Turning Gears into a turn-based tactics game meant having to solve all kinds of new challenges with the UI. Since there were so many questions to answer, I helped out the UI team with a bunch of designs, using Gears' classic Tac-Com as a style guide to visually integrate a lot of the gameplay information.
At the beginning we investigated a much more diegetic approach, e.g. Fog of War being the actual dust and smoke from burning buildings, but it did not give us the consistency and clarity we needed for the gameplay. Connecting all the elements to a Tac-Com overlay ended up being the better way to go.