ORIGINAL: pak19652002
These are looking good. Amazingly, the Chinese and Italian units look very different to me. The Japanese and US units are distinct as well. The US and Russian units are a little dicey, however. I didn't realize at first that both were on the Allied screenshot. Maybe you can sprinkle some of the same pixie dust on those as you did on the Italians and Chinese!
I agree that the yellow writing on the SS units needs to be spiced up a bit. CWIF was red, wasn't it? Anyway, in this case I think the contrast is key, not the color per se.
Peter
Excellent news. There might be others with blue-green instead of red-green, if I remember what I read about this back in 1982 when I did my first game. So I'll wait for addiitonal input.
What I was thinking about this morning was: adding a small square to the lower right corner of one or more countries so it is easy to tell them apart if colors don't do the job. For example, I could add a balck square to all the US land units. It is much harder to do something comparable for the air and naval units. There is very little room to work with. The best I have come up with is to place a circle around the strategic factor for air units (lower right corner, it is the only number that never has a circle on an air unit) and a circle around the anti-aircraft factor for naval units (lower left corner, it is the only number that never has a circle around it). The circles would be transparent, just a black rim. I would only do that for USA units and it could be toggled on and off. It would be simply a device for players having trouble with the colors who want that problem eliminated. What is messy about this is that each unit type (land, air, and sea) has a different indicator.
Perhaps a cleaner solution is for you (and maybe some others?) to devise a color combination that differentiaes all the major powers by color. In a sort of role reversal here, I am blind (unable to see) what would work for you and therefore can't do it myself. It doesn't matter if it looks garish or weird to anyone else, just so it works for you (as a representative of a minority). An optional color scheme could be automated (though I am not keen on doing that).
The way I worked out the colors in the screen shots posted herein was to place a simple square within a square and then make 40 copies or so. I filled 5 of them in for each major power: regular, divisional, artillery, marine, and airborne. After I had colors that looked reasonable, I used CorelDraw to tell me exactly what the RGB values were so I could incorporate them into the game. And then tweaked them over and over.
This doesn't have to be decided now. I actually prefer to let various possible solutions rise to the surface and drift around for a while. It seems as if eventually one of them will stand out as better than the rest.
