Unit Icons: State Changes

[AriochIV]

This information may be obvious to some of you, but I only just recently noticed it, so I'll mention it.

I've noticed that the shapes of the unit icons have meaning for the type of unit (round for military, triangle for civilian), but that they also change with the state of the unit. Some examples:

1. Fortification: shield icon. The units on the left are fortified. The icon returns to a circle as they attack.

2. Water Embarkation: pentagon. Note that the embarked icon is the same for military and civilian units.

3. Icon dimming. In both the regular and strategic view, in some cases, some of the player's unit icons are dimmed. I'm not sure what this indicates. Someone suggested that it has to do with whether a unit has movement points left, and this is a good idea, but it appears to be more complicated than that. If you watch the video in which the riflemen are fighting and the ships are bombarding each other, the icons of both the selected unit and units around it flash and pulsate and switch states from dim to bright and back again. So it's not clear what these states indicate.

4. City Garrison. The icon takes on a gold border. It is also positioned to the upper left of the city bar, whereas other units that appear to be just sitting in the city have the icon to the upper right. (By the way, the red target icon below the city bar is the button to active the city's bombardment ability.)

Longsword unit on city tile but not garrisoned: icon on right instead of left (ignore arrow)

 

[Geek113377]

that will be useful as far as i can remember the only way to tell if a unit was fortified in cIV was to look at the graphics or click on it

 

[Mercade]

This is a very useful observation. Another example of how you don't have to go into a secondary screen just to find out particular information about a unit or tile.

 

[Dale]

1. Fortification: shield icon. The units on the left are fortified. The icon returns to a circle as they attack.

What a crap spot to fortify. Would've been heaps better fortified where the attackers are, on hills and with a river for the added defense.

 

[staterman]

What a crap spot to fortify. Would've been heaps better fortified where the attackers are, on hills and with a river for the added defense.

Haha! Maybe they didn't get their defences in order in time... one of the chalenges of 1uphex... that said, how would they then have fortified?... hmmm

Great spot though AriochIV!

More evidence of good interface design.

 

[Schuesseled]

What a crap spot to fortify. Would've been heaps better fortified where the attackers are, on hills and with a river for the added defense.

The point of that particular moment in the demo was to show off how hard it was to kill a unit in a good position, and if he wasn't even fortified when he was acttacked then he did very well.

P.S nice finds arioch, no one else has mentioned them, and i wasn't aware of those subtle differences.

 

[Jaybe]

What a crap spot to fortify. Would've been heaps better fortified where the attackers are, on hills and with a river for the added defense.

It was a race to the high terrain and the Redcoats got there first. As I recall, it's English territory. ...

But we've seen the vid of this. The Romans sacrifice their pikes and succeed in storming the hill.
But do the Redcoats recapture it? I'll let you know in the wee hours of 9/22.