Thinking about the… “visual overdose”… we have with all those animated effects covering troops and even making it harder, or impossible, to distinguish what is going on i imagine the devs need to plan carefully the next steps otherwise they will have a huge waste of working hours with tweaks/changes and implementations until they reach some desired stability.
With this consideration in mind i’ll throw a little idea i had: We need tabs for Buffs and Debuffs for each troop. The picture below is a sketch made on MsPaint.
Some explanation of the general concept and changes needed:
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Moving and resizing the Chat and Configuration buttons. I tried my best to keep those on a place where they wouldn’t get covered by when Buffs/Debuffs Tabs appear, but the devs should probably find a better way to realocate those and keep the original size.
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The Peasant is Stunned, Frozen, Poisoned and Deathmarked. These are sketchy icons i made, i chose a size based on the card’s skill icons. Yes, my team has no way to apply Deathmark or poison to the Peasant, but i did it anyway because i’m cruel.
The blank spaces where just measures i’ve been using, the devs would certainly consider their own measure based on the amount of Buffs/Bebuffs they have planned, but i would urge them to not make icons much smaller than that. These Debuffs will be displayed if you click on his Debuff Tab. -
The Musketeer have at least one Buff and one Debuff, that’s why he has both Tabs on him, the Reaver have at least one Buff and no Debuff, therefore there is no need to show his Debuff Tab, and the Fortress Gate have at least one Debuff and since it have no Buff his Buff Tab doesn’t shows up.
Why i think this is a good idea to be implemented?
Again, as the game moves forward we will have new effects being added, and this means we’ll get even more convulated/psychodelic/seizure-inducing animations on top of each other. Making this change doesn’t means they need to throw away the animations, but instead they can take this opportunity to give us the option to disable said animations on the configurations. Many have asked for it, but few wondered what is needed to replace these animations, and in this sense making an investiment on these Buff/Debuff Tabs would be a good solution.
Without the animations, we would still need some icons or symbols to show what Buffs and Debuffs are active, but we’ll still reach a point where things will become cluttered again even with small icons (which are undesirable) as troops already retain little free space for information… So, having these Tabs implemented will help the game and the players greatly.
Do you have a perfect vision, almost reaching the X-Ray vision of Superman? You can keep all animations on and still benefit from having a clear reminder that a troop has at least one Buff among all those Debuffs, so make no mistakes and click on the Buffs Tab to remember/see what it is.
Do you have an average vision but don’t like the animations, or do you want to turn those off for a while for any reason? Okay, don’t worry as you can still check all status applied on both teams by just accessing Buffs/Debuffs Tabs.
About the future: With this idea the devs could keep the simplest icons/symbols/animations that affect troops such as Silence or Enchanted and others as they are, it would be up to their judgement what is already easy to display on the troop. For everything else they can put in those tabs as long as they make icons/symbols for everything and make sure that those symbols have a strong identity being easy to distinguish not only by colors/contrast but also by shape and size.
I hope this helps. 