Good Riddance, Advisor Button!

From the stream, not only is there some cool new interface graphics again, but they finally removed the nearly useless advisor button (which I personally almost never click)!

So, now there's a culture/tourism button (I think) alongside the existing scoreboard, social policy, and espionage ones.

Anybody else notice some cool little things besides the big obvious ones?

The tourism screen looked very nice.

Completely agree I found the advisor button took up space.

For vets, it's completely useless. It should just be a menu options when you click into the list of UI screens (victory progress, religion, demographics, etc.) That way, it's not completely gone if you want to look at it and it can be helpful to newbies playing the game.

The military strength analysis is helpful.

i use the military strength analysis all the time. In early game it tells me if a near by warmonger is building up and army and how much I need to build to catch up.

ubergeneral said:

i use the military strength analysis all the time. In early game it tells me if a near by warmonger is building up and army and how much I need to build to catch up.

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I need to start doing that! I usually just use demographics for that, but I'm guessing that the advisers can be a little more specific about neighbors!

Louis XXIV said:

The military strength analysis is helpful.

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For some reason he always fails to mention the only civ I really care about. He will consistently tell me how everyone is doing, except my neighbour who has been making threats lately. But he's great at telling me where I've built barracks and where I still need to!

As a whole I find the advisor button to be entirely useless. The only one with any use is the military advisor, and just giving us a ranking of military strengths would make him obsolete.

Yeah, I agree a better interface would just be to allow you to click on the civ you want and have him tell you the relative strength. The scrolling was awful because, yeah, it would randomly leave someone out.

On the talk of interface, is it me, or does the Tourism icon and button look strange? I can't make out what they're supposed to be.

i'm a relatively new Civ player and the advisor button provides HEAPS of help.

kaspergm said:

On the talk of interface, is it me, or does the Tourism icon and button look strange? I can't make out what they're supposed to be.

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I agree, the icon/button looks quite strange. I had to look twice (at least) to recognize what it represents: It ought to be a combination of all three arts: a music note, a paint brush and a quill.
I think, limiting themselves to a simple music note would have been somehow more straightforward and easier to grasp.

I will miss the military advisor. All the others were useless.

Deggial said:

I agree, the icon/button looks quite strange. I had to look twice (at least) to recognize what it represents: It ought to be a combination of all three arts: a music note, a paint brush and a quill.
I think, limiting themselves to a simple music note would have been somehow more straightforward and easier to grasp.

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It's the same icon but bigger as GW slots

Not quite, as the GW slot for paintings is a palette. Anyway, I am a friend of reduction and would usually like the clearest icon possible. But don't get me wrong: I can perfectly live with the given icon!

Was the diplomacy globe cut off or is that gone too?

It is still there:

An added religion button would've been nice too.

Louis XXIV said:

Was the diplomacy globe cut off or is that gone too?

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It's there, it was just cut off in some views.

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The advisor screen would be a bit nicer if instead of tips in the form of text which you have to tediously scroll thru (if you needed to use their advice at all), it instead simply displayed the data the way in which the rest of the game does: with tables, lists, and such. The text is pretty much the same stuff anyway with a few variables, it's not very immersive to begin with.

Four tabs for each advisor. Keep their pretty portraits within the window and then just have lists of data relative to the advisor. There's no need for paragraphs of text.

Or, just simply incorporate them into the other existing windows.

Or, have their portrait pop up in a small window off to the side with a random tip pertaining to the current window you're viewing and which falls under their specialization. This would be an option of course so users can disable it if they wish.

There's lots of nicer things that can be done with them. Though, they're certainly not a priority, and there's much bigger things to work on. For now, the removal of the button is a nice start. New players probably don't go looking for them anyway, and it's better that they pop-up and interrupt them with advice instead.

The only value I ever got from the advisors was a few laughs when I opened their screen on the first turn before founding a city. I barely even notice the advisor button anymore.