Just so we are clear, we are 20 posts into this thread and even the people who say they like the existing icons concede that they should be changed somewhat.
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then why add icons? just depend on muscle memory and text? Then this entire thread is useless and your video is waste of time?
Icons add to the experience, the look the feel, the immersion, consistency. Experience is created, itās personal and it adds a lot of value. People pay for the experience, not icons and texts, itās a complete package. itās users experience of the final product. The current icons go very well with the AOE theme of metal embossing, encyclopedia and tactile feel and historical. That is their DLS, so they will go with it, slight changes are need even I agree, but they are not dysfunctional.
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@TheFibrewire
To give a clear example for why AoE 4 icons are bad:
In AoE 2 if you open the blacksmith for 0.3 seconds and then close it, you can recognize which tier each of the upgrades were.
But in AoE 4 if you open the the blacksmith for 0.3 seconds and then close it, you canāt recognize which tier each of the upgrades were.
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You add icons because thatās how the human brain works. Iāll give you an example. I know how to play the Moonlight Sonata on the piano. The full piece. I donāt even think about the notes anymore because Iāve played it so many times.
When I play the piano, I hit the key and I get a sound back to my ear and I make no mistakes. When you take away the sound - i.e. if I play the piece on a keyboard thatās not turned on, I can actually play the piece just fine as wellā¦ but guess what? I start making mistakes. Misclicks. Stutter in some areas. Forget and rewind to continue. The human brain is build on muscle memory, yes, but that experience is built with the condition of you using your eyes and ears. Can I technically learn an entire new piano piece WITHOUT sound? Absolutely, all I have to do is play the right keys. Will it make that experience miserable? Heck yes. Learning a piece with the sound on HELPS you click the right keys.
So, if we donāt get that extreme, even with 100,000 of hours of muscle memory, bad icons lead to you misclicking because of how difficult it is to tell apart in milliseconds. Not to mention getting used to it. You take away the sound in my piano and I start making mistakes. You take away the color and proper shapes on my icons and I begin misclicking.
TL;DR: Developing muscle memory with the current icon system is like learning a new piano piece without sound. Technically doable, but an awful experience.
And Dysfunctional is a hyperbole of course. By definition, you click on them and they work. They are poorly designed that hinders the gameplay experience would be a more accurate descriptor.
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I like the style of the UI, but itās really lacking. Thereās so much more that can be done with it. Even the color coding would make it so much more vibrant and match the gameās art style of a painting.
Things like this shouldnāt happen. Thatās the problem, it doesnāt pop out enough.
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Idk how the āsame icon with different number of dotsā can improve identifiability, compared to icons with distinctive designs.
Letās say youāre in a fast competitive gameplay, which assumes great familiarity with the game.
With that level of familiarity, you can easily recall the tier of the icons if they each has a distinctive look.
For the same icon with different number of dots, youāll need to stare closely to check the number of dots every time. Because they all look the same and memory does not help at all.
Not to mention the dots are quite small compared to the size of the icon.
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I donāt knwo if you know or played this game but this video shows how much thoughts can go into the process of designing the UI, Map, Colors and everything that makes a good visual and easy to understand UI.
[Summoner's Rift Preview | Gameplay - League of Legends - YouTube](blueprint of UI thoughts :D)
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Things like an anvil, a forge, a medieval helmet, chain mail, etc. are embedded into our culture because we see them a lot in movies (Lord of the Rings is one good example). I had seen chain mail in movies when I was a kid but AoE II taught me its actual name, thatās how good of a teacher a good icon is. Few people have seen an actual arrow in the flesh, but we use its symbolism for everything, even modern computer UIs.
For other things that are not that common, I donāt know about you, but if I canāt make a relationship between a guy standing right next to a fire and an increase in armor, I am motivated to Google it and figure it out.
I would say that most people drawn to the AoE franchise have some slight interest in learning history. Bronze colored, embossed icons that have the same feel to them may be exactly what the devs were aiming for, but they are as terrible as those icon packs you once got for your phone:
Something like this is exactly what I meant. The art is fine, IMO, but some color coding like this should be 
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The most pathetic thing is that a random guy with some basic photshop skills has created an UI that is literally 100 times better than what āprofesionalsā have done for an AAA game that costs 60$.
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Iām not an expert in UI/UX but I work with UI/UX regularly and hereās how I think the icons should work:
At the first few times you play the game, no matter how the icons look like, mono-color, silhouette, or realistic images, you wonāt be able to tell which is which and will have to read the tooltips to start understanding.
After that, your brain will start to make connections between the icons and its meaning. The better icons are designed, the less time it should take for these connections to start forming and the less time it should take for you each time looking at them to realize what it is. The whole point of using icons are to enable users to tell what the button does in miliseconds with minimal brain power spent on them, so that brain power can be spent on more important things like strategy and planning. If icons cannot do that job, weād rather put text directly to the buttons. With that said, icon design needs to satisfy these requirements:
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It needs to be easily distinguishable from each other. Human brain looks for patterns, namely shapes and colors here. So the more different shapes and colors icons have, the quicker our brains can recognize them.
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But if all icons look completely different from each other, it will put a burden to our memory to remember all of them individually. In order to memorize a large amount of data, our brains need to have an organized system, where icons are grouped and sorted logically, i.e. the more closely related 2 icons are, the more similar shapes and colors they should have. For example, we make some rules: 1) Background colors are for broad categorizing, red background on all attacking icons, blue background for all defensive icons, etcā¦ 2) Shapes are for distinguishing different techs, all melee attack upgrades have the sword shape, ranged attack upgrades have the arrow shape,ā¦ 3) Shades are for different levels of techs, lower level upgrades of the same tech has lighter color, higher level upgrades has darker color. This kind of systemic shape and color coding will help reducing the number of patterns we have to memorize a lot, and our brain will have much easier time to navigate in an organized system than in a mess.
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If random shapes and colors are assigned to each icons, we can still memorize them eventually, but the memory will form quicker and more stable if the shapes and colors have meaningful connections with the actual meaning of icons. For example, if the ranged attack upgrade icon has the shape of an arrow, our brains will make a very easy connection and the next time looking at the icon, we wonāt need time to figure what it means again. The current ranged attack upgrade icon fails because if you look in the details, itās actually and arrow shooting through an obstacle, but since the icons are small, in the game we donāt look at the details but just the overall shape, and its overall shape doesnāt remind us of the arrow at all. Worse, its overall shape is very similar to the melee attack upgrade icon with a sword instead of an arrow, which looks very similarly.
All in all, the current icon system falls short of all 3 requirements above. I really hope the devs will listen and rework the icons before they release the game.
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You canāt really say that considering how many people are actually agreeing with him, me being one of them.
I like your suggestions and mock-ups, certainly an improvement even thought I still PERSONALLY donāt like how simple this Icons look, but it is a massive improvement nonetheless.
I LOVED your Classic UI option dude, it is EXACTLY what I want from the game at launch, I would tag every single dev if I knew their names lmfao!!
Thank you for putting in the time to make these man, I really appreciate it.
The Tech Tree is also a major improvement, but I think they should redesign it be more visually appealing.
Anyway, thank you.
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I only find the blacksmith icons to very badly designed, rest all are unique and convey the meaning. The problem with blacksmtih icons is, they both are in half X silhouettes. They have to change one of the icons, armor or damage. Like instead of arrow breaking, maybe arrow bouncing off or something, so that it offer a different silhouette. other than that I think all icons are very easily recognizable and tell what it does, and sets the expectation.
The only way to differentiate between armor and damage is either changing the icon itself or provide some colour change. Also they need to have some I, II, III roman number indicators for the tiers.
What you written is very good, real good insights and hope devs have a change in mind.
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Agree, when you see the UI/icons of age IV it doesnāt reflect a age of empires game as simple as that, there is nothing of age of empires in that UI, thatās why I said it needs a complete remake, not just change some colors.
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Yeah, I think that is one of the few things our community has agreed on in the majority lmfao.
Discussions around Age IV seem very heated and passionate, specially those regarding civilizations. Its good to see the love this Series has, but it must be a huuuge pressure for the devsā¦ Man, I got into the game industry because of AoE but Iām happy Iām not an AoE Dev lmfao.
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Wonderful! Thank you!
Well you coveniently havenāt adressed the issue he has with the tier of the upgrade/unit being a tiny dot at the top of the icon. This is clearly not distinguishable when you have high enough apm.
Liked the icons, but it needs some different colors.
Honestly? After playing aoe4 like a madman both times it was available, I had no idea there was even an indication of upgrade level in blacksmith until after the stress test was over, and I learned it through a post here. Iām completely clueless about the subject and have no idea what makes good UI design, but this canāt be it.
It isnāt the thing that makes a good UI, but it is a part of it, and more importantly it is the thing that makes the AoE 4 icons bad.
There are many criteria that UI icons needs to fulfill, and the AoE 4 icons do meet many of those criteria. So I just mentioned the criterion which the AoE 4 icons failed to fulfill.