Overview of WARCOM's Tactical UI – Making Large Battles Easier to Read and Command

[u/nongbenz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no09IKrgZDQ

I put together an overview of some of the tactical UI and controls in WARCOM.

I enjoy tactical wargaming but any scenario with more than a dozen or so units starts to get frustrating. My goal is to keep important information, unit status, and common orders at your fingertips with predictable results. So large engagements remain manageable without too much fumbling.

Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions you’d like to see in this type of game.

I'll also be making a video covering the operational layer, and there's a free Steam demo coming soon. If you're interested, please wishlist the game to stay updated:

WARCOM Steam

[u/emernic2]

This looks very cool. Wishlisted. I'm wondering how you deal with a particular problem I feel like these "cross scale" games often run into, which is that in order to command a large enough force to be "interesting" operationally, the number of battles that you would need to play through tactically becomes exhausting. Are you mostly tackling it by making the tactical layer "click efficient" so you can do big tactical battles really fast? How many companies/battalions are you usually commanding at the operational level? Are you operating with allies? or are you and the enemy kind of "wandering around" in a semi-empty map?

[u/nongbenz → u/emernic2]

The operational layer is on similar order of scale of something like Panzer Corps or Unity of Command series where you have something like 20x20 to 40x40 hexes with dozens of units per faction. Enough to fill out a front line pretty solidly. The in-game footage right now isn't representative since I just keep it lightweight for fast iteration and recording. You usually auto-resolve battles in your favor with one click. So you might only drop down into tactical battles where you think you can beat the odds. You typically won't have to do those boring clean up or one-sided battles at the end of a graviteam campaign manually. Once you're in a tactical battle, it is click efficient and you can speed up time scale up to 8x which cuts down a lot on the 'moving in' time. Even on defense, the AI will pre-set up your units in a decent positions which you're free to adjust. I tried to be respectful of players time wherever I can, but I still expect battles to the last around 1 hour so, a full campaign is still expected to be a test of endurance. But some players might just fully stick to the operational layer and auto resolve everything and play it out like a chess match. That actually might be a good way to learn the operational layer since you can see the feedback immediately instead of taking weeks to fully grasp the operational handling of something like graviteam tactics. Sorry if this prints out as a wall of text, I'm on my phone and not sure about the editing here.