Hey,

I wanted to write a quick post to further clarify my question in the Q&A shown below:

Question:  I think the best way to show a lot of combat information is through graphs .  Digging through walls of texts is a lot of work.

Would this be difficult to add?

I have found that walls of text can be intimidating for new players.  Many players don't have the time (or desire) to go through numbers and text to figure out how they affect the gameplay.  This can cause players to get frustrated with the game in question.  Graphs are an excellent way to convey a lot of information in a relativity short amount of time.

Currently players see this screen when a battle finishes:

I can mouse over individual ships to see to see how much damage they dealt which is a great addition to the game and is the second fastest piece of information I can extract from this screen.  The first is the use of the health bar which is a form of graph.  By simply glancing at the ships, I know which ships took damage in that fight and which ones were destroyed.  A huge amount of information is quickly conveyed about what happened in the battle in those bars.  Finally if I want, I can pull up the battle log:

This is an exact blow by blow of the combat.  It gives me a huge amount of information, but as a player its pretty meaningless unless I'm willing to take 10-20 minutes to understand what exactly occurred here.  Occasionally I will do that, but honestly speaking this is a wall of text that doesn't help give me quick insights, or help me make future decisions about my fleet.

While there are several options for conveying this information I feel that graphs could be utilized here and elsewhere to inform players efficiently of the key points of a battle.  For example next to the battle log, could be a battle graphs option.

I generally like separating information by ship size or class, although there are other options.  This limits the information to a size easier to digest for the player.  One of these graphs could be a pie chart showing what percentage of the total damage each class did.  In the above example each ship did about the same amount of damage and there are 10 ships so the cruiser dealt 10% of the total damage and the frigates dealt 90%.  Another graph showing damage mitigation by class could also be helpful.  Another pie chart showing damage percentage by weapon type would be extremely useful.  Same goes for defense.

The other place I think graphs would be extremely useful is fleet design.  I'm hoping to see combat evolve to a grand scale where fleet composition becomes important and lines up with the Doctrine system that has been given thought.  In order for that to happen though players would need to be able to quickly determine what situations their fleet performs well in and take advantage of those situations.

One game that creates conditions for situational strategy extremely well is Armored Core 6.  In that game you put together a mech and then enter a mission.  There are dozens of different weapons, and many have niches.  Some weapons are good against many targets, others against single targets.  Some builds are light and quick and others are like driving a tank.  The problem is that when building a mech you get this wall of text:

This tells me a lot here and it is only helpful to players like me who are willing to spend the time to learn what those numbers indicate and how they affect the mech.  My wife is more of a casual gamer.  She despises mech building because there are too many numbers here and she's unwilling to take the time to learn what this wall of text means.  This means she uses my builds the vast majority of the time.  She has expressed desire to learn how to build a mech, but that wall of text has been difficult to overcome.

Ace Combat 6 which has an extremely similar mission structure found a way around problems like this using a spiderweb graphic.

From a quick look at the spiderweb graphic I can determine which situations a fighter is most suited for.

The F-15 outshines the Tornado in Air-to-Air combat and Speed, but the Tornado will function better against ground targets.  The effort I had to make to determine which functioned well in what situations was minimal.

A graph like this attached to fleets would be a really cool feature.  The points of the graph would be up to what situations Stardock wants to include, but could be things like:

- The fleets ability to kill many small ships

- The fleets ability to kill large ships

- Range

- Defense

- Attack

- Tactical Speed (I'd add thrusters back in that improve tactical speed of ships)