Poor interface

[taulph88]

I talked about this in another thread in Bug Reports:

Some boosted techs/civics has the "BOOSTED" text with its proper fill highlighted color. Others don't show the fill color at all, but has the filled arrow and the filled semi-circle. This happens so randomly that it can't be fixed. Quill18 noticed this too on one of his preview playthroughs (I think it was Rome).

When clicking on a unit, you can click elsewhere to deselect it. However when clicking on a city, you cannot click elsewhere to de-select the city.

On a coastal city, I had one water tile that had a resource, so I could not get a harbor district. However on the city screen it would not show me other tiles that I can purchase where I could build the district.

 

[VirtuallyJesse]

Is there any word whatsoever that Firaxis is listening to the massive complaints about this ****ty UI? Everything in this thread needs to be shown directly to the UI designers.

I wouldn't expect them to make any changes outside of the next expansion. Instead, look for modding news and hope we can fix it ourselves. Steam store still lists Workshop as a feature, so we know its coming.. just a matter of when.

 

[steve_indy]

A lot of this is repeated elsewhere, but the most annoying UI bits for me:
1) No wait button for units
2) Separate commands for linked units
3) Hard to hit tiles correctly (resource, name, etc. blocks the click)
4) Unit cycling is a mess - jumps all around, interrupts clicks, should stay local if I click on unit near a bunch of other units
5) No demographics or other status measure (population, science, production, army power)
6) Movement changes make you click "skip turn" if you have movement left, but not enough in your current path
7) Where are my luxuries going? Do I need more, have enough??? There should be a summary for this.
8) Overall lack of information screens about my empire, and comparisons to other empires, that have been standards for the CIV franchise

There are other aspects that bother me, but these are the main UI issues. Almost a great game, I think it's fixable in expansions. Still fun, and better than CIV V on release.

And... removed "c" from "center on unit." WTF - that's just a foul. When they fix the "wait" bit, put that back on "w."

One more PS - units skipping turn is a permanent decision. You should be able to go back and do something with it. With simultaneous turns in multi-player, this will be a big issue. They've done that right since CIV IV - why go backward?

 

[Matte979]

My gripes, initial short list.

City Screen, Really great concept with Amenities and Food controlling growth , but some better way of showing what's going on in the city besides having to switch between tabs and guess.
Luxuries - No overview where they go or what's traded etc.
Diplomacy - What deals do you have, no overview.
Trade - No previous trade route highlighted no list of which trades you have etc.

Lots of improvements.

Seems like they ran out of time due to having to create a new engine.

 

[LDiCesare]

5) No demographics or other status measure (population, science, production, army power)

There is the overview of your civ (button at the top, no icon, no hotkey) and the victory conditions panel (button to the right, third from the border) give a few tidbits.
I know that's not what you seek, but it's something and it's already hard enough to find, so I thought I'd point it out.

The best luxury screen I've found is the diplo screen. Go see someone, look at what you've got in a readable presentation, say goodbye.

 

[Plus Ultra]

Bugs and missing info panels are making it harder for us to adapt to the new UI than it should be.

I don't think the UI is abysmal, I'm starting to get used to it now and I think it shows potential.

 

[Ruszel]

Below is my list of IU/UX complaints, that I have already posted in another thread. This is pretty much a compilation of issues mentioned above and elsewhere, although they all came straight from my first full playthrough of the game.

-

In general, information is often unavailable or buried too deep. Some interface solutions are far off from optimal and it seems as if, in many instances, they have been designed with noobs in mind. In no particular order:

1. No demographics tab.
   There is some partial info about it here and there, but that does not seem enough for a game like Civ.
   
   
2. Unhelpful Civilopedia.
   Once again unnecessarily criptic and brief. Descriptions for many items seem more like placeholders than helpful information. And there is no "back" button. C'mon!
   
   
3. City(?) report tab.
   ...is an example of a really bad design. More annoying than useful.
   
   
4. Ammenities mystery.
   Some form of summing up and following what's going on with ammenities in your empire is a must. But it evidently did not seem that way to developers. There is a similar problem with housing, although not as glaring.
   
   
5. Gossip dumb.
   Valuable information from gossips gets flooded by meaningless crap like someone having build granary. I can't even tell if there really is anything interesting there, because this constant avalanche of bullfeathers just forced me to ignore it altogether.
   
   
6. Unit cycling.
   Player should be able to turn it off. It causes unwanted unit movements again and again and pisses me off like hell.
   
   
7. Removing city screen was not a good idea.
   I can imagine that developers wanted to make the game more immersive (?) or approachable for noobs (?), but the prescribed cure turned out to be much worse than the disease. It forces you to literally click thousands of additional times per playthrough to get to options (production, buying tiles, etc.) and info about the city (buildings, what the hell is going on with ammenities, etc.).
   Moreover, you can't queue production and even cycle through cities with keyboard arrows (why not?).
   
   
8. No game log.
   Quite a lot happens during the game and often you just notice that something happened, but not quite exactly what it was (notifications disapear pretty quickly). Well, you have no option to get back to it.
   
   
9. Border expansion.
   No information about it. You can't tell when it will happen, which tile will be claimed next, and the game does not notify you when it happens.
   
   
10. Unit list.
    Hidden. I haven't even noticed it at all during my first playthrough. And I won't justify it with a lack of perceptivity on my part. I have played Civ games for 15 years and if I haven't detected it by myself, then it is just plain bad UX design.
    
    
11. Experience points.
    ...for units should be more readily visible. Why I do have to hover at the edge of screen over a barely visible bar to get a small tooltip about it?
    
    
12. Tooltips.
    A game like Civ should be flooded with tooltips. Everywhere. And if someone doesn't like it, just let them switch it off. Currently, in many situations, there is no helpful information readily available. Why do I have to go to Civilopedia to see district bonuses? The same goes for the already built district. Why the map with turned on yiealds does not show me their production?
    
    
13. Diplomacy overview.
    Wouldn't you think that a need for one is quite obvious? Maybe I am dumb, but it seems that now you have to just manually click through all the civilizations to get some basic data about it.
    
    
14. Renaming cities and religions.
    Why they decided to remove this is a mystery to me. You seem to be able to rename your religion, but my copy of the game did not quite allow for it to happen.
    
    
15. Cryptic tech boosts.
    It won't be rare that you get some technology or civic boost and will not know what caused it. Why the notification doesn't tell you that in a clear way?
    
    
16. Exiting pop-ups and tabs.
    Often it is waaay too hard. Why do you have to aim for the little X at the top right to make it go away? For the wonder mini-movies, clicking on the screen should be enough. For discoveries, clicking outside their pop-up should do the trick.
    
    
17. Animated leaders and diplomacy screen.
    When leaders contact you or react to something, you have to wait too long to take action. It would be all nice and fun if it happend only a few times per game, but for a playthrough that takes dozens of hours it gets old very quickly.
    
    
18. Layers.
    This is not a bad idea in itself, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, it is way too heavy handed – turning any layer on makes terrain features barely visible. It is even worse for settlers, because their layer (I can't now remember what it is called) turnes on automatically and makes it needlessly hard to move them around. And it pisses me off.
    
    
19. Religion enhancement screen.
    It might not be the only one that does it, but this was the one that came to my mind first. What is the problem? Well, its priority seems to be beauty, not usefulness. When you are choosing a pantheon, it takes over your screen, so you have to constantly switch it on and off to check subsequent bonuses with the land you own (and might own in the future).
    Making it a sidebar would be a better solution. Moreover, choice list is unnecessarily crammed in a tight space, so you have to scroll it up and down to go through your options, while a huge section of the religion screen above is designated for your religion's symbol.
    
    
20. Not remembering game settings.
    Currently you have to set your game from scratch each time. Jesus Christ, this just seems like game devs wanted to piss us off here, intentionally.
    
    
21. No restart location option.
    It is a minor issue for me and I would easily let it slide, but there are so many issues like this with this game...
    
    
22. Tile allocation.
    Is it just me, or did allocating citiens to tiles become a pain in the ass?
    
    
23. Lack of keyboard shortcuts.
    Many of the problems with UX (city screen!) might have been mitigated by shortcuts. But these are only available for the major overview tabs.
    
    
24. Notifications.
    Again, this might just be me, but I could use more notifications about deals ending, barbarian camp spawns, cities growing in the early eras, and so on.
    
    
25. Map issues.
    Hills are sometimes hard to distinguish from flat land. Similar problem for improved/unimproved tiles. Tribal villages might be a little hard to notice, but I am OK with that myself.

To end on a positive and not to leave the wrong expression:
I like quite a lot about the game, but the many problems with user interface just grind my gears. Make it right!

 

[Plus Ultra]

This is pretty much a compilation of issues mentioned above and elsewhere, although they all came straight from my first full playthrough of the game.

Thanks Ruszel, that sums it up quite nicely. I agree with every single issue you have listed here.

A couple of hopefully helpful comments to your list:

-10. Unit List: Can be found by clicking on the "name" of any unit, in its info panel. Wierd place to put it, but there it is.
-14. Renaming cities and religions: You *seem* to be able to choose from a list of existing religions or create a new one (with the symbols provided) and name it.
-17. Animated leaders and diplomacy screen: Pressing ESC closes that window for me.

And this seems as good place as any to include a couple of issues of my own:

26.Changing Goverment Policies - Currently a Leap of faith.
Will that 100% Campus adjacency bonus policy give you more science per turn than a 100% bonus on Campus district buildings? Good luck finding out.
Having a summary that includes the effects of a change in policies would be amazing.

27. Obsolete policies simply disappear
When one of your active policies become obsolete the game needs to tell you. Simply making the policy disappear makes looking for a substitute much harder.

28. Final Techs have to be reselected.
Future tech (Science) and Social Media/Globalization (Culture) need to reselect themselves as active the second time they are researched. Just like in Civ V.
I had to 1.Close the window for the tech pop-up and 2.Select it in the research list for 9 times in my latest Science focused game.

29. Deals ending without any way to know.
There is no way to check active trade deals, and no notification when a deal ends.

30. No way to renew trade routes.
Unless I'm mistaken, there is no indication of where did that trade route go before, it just asks for a new destination.

31. The "Possible trade routes" tab on the trade route menu is bugged.
It shows nothing for me, nada, when there are clearly lots of posibilities, making comparing between traderoutes from different cities impossible.

30. Luxury resources not showing in top bar.
Probably a bug, but only strategic resources are showing in such bar for me. This, combined with the rest of issues make it impossible to know what is happening with your luxury resources.

 

[Znabel15]

This is a perfect summary.
And seeing this summary makes me wonder even more what the heck the devs were thinking.

Below is my list of IU/UX complaints, that I have already posted in another thread. This is pretty much a compilation of issues mentioned above and elsewhere, although they all came straight from my first full playthrough of the game.

-

In general, information is often unavailable or buried too deep. Some interface solutions are far off from optimal and it seems as if, in many instances, they have been designed with noobs in mind. In no particular order:

1. No demographics tab.
   There is some partial info about it here and there, but that does not seem enough for a game like Civ.
   
   
2. Unhelpful Civilopedia.
   Once again unnecessarily criptic and brief. Descriptions for many items seem more like placeholders than helpful information. And there is no "back" button. C'mon!
   
   
3. City(?) report tab.
   ...is an example of a really bad design. More annoying than useful.
   
   
4. Ammenities mystery.
   Some form of summing up and following what's going on with ammenities in your empire is a must. But it evidently did not seem that way to developers. There is a similar problem with housing, although not as glaring.
   
   
5. Gossip dumb.
   Valuable information from gossips gets flooded by meaningless crap like someone having build granary. I can't even tell if there really is anything interesting there, because this constant avalanche of bullfeathers just forced me to ignore it altogether.
   
   
6. Unit cycling.
   Player should be able to turn it off. It causes unwanted unit movements again and again and pisses me off like hell.
   
   
7. Removing city screen was not a good idea.
   I can imagine that developers wanted to make the game more immersive (?) or approachable for noobs (?), but the prescribed cure turned out to be much worse than the disease. It forces you to literally click thousands of additional times per playthrough to get to options (production, buying tiles, etc.) and info about the city (buildings, what the hell is going on with ammenities, etc.).
   Moreover, you can't queue production and even cycle through cities with keyboard arrows (why not?).
   
   
8. No game log.
   Quite a lot happens during the game and often you just notice that something happened, but not quite exactly what it was (notifications disapear pretty quickly). Well, you have no option to get back to it.
   
   
9. Border expansion.
   No information about it. You can't tell when it will happen, which tile will be claimed next, and the game does not notify you when it happens.
   
   
10. Unit list.
    Hidden. I haven't even noticed it at all during my first playthrough. And I won't justify it with a lack of perceptivity on my part. I have played Civ games for 15 years and if I haven't detected it by myself, then it is just plain bad UX design.
    
    
11. Experience points.
    ...for units should be more readily visible. Why I do have to hover at the edge of screen over a barely visible bar to get a small tooltip about it?
    
    
12. Tooltips.
    A game like Civ should be flooded with tooltips. Everywhere. And if someone doesn't like it, just let them switch it off. Currently, in many situations, there is no helpful information readily available. Why do I have to go to Civilopedia to see district bonuses? The same goes for the already built district. Why the map with turned on yiealds does not show me their production?
    
    
13. Diplomacy overview.
    Wouldn't you think that a need for one is quite obvious? Maybe I am dumb, but it seems that now you have to just manually click through all the civilizations to get some basic data about it.
    
    
14. Renaming cities and religions.
    Why they decided to remove this is a mystery to me. You seem to be able to rename your religion, but my copy of the game did not quite allow for it to happen.
    
    
15. Cryptic tech boosts.
    It won't be rare that you get some technology or civic boost and will not know what caused it. Why the notification doesn't tell you that in a clear way?
    
    
16. Exiting pop-ups and tabs.
    Often it is waaay too hard. Why do you have to aim for the little X at the top right to make it go away? For the wonder mini-movies, clicking on the screen should be enough. For discoveries, clicking outside their pop-up should do the trick.
    
    
17. Animated leaders and diplomacy screen.
    When leaders contact you or react to something, you have to wait too long to take action. It would be all nice and fun if it happend only a few times per game, but for a playthrough that takes dozens of hours it gets old very quickly.
    
    
18. Layers.
    This is not a bad idea in itself, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, it is way too heavy handed – turning any layer on makes terrain features barely visible. It is even worse for settlers, because their layer (I can't now remember what it is called) turnes on automatically and makes it needlessly hard to move them around. And it pisses me off.
    
    
19. Religion enhancement screen.
    It might not be the only one that does it, but this was the one that came to my mind first. What is the problem? Well, its priority seems to be beauty, not usefulness. When you are choosing a pantheon, it takes over your screen, so you have to constantly switch it on and off to check subsequent bonuses with the land you own (and might own in the future).
    Making it a sidebar would be a better solution. Moreover, choice list is unnecessarily crammed in a tight space, so you have to scroll it up and down to go through your options, while a huge section of the religion screen above is designated for your religion's symbol.
    
    
20. Not remembering game settings.
    Currently you have to set your game from scratch each time. Jesus Christ, this just seems like game devs wanted to piss us off here, intentionally.
    
    
21. No restart location option.
    It is a minor issue for me and I would easily let it slide, but there are so many issues like this with this game...
    
    
22. Tile allocation.
    Is it just me, or did allocating citiens to tiles become a pain in the ass?
    
    
23. Lack of keyboard shortcuts.
    Many of the problems with UX (city screen!) might have been mitigated by shortcuts. But these are only available for the major overview tabs.
    
    
24. Notifications.
    Again, this might just be me, but I could use more notifications about deals ending, barbarian camp spawns, cities growing in the early eras, and so on.
    
    
25. Map issues.
    Hills are sometimes hard to distinguish from flat land. Similar problem for improved/unimproved tiles. Tribal villages might be a little hard to notice, but I am OK with that myself.

To end on a positive and not to leave the wrong expression:
I like quite a lot about the game, but the many problems with user interface just grind my gears. Make it right!

 

[skyclad]

Id like to please if you could add to the list, that we cannot move with numpad... Serious problem for me!

 

[Ruszel]

26.Changing Goverment Policies - Currently a Leap of faith.
Will that 100% Campus adjacency bonus policy give you more science per turn than a 100% bonus on Campus district buildings? Good luck finding out.
Having a summary that includes the effects of a change in policies would be amazing.

Can't argue with that. For me, this is one of the symptoms of a more general problem with the interface, where much of the information is either hidden of totally unavailable. I can suspect that it's been done that way because of either a hurried release, or for the sake of a "smoother and less data-cluttered playing experience" (...for the newcomers & casuals). Such an interpretation could also explain many other UI/UX issues with Civ6...

And I am not amused by this approach. It just seems to me like the devs prioritized newcomers (+shine and glitter) ahead of loyal Civ players (&giving us all the necessary options and information).

But maybe I am jumping to conclusions too quickly. Either way, I strongly believe that modders will once again make the interface right eventually (may they be praised!), as they did with Civ5.

In general, I am just surprised that so many obvious and seemingly easy to fix problems made it to the final release. On the other hand, I am not surprised by some mechanics and balancing issues, as these are to be expected from a game as complex as Civ.

 

[RisingSun]

This might have been mentioned already throughout this post, but:

- Please fix some unreadable color combination (Scythia) and increase the differende between some others (Arabia/Russia) are indistinguishable, especially in the mini-map.
- Add some anti-alias to the city name/population label above cities... the serif text looks ugly as it is now...

 

[Lord Tirian]

Seems like they ran out of time due to having to create a new engine.

Haven't had the chance to check it myself, but somebody on reddit had a look through the files and it looks like there are a lot of to-do comments in the UI files. Looks like they literally ran out of time and rather aimed for something that's working.

The upside is, of course, that it means the UI will warrant another look from the devs and hopefully use the feedback from players to improve it in addition to the planned to-dos.

 

[Wade-FIN]

Notifications.
Again, this might just be me, but I could use more notifications about deals ending, barbarian camp spawns, cities growing in the early eras, and so on.

That is a good list that contains many of the problems I have with the game. I'd like to mention one more notification that would seem useful to me. I don't have the unit auto-cycling on and I often find myself waiting for the next turn even if it has already started. The only small indication of the new turn is in the lower right corner when the "please wait" text changes to something else and the globe spinning animation ends. A small change in the corner of the screen is very easy to miss at least with a larger monitor when your focus is in the middle of the screen.

 

[Disgustipated]

Anyone know how to rename your units? And how do you tell how much experience they have? I can't seem to find this anywhere.

 

[narmox]

Anyone know how to rename your units? And how do you tell how much experience they have? I can't seem to find this anywhere.

Renaming happens after they gain some experience (not sure how much/what level they need to be), and is indicated by a feather (like the old style writing feathers) icon. Experience is a 2 pixel high bar at the bottom of the screen below the unit info, very hard to see, but it's there.

 

[n00buk]

Anyone know how to rename your units? And how do you tell how much experience they have? I can't seem to find this anywhere.

You can rename unit after it gets 2 upgrades.

 

[bcaiko]

I think the universal consensus is that the UI needs a lot of quality of life improvements. One thing I would constructively suggest is using colors on the notifications. They all run together now, looking like white meh. The symbols aren't enough to differentiate the important notifications from the less relevant ones.

I'd also like it if we received better notification of very important things, like enemy units/barbs appearing near your borders. The game doesn't always seem to give this notification, in my experience.

27. Obsolete policies simply disappear
When one of your active policies become obsolete the game needs to tell you. Simply making the policy disappear makes looking for a substitute much harder.
​

I was wondering about this! At some point during my first game, my amenities per stationed unit policy simply disappeared. I really liked it, and there didn't seem to be an actual replacement. This is a terrible UI decision. Policies shouldn't go obsolete at all.

 

[Mustakrakish]

I would add the problem with city-states that are at war with you. The problem is there's no any clear visual indication that you are in fact at war. Sure you get that little notification with a bunch of other notifications you ignore on the right of the screen, but that's not nearly enough. At least in V the notification was animated and got your attention, plus you could clearly see it on the map.

Just today out of the blue La Venta captures my builder that was passing by. There was nothing to indicate we are at war. And then that message about being unwise... It's like the game told me "LoL your builder got snatched, you scrub. I bet you're pissed you didn't even know you were at war"

 

[Kwami]

I wouldn't expect them to make any changes outside of the next expansion. Instead, look for modding news and hope we can fix it ourselves. Steam store still lists Workshop as a feature, so we know its coming.. just a matter of when.

Why do you say that? Previous Civ games had numerous free patches that fixed bugs and added requested features, outside of the major expansions.