the interface in civ 5 is definitely significantly inferior to that in civ 4. broadly speaking i find that i have to click two or three times in civ 5 when i would have only had to click once in civ 4.
- City screen is messy and you cant find all info easily.
i think the city screen is probably the single biggest interface disaster in the game. a few examples:
-- in civ 4, to add something to the build queue all you had to do was shift-click the icon. now you click "show queue," then "add to queue," then the item, then "back," then "hide queue." that's 5 clicks instead of 1. i've taken to leaving the queue permanently open just to get rid of two of those clicks.
-- to move a worker you now have to open & close "citizen allocation focus" as well as the clicks required for the actual move. you also have to do this to see the yields of unworked tiles. they may have thought removing that display made it easier to see what was actually being worked, but it ends up making citizen management more cumbersome.
-- the building list on the right takes up a huge amount of space, mostly just for the picture circle and then a bunch of blank space. it makes sense for buildings with specialists--i actually like this feature--but making non-specialist buildings the same size is just clunky. moreover when you mouse over a building it still tells you how many hammers it requires even though that info is irrelevant now.
-- the great people bars also take up a huge amount of room if you've got a few of them in a city.
-- even if you've locked workers, if you start moving them into and out of specialist slots the game sometimes unlocks your
entire workforce. i find that locked workers have been moved with alarming frequency.
- Very little tooltip info when you mouse over anything (workers, units ... etc)
i find it bizarre that the only way to find out how many XPs your own unit has is to select it and then mouse over the circle in the lower left. the F3 screen is also massively inferior to its equivalent in civ 4, as it doesn't tell you how many XPs each unit has, it doesn't show their names, and there is no way to find out where they are on the map.
- No detailed info screen for available trades and tradable resources like in CIV4
this has actually been added with the recent patch. go to the F2 screen and click the "resources" tab. it's still more clunky than the one in civ 4, but at least it's workable.
- No info screen for relationships between civilizations like in CIV4
i was just noticing that i have no way of telling what the AIs think of other AIs. of course i suppose this isn't as relevant to know as it was in civ 4, but it would be interesting.
- Till now I dont know how to check how many turns left for a deal with the AI to end.
go to the F4 screen, choose the "deals" tab, and then select the deal in question and mentally add 30 to the turn it started on. still clunky, but doable.
nonetheless the "deals" display is much more inconvenient than the same screen in civ 4, because all you see is a list of deals with different countries and the turn they each started on. thus if you want to see which one is your open borders deal with china, you have to click on all the deals you have with china until you find it. in civ 4 diplomacy the leader themselves would give you a list of all your current deals, and the deals screen summarized very quickly what you were importing from and exporting to a given civ.
- no info screen for all your cities as in Civ4 BTS, where you can see a list for all your cities with info like culture, populations, gold, science, hammers and current production.
that's the F2 screen. it nonetheless doesn't show great people production, and it doesn't let you sort by item being produced if, say, you wanted to group all the cities producing libraries.
- No info screen for wonders where you can check who built them.
that was added with the patch as well. go to F4, click "global politics" i think it's called, and it will list all the civs you've met along with the wonders they've each built.
another issue is if i have the F2 screen open and then open F3 as well, i shouldn't have to go back and close the F2 screen once i'm done with F3. and while i do like the idea of the brief display in the upper left, you can't toggle through by hitting just one button: you first have to close the one you're on before you can choose the next. i end up finding it faster to just hit F2 or F3. this need to close everything in civ 5 feels particularly cumbersome given that civ 4 proves that it's not necessary.
i realize the whole point of civ 5 is to not be civ 4, but given the large number of ways that the new interface is less efficient than the old, perhaps this is one area where imitation might be better than innovation.
