Hey,
related to the LOS post, there is the second idea. This can be UIish done in a single element, but timeline may need backend changes and won’t work that easily as the movement prediction. What I got in mind is something like a slider with the marker in the middle at 50%.
Timeline: Moving the marker to the left, you’ll go back in time. That could be interesting if many area of effects were activated in a short period of time. So my friends did a lot of things. I’ll move the slider a bit to the left, click on a little play button and can now see, what happend. Right at the beginning I could go back the 2 days in nightmare, click on play and watch the blighted spread around in a x10 fast forward playback.
Movement prediction: That will be very handy in combination with the LOS idea.I select my artillery, see their LOS and move the marker to the right. This is just something in the client happens. The units will show their positions in a future point. Maybe I have to go +1h and see, that the artillery is still not in range, so I go another +1h forward. Now it is in range and I have a point in time when I need to come back, login and fire. To be clear: going forward in time should not pinpoint the exact location of the units. Units reaching a junction can be marked with a ? to indicate further unpredictable movement or (muhahaha) split up and show their possible position on each path. Well, living units with an active path can go along just in one direction. Undead can split up on 2 paths, if there are 2 unblighted villages in range. We know how they will behave, so there is no need the split them up on all the paths they will never walk on. If that is for all units on the map and you go to far in future, your map will be so crowded, that it is not helpful anymore. But the possibility to see, how the map can look like in 12h/24h could be interesting. It’s just like sitting all together, talking about the map clicking some unit and try to figure out, what the likeliest path/position will be.
Oh dear, that was a wall of text, but I hope, I made myself clear and what it is good for.
ps: The timeline function will also made complete replays available if someone like to watch why the tournament first position won and what he did to learn from or afterwards to analyse why we lost and pinpoint a crucial error or maybe a little mistake/un-optimal decision started a fatal snowball effect… put in your ideas here