort by or compare in the table. There are three main components to the information pane.

At the top is the ship preview. Think of it as a headshot in a personnel roster. This graphic was ripped directly from the Ship Design view so this should be easy to implement. You don’t even need more than one graphic per active ship class, since ships of a given class/revision are identical.

In the middle is the scrollable wall of text. This is where all the information regarding the ship goes. Pretty much every aspect of the ship that can be known should be in here. This is essentially the same as the left-hand pane in the Task Force dialog, but formatted better. The text in the graphic is placeholder but is somewhat representative - see below for more details on its exact contents.

At the bottom is the 'button pile'. This is where all the buttons for acting on the ships go. The most important change here is that SCRAP IS IN THE VERY CORNER AND COLORED RED, AND IT HAS A CONFIRMATION DIALOG BEHIND IT. If I can't un-scrap the ship, I need to be damn sure that I'm not going to click on that by accident, and even if I do, I have to affirm that I mean it before the game erases the vessel. The Scrap button has no right being in its current location in the center of the interface, even if it is sort of near the bottom of the screen ('near' is generous - there's a 15% margin between the inset and the bottom of the window). I don't know the number of people that have scrapped ships by accident, but I know the number is at least one, which is too many. Mothball goes above Scrap and to the right of Set Crew which comes out of the table, the dialog it spawns assumes the Add Crew checkbox. Set Role also leaves the table and joins and Change Port as common actions on the left. Change Port should also now support bulk operation. Suspend and Cancel Sale behave as usual; disabled unless selecting a ship under construction. View also works as normal - taking you to the ship design page for the vessel. Since we're keeping the ability to select multiple rows in the table, the buttons that can be used for multiple ships will retain their current behavior despite their new location.

Veterans among you might recognize this as being awfully similar to the pane on the left-hand side of the Task Force dialog; and that is intentional. They’re fulfilling the same purpose in the UI. However, the current TF dialog is too short, and its wall of text is just the Ship Tooltip glued onto the SDWoT; this has some issues that will be addressed in the Wall of Text Contents section below. I’d expect the graphic + wall of text format outlined here to form a common info pane widget that can be used in multiple places in the UI - but we’ll cover that another time.

The Table

The table looks more or less the same. It has been shifted to the right to make room for the information pane, and it is a bit taller to show more rows on-screen (it could also be made taller to reclaim some more room at the top). For context, the Politics View has margins similar to these. The primary strengths of the table are sorting and information density; this layout strives to maximize those strengths by giving the table as much real-estate as possible. Ideally, the player would be able to specify which columns the table shows and change their order. This may be a tall ask, and if not possible the graphic shows a decent default arrangement of columns. This is fairly subjective and I'm not married to the order, but with the new room afforded by removing the buttons I figured I'd see what I could do. There are also many many more things that could be a column if so desired. Information is roughly grouped in order of importance from left to right:

Type, Name, Class, Year What is this ship. Class jumps 9 columns to the left to take its proper place near the left. If nothing else comes of this, I would like to see this one change made - Class has no right being where it is today. Year comes and joins them since it's a sub-attribute of class (year is the design year, not the launching year). Year could be folded into a tooltip or dropped entirely to make more room.

Area, Port, Status, Role, Damage, Ammo Where is the ship, what is she doing, and how is she getting along. Role is back but not as a button, sitting side-saddle with Status. Also like Status, it is color-coded to better identify the different roles at a glance.

Fuel, Speed, Cruising Speed, Range. Mobility information. Speed feels like it wants to be further left, but I'm putting it with the mobility stats on gut feeling alone. Cruising Speed looks familiar but is actually a new one; not the ship's designed cruising speed in kt but a measure of how far a ship can travel in one month on the map (which is far less than the math would suggest). Range is operational range, which is desperately missing from the original table.

From here on, I’d consider the rest of the columns 'interesting but not critical'.

Cost/m and Displacement. Useful to see who's the heaviest or most expensive. A good case to be made for putting these further left with Type, Name, Class Year, but I put them here to make more room for status. Displacement takes over for "Tonnes" as the column name.

Crew. Crew now shows not only current crew but also total crew. The current crew count is meaningless without also seeing the total amount, which was buried in the tooltip before. Crew Percentage alongside the current Crew as two columns would also be a good approach as well, which also clears up some ambiguity in the sorting.

As far as existing columns that are removed (aside from the button columns), Weapons is out because it doesn't sort nicely and is largely a property of the class. This is now seen more succinctly in the information pane. What this really wants to be is some way to compare broadside firepower, but I'm not interested in solving that problem (total main battery turret weight perhaps?). Sold also gets cut, since that column is only relevant for a small fraction of ships at a given time.

There are also a few QoL changes. First (and not shown due to laziness), alternating table row colors makes the table considerably easier to read. Second, the Damage, Ammo, and Fuel values should be color-coded like Crew is. This provides at-a-glace severity without having to read the number directly. I find that the varying colors of Status are incredibly useful and the color coding approach should be adopted whenever possible. We'll also retain the multi-select capability, and the color change when hovering over a row - both objectively good features for a table to have.

The Ship Tooltip

The Ship Tooltip which was so critical for the previous UX can be completely removed from this view, with almost all of its contents being moved to the information pane.  Instead, tooltips for individual columns can be implemented to provide more information when required. For example, "Armor" could be added as a column and the tooltip can show a more detailed breakdown of the armoring scheme. You can always have the Ship Tooltip stick around for the Type, Name, and/or Class columns.

continued below...

 

[TheFurTrapper]

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Edited August 31, 2024 by TheFurTrapper
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[TheFurTrapper]

<snip>

Edited August 31, 2024 by TheFurTrapper
cleanup

[TheFurTrapper]

<snip>

Edited August 31, 2024 by TheFurTrapper
cleanup

[TheFurTrapper]

The Wall of Text Contents

Part of the problem with the tooltip is that it cannot be scrolled, so when you have a lot of stuff to display (e.g. flaws) the tooltip gets very tall - too tall. By putting this information in a scrollable text block, we can store an order of magnitude more information without having to worry about organization. Ideally, the WoT would not be text at all, but a custom formatted page which can make better use of the available horizontal real-estate and with sections that can be collapsed. I don't see any precedent for this in the current UI, and so I'm going to stick with a simple text field. So here's the layout first part of the layout, with a bullet for each line:

• Type, Name
• Class, Displacement
• Owner
• Cost, Nominal Upkeep (In Being)
• Design Year
•  
• Main Battery
• Main Belt
• Top Speed
• Operational Range
•  
• Crew/Total Crew
• Crew Training
•  
• Armament
  • Main Battery: Mounts x Barrels, Diameter/Caliber, Grade
  • Secondary Battery: Mounts x Barrels, Diameter/Caliber, Grade
  • Tertiary Battery: Mounts x Barrels, Diameter/Caliber, Grade
  • Mounts x Tubes, Deck or Underwater (Torpedo size and propulsion)
  • Propellant / Explosive
  • AP shell type / HE shell type / Shell Weight
•  
• Armor
  • Armor Type, Armor Quality
  • Fore-Mid-Aft Belt Thickness
  • Fore-Mid-Aft Deck Thickness
  • Inner Belt Layers
  • Inner Deck Layers
  • Conning Tower Thickness
  • Superstructure Thickness
  • Main Battery Face/Top Thickness
  • Secondary Battery 1 Face/Top thickness
  • Tertiary Battery 1 Face/Top thickness
•  
• Propulsion
  • Speed
  • Range
  • Cruising Speed (both in kt and km/turn)
  • Fuel
  • Engine Type, Engine HP

These are the big rocks. The vast majority ship design is a tradeoff between the triad of firepower, speed, and defenses; these properties primarily define the ship and its capabilities so they go near the top beneath the ship’s identifying and status information. The order is somewhat arbitrary, there are good arguments to be made for any order and I think that will come down mainly to personal preference. The organization of this is very similar to the SDWoT, but with a focus on the physical ship properties and not intermediate design attributes.

The first lines show the type, name, class, displacement, owner, cost, upkeep, and design year of the ship. Name and class are no-brainers. Displacement shows actual displacement, perhaps color-coded if the ship is over- or under-weight. Owner here lets us get rid of the Sold column from the table. Cost and Upkeep are useful as a rough order-of-magnitude of the usefulness of the ship. Design year also goes here but only because it's the best indicator of ship age that we have. If hull age were important (say, for upkeep purposes), that would go here too (possibly instead of design year).

The second section shows the main belt thickness, main armament, top speed, and operational range. These four numbers - while not enough to tell the whole story of the ship's capabilities - provide a rough estimate of the fighting capability of the ship. These values are duplicated below in their relevant sections, but that is acceptable since they are needed both as a ship-to-ship comparison metric and as a design property for their respective piece of the triad.

Crew Status and Crew Training go right beneath the overview, since they are status-like information and deserve to be near the top. The astute among you will notice that we aren’t including location or status (or role) here; the intent is to move that information to other parts of the UI.

Then we have the main triad sections:

Armament stays mainly the same as it exists in the tooltip, except we get to see the caliber of the guns as well as their grade. Comparing guns based on diameter and quantity alone is not useful, and including grade and caliber can provide more insight into the actual capabilities of the weapon. We also get to see the propellant and bursting charge materials, as well as AP and HE shell types and weight. Torpedoes also get their diameter and propulsion method (although admittedly torpedo performance is very technology dependent). This provides a single at-a-glance summary of the offensive capabilities of the ship. More detailed information such as shell quantity and AP:HE ratio are shown further below.

Armor is not displayed as a range anymore, and the thicknesses are collected into a single line for fore, mid, and aft deck and belt respectively. The SDWoT already does this for turret armor, and that should be expanded for the primary armoring as well. Armor as a range is rarely useful; small guns often have 1" or less of armor, and the AI loves to over-armor its turrets, so seeing Armor: 1"-18" is really not useful at all in assessing a ship's protection. We take a similar approach for layers and conning tower/superstructure armoring, and for turrets we keep what the SDWoT has.

Propulsion is mainly a pared-down version of the Maneuverability section in the SDWoT (renamed so that we can use Maneuverability later). We emphasize speed and range, then show cruising speed, and finally some engine details. The rest of the SDWoT section is removed; things like funnel capacity and acceleration/deceleration are not relevant here.

After this things get a little fuzzy. There are a lot of attributes in the SDWoT that can go beneath, as well as Flaws. I'm not going to go through everything, but here are some tentative categories in no particular order:

• Survivability
  • bulkheads quantity
  • flooding chance
  • gun/torpedo damage modifiers
  • fire/flashfire chance
  • hull bottom
  • barbette
  • anti-flood
  • bulkhead reinforcement
  • aux engines
• Maneuverability
  • engine efficiency
  • acceleration and deceleration
  • turning radius
  • speed at max turn (kt, no percents here)
  • course change time
  • rudder machinery
  • ruder balance
  • boiler machinery
  • shaft type
• Detection and Command
  • detectability
  • spotting range
  • torpedo spotting range
  • recon
  • control radius/command radius
  • radio/radar
• Fire Control
  • rangefinder
  • accuracy bonuses/penalties
  • aim speed bonuses/penalties
  • shell ammo
  • main ammo balance
  • secondary ammo balance
  • torpedo ammo
  • turret autoloader
  • turret traverse machinery
• Support
  • ASW
  • minesweeping
  • minelaying
• Flaws:
  • flaw 1
  • flaw 2
  • etc

There are two main axioms driving the composition: First, don't show design-specific magic numbers. Hull Form, Resistance, Tower Spotting - these things are necessary for driving the underlying simulation but are not relevant on their own due to how they combine to produce the holistic properties of the ship. Prioritize showing concrete numbers (speeds, ranges, times, accuracy percentages, damage resistance percentages, etc). Second, put the information formerly found in Components in with the relevant section. Components as a section is nice in that you get to see everything for a ship in one place, but this removes the context of the actual effects that this has on the relevant design aspects. Finally, the WoT needs to preserve the scrollbar position when the selected ship changes. This lets the user focus on a section of the text, and then click through different ships to compare the values without having to scroll down each time.

Following is an example for what this looks like in practice:

• BB Massachusetts
• Maine-class (8,452t)
• United States
• $19.8m ($1.37m/month)
• 1890
•  
• Main Battery: 2x2 10"/26 Mk1
• Main Belt: 16" (+36%)
• Top Speed: 17 kt
• Range: 7182 km
•  
• 713/725 Crew
• Training: Seasoned
•  
• Armament
  • 2x2 10"/26 Mk1
  • 6x1 4"/36 Mk1
  • 26x1 3"/32 Mk1
  • 6x1 1.7"/25 Mk1
  • 10x1 Underwater Torpedoes (15" Standard) Mk1
  • P/BC: Brown Powder / Black Powder
  • AP: Standard / HE: Base Fuse / Standard Weight
•  
• Armor
  • Compound Armor (+36%)
  • Belt: 6.5"-12"-7.5"
  • Deck: 1"-1.6"-1"
  • Inner Deck: 0.5"
  • Conning Tower: 13"
  • Superstructure: 1"
  • Main 10" Turrets: 12"-2"-12"
  • Secondary 4" Turrets 1.5"-0.5"
  • Secondary 3" Casemates 4.5"-0.5"
  • Secondary 1.7" Turrets: 0"-0"
•  
• Propulsion
  • Speed: 17 kt
  • Range: 7182 km
  • Cruising Speed: 8 kt (1,037 km/turn)
  • Fuel: Coal
  • Engines: Steam Basic (5,317 hp)
•  
• Survivability
  • Flooding Chance: 76.6%
  • Gun Damage: -5%
  • Torpedo Damage: +17 %
  • Fire Chance: +1%
  • Flashfire Chance: 21.2%
  • Citadel: Citadel 1
  • Bulkheads: Maximum
  • Bulkhead Strength: Standard
  • Hull Bottom: Single
  • Barbette: Barbette I
  • Anti-Flood: None
  • Aux Engines: None
•  
• Maneuverability
  • Engine Efficiency: 98.7%
  • Acceleration: 1.4 kt/s
  • Deceleration: 1.1 kt/s
  • Turning Speed: 6.3 kt
  • Course Change Time: 10.4 s
  • Steering: Steam
  • Rudder: Balanced
  • Boilers: Natural
  • Shaft: None
•  
• Command and Observation
  • Detectability: 4059 m
  • Spotting: 6300 m
  • Torpedo Spotting: 949 m
  • Recon: 20.7
  • Flagship Near: 1.6 km
  • Flagship Far: 2.2 km
  • No Radar
  • No Radio
•  
• Guns & Fire Control
  • Rangefinder: None
  • Base Accuracy: -3.6%
  • Long-Range Accuracy: -2.6%
  • Aim Speed: -12.5% (can this be in seconds?)
  • Conditional Penalties:
    • Precipitation: +0 (formerly 'weather')
    • Lighting: +0
    • Wind: +0
    • Sea State: +85%
    • the conditional penalties are a bit weird in how they are displayed, but I don't know enough about the underlying sim to recommend changes.
  • Ammo Count: Standard
  • Main Ammo: Max AP
  • Secondary Ammo: Increased HE
  • Torpedo Ammo: Standard
  • Reloading: Enhanced
  • Turret Traverse: Hydraulic
•  
• Support
• ASW: 0.0
• Minelaying: None
• Minesweeping: One mine (sacrificial)
•  
• Flaws:
  • Overweight +10%
  • Boiler Weight +9.2%
  • Base Accuracy -2.1 %
  • Long Range Accuracy -3%

Summary

oops, I spelled 'Nickel' wrong

And there we have it - a new Fleet View. We extract information from the SDWoT and Ship Tooltip into an information pane, adjust the columns in the table for a more streamlined experience, and consolidate all the actions into a small panel below the info pane. The info pane contains a high-level summary of the ship and its design characteristics in concrete terms, and organizes the information into three main groups in order of importance: summary, primary triad (guns, armor, propulsion), and everything else. The table columns are grouped to show related information, and the action columns are removed for a more cohesive user experience. By de-emphasizing the common Ship Tooltip, we can add per-column tooltips in the table to show more detailed information for each cell if desired. This also lets us redesign the Ship Tooltip since it is no longer the only place to see certain ship-specific information (e.g. flaws) - but that's a story for another time.

Ok, Now What

"Gee" you might be saying, "that FurTrapper guy sure put a lot of thought into this." You may even find yourself agreeing with some of the design choices I've made. So the next question is "where do we go from here". Well, I would like to see this implemented pretty-much as-is. The new interface was designed specifically with reuse of existing UI elements in mind to make this as easy as possible for the devs. In lieu of that, this seems like a good case for a mod to demonstrate the viability of the design, if modding the UI is even possible. I have no practical modding experience, but if such a thing is possible I am happy to learn or assist another in doing the work (if anyone is so motivated). I really enjoy playing this game, except when it comes to the campaign UI, and I think this will be a considerable value-add while not requiring too much effort to implement.

And hey, you made it to the end. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Let me know if you have any thoughts on what I've got here - I'm designing based solely on my own experience and there is probably stuff I've overlooked. If this goes over well, I've got ideas about the rest of the UI that I can overhaul as well, so stay tuned for that.

P.S. Five Clicks

Yes, it really does take five clicks to move a fleet on the campaign map.

• Click Task Force to open TF dialog box
• Click "Move" Button in TF dialog box
• Click destination on map
• Click slider to move all ships
• Click Ok.

vs.

• Click Task Force to select it
• Click (RMB perhaps) destination on map

Edited September 8, 2024 by TheFurTrapper
fix bullets

[TheFurTrapper]

<snip>

Edited August 31, 2024 by TheFurTrapper
cleanup

[xPorkulusx]

I'm absolutely in agreement. The game's UI is a mess and the Fleet View would be a good place to start clarifying and condensing things. 

[MajesticPaul]

I like it, and you have obviously thought a lot about the best way to display the information.

The other thing I find annoying in the fleet view is that it's difficult to do things from here on anything more than a single ship. Selecting multiple ships works ok as you can sort the table to put the rows you want together and then shift-click to select multiple rows. However most of the actions don't really work on a multi-ship selection. For example I might want to put all the ships in a selection onto the same duty but I can only do that if all the ships start on the same duty. Why? Or I might want to move a selection of ships from different areas to a new port (one that I've just captured) - can't do that via a multi row selection, have to move each ship as an individual move/change port order.

And then crew. I often have a big crew pool. When I get a pop up that some ships are short of crew I need to select each ship individually and move the slider to top up the crew. If their was a checkbox on the finance screen (next to crew training funding) to turn on auto crew top up, that would save so much UI annoyance. Or it auto-topup could be a checkbox on each row in the fleet view. Anything to avoid having to mess with sliders on a ship by ship basis.

[TheFurTrapper]

17 hours ago, MajesticPaul said:

The other thing I find annoying in the fleet view is that it's difficult to do things from here on anything more than a single ship.

Yeah that's a good point. Change Port will definitely need to support multi-ship operations (like how Select Port does for ships under construction - I forgot to mention that in the original post). I haven't run into that issue with Role yet, but again, shouldn't be a big deal to make that work.

Crew is admittedly the bit I gave the least thought to, and I'm not really satisfied with the solution I came up with. The Add Crew checkbox where it currently is makes more sense than having it in the crew dialog, but it would make even more sense to (like you said) have it on the Finance view instead near the actual crew pool size. Another thing I'd like to see clarified is if the crew pool includes crew on active ships or if that is the reserve, and if the former, see what the reserve is.

[justMike247]

On 8/18/2024 at 5:59 PM, TheFurTrapper said:

P.S. Five Clicks

Yes, it really does take five clicks to move a fleet on the campaign map.

*le cough*

Point of Order, Mr FurTrapper, Sir...

it's a damned sight more than five clicks... you're forgetting all the farfing about with having to scroll from one side of the map, dragging it allllllllllllllll the way over to the other side, then scrolling to zoom on the centre of the specific location if you want your fleet to actually enter a dock rather than hang around shootin the breeze with the locals, just outside it...

 

Damn good paper, nice bit of work... the dev's will never buy it however... farrrrrrrrrr too logical

[TK3600]

UI enehancement? Rejected because it makes too much sense. Best you get is yet another ballistic rework that breaks the game. Ssee you next patch.

[TheFurTrapper]

Alright folks, let keep it civil here. Please curtail any further frustration with the devs and their practices - however justified - and focus on feedback and criticism of the original topic.

[MDHansen]

Just tossing my cent worth of approval in here aswell 👍
That Fleet view ui is not only way more uncluttered, but so much more logical. There are too many things relying on info "popups" that clutter the screen, often taking near half the screenspace.