This strategy game uses color for everything and I keep issuing the wrong orders

I bought a strategy game that marks friendly units in one color, enemies in another, and different resources with slightly different shades of both. In a quiet tutorial, I can usually work it out. During a crowded battle, the entire map becomes expensive confetti.

I do not have trouble distinguishing every color in daily life, so I did not initially think to look under accessibility. I blamed the size of my monitor, then the room lighting, then my own attention. I increased saturation until the landscape looked radioactive. I changed the interface scale and gained larger versions of the same confusion.

The game does include several color presets. One makes units clearer but turns two resource icons almost identical. Another fixes the resources and makes warning zones disappear into the terrain. I can also add outlines, although the thickest outline hides small status markers. Every setting solves one part of the screen by creating a new puzzle elsewhere.

My friends play online matches and want me to join. I tried once. At a critical moment, I moved a support unit toward what I thought was a damaged ally and discovered, through immediate destruction, that I had volunteered it to the enemy. Everyone was kind. That somehow made the mistake more embarrassing.

I am not trying to make the game look exactly as designed. I would happily accept ugly colors, symbols, labels, or a simplified map if the information became reliable. The difficulty is testing systematically. I keep changing three settings at once, entering a match, and deciding the whole combination feels wrong. Then I cannot remember which change helped.

What would a sensible accessibility test look like? I am thinking of capturing the same busy scene, changing one variable at a time, and scoring whether I can identify teams, alerts, resources, and selected units within a few seconds. Is there a better way to separate color, contrast, scale, and clutter? I would also like language for telling my friends I need practice matches without turning the request into an apology. I can learn complicated strategy. I first need the game to stop testing whether I can read its paint samples.