I've been looking around and I've found various forums/articles describing player preferences for which colors they most choose when given various options. Most of my research comes from board games, like RISK, where a player can choose from a limited set of colors and the most often choosen color is Blue, Green, then Red, etc.

I'm working on a game that (hopefully) will support (a max of) about 16 different players (mostly AIs with some players). The normal/usual mode will be around 8 or 4. The problem that I'm running into is choosing 16 colors that are different enough so that they are easily distinguishable and easy to see on the screen/TV.

Here's the colors that I've choose so far (sorted by preference, so when 4 or 8 is playing, the top 4 or 8 will be automatically assigned).

Color.Blue, Color.Green,   Color.Red,    Color.Yellow,
Color.Black, Color.Purple, Color.Orange, Color.Gray,
Color.White, Color.Brown,  Color.Gold,   Color.Pink,
Color.Aqua,  Color.Teal,   Color.Maroon, Color.Olive

My problem is that some of these (like Maroon/Red, Gold/Yellow, etc.) look a bit different, but I don't know if it's different enough to distinguish the units. I'll probably add some unit flag or symbol (like square, circles, etc.) on the team flags, but I'd like the color to be unique enough so that I don't really need to use a shape+color on a flag.

Does anyone have a better list of colors or recommendations for replacements? The first 8 is pretty solid. I think it's just the last 2 rows of colors that need some tweaking.

thanks,

Is it important that the player can clearly distinguish units from different enemies? If not, then a possible solution would be to always make the player appear as blue to himself, and the enemies getting various colours completely unlike blue. That's also friendly to colour blind people.

I think it's important to clearly distinguish self and ally units from enemies. Hopefully, this will be multi-player and some team will be allies (but alliances may come and go).

I think that's a good idea for 'single player/campaign mode', but for multi-player play or just 'death matches', I'd like to have some colors that the player can quick see who is where.

The UI will show a list of all players associated with the player color, so they'll see "Player: Bob" in red to indicate the red units are Bob's. I'll probably show an icon if they have some sort of alliance, but I'd rather not have the player send units to the border thinking the red friendly units are maroon enemy units and not figure it out until he tries to attack, etc. I really don't know if there's a good solution for this.

You could change colours dynamically so that allies always have the same colour (or very similar shades of the same colour). In the 'player is always blue' model, of course, your own allies would also always be blue. Oh, of course, you should also make it so that player X appears to Y and Z under the same colour, so Y and Z can chat about uniting forces against the green alliance and be sure they mean the same green alliance.

Giving all players from one alliance the same colour also reduces your trouble with too similar shades in most practical situations: I'd expect it to be usual for players to naturally form large alliances until there's only four or so left. That's sort of an universal strategy game constant.

Thanks. I think I might devise something from this technique.