just out of curiosity: i'm surprised you're saying icons diminish at-a-glance readability, isn't it generally the other way round? at least once a player already has a rough idea what the different options are for, and only needs something that makes it easy to quickly execute the intended action.
probably also personal preference to some degree though, since different people process information more easily in different forms.
I meant for someone's first time encountering it, yeah. But once you know "select 2nd option to do X", you don't even need the icon at that point, really. And if you *do* need to look because maybe you got confused for a minute and don't remember which option is which, having text instead of an icon is again superior, unless it's a whole lot of text. For bonus points, text is also recognizable as a shape, especially when it's short, so you don't always have to engage the "reading" part of the brain.
So the icons are rarely
actually useful, at least IMO. Most of the time they're a UI concession - there isn't enough space to lay things out with text, or it would look too busy if you did, so you put in icons because you need *something* there and it can't be text, not because icons are particularly great. On the bright side, they can look very nice.
I don't want to make too general of a statement, though. For certain things, icons do a very good job. For example, the back/forward/reload/home browser buttons, that works well because you know what these actions are going to be going in, and the icons are very clean and symbolic. But for things that are more complex and/or novel, I think it works progressively less well.
It's also a function of what else is being used. I think a mix of both works best - too much text everywhere, and it's too busy. Too many icons, and it's too arcane. But now I'm getting way off on a tangent
off the top of my head, one "other thing" that i think would be nice is having hyperspace jumppoints display nearby objects, in the same way they do now in normal campaign view.
That actually feels like it's more information than should not be available from the map vs actually going there, and in any case, the hyperspace map doesn't have jump-points on it in the first place.