Civ6 UI Fix Requests

[dexters]

So I'm a bit surprised for a game that feels and plays relatively polished, and certainly the least broken Civ released since forever, this game has some really weird UI quirks that seems like it was intentionally done a certain way only to be patched out later.

Here's my list. I'll add/subtract to this list as people post theirs and clarify things I may have missed.

General UI

• Tooltips- The game does a good job of showing you where to best place a new district based on adjacency bonuses, but there's no way go back and review the yields of existing districts as you improve and increase their yields over time to follow up on results of planning
• Tooltips - You have to click on the citizen icon to deselect it to exit citizen management screen; this seems awkward. Hitting ESC does the same thing but more often than not, I pull up the settings (save/exit) screen as well, breaking the flow of a game
• Tooltips - Factories/Power Plants/ Arena/ Zoos and other buildings with area affects should either have their own filter or a tooltip showing their range for better city planning
• Tooltips - Hex view is too mild even when turned on. Request adding a new setting to increase opacity of the hex borders.
• Tooltips - There is generally too much 'hovering' to find needed information. Victory Condition reports should instead include a ' +' and '-' clicky to expand information provided. There is absolutely no reason why there is no screen for military size listing each Civ's strength in order, or beakers per turn for the science screen.
• Log - There should be a diplomacy log summarizing diplomatic/traveller's reports from all the nations each turn
• Log- There should be a separate event log
• Log - both logs should keep something like the last 10 turns of events, not just 1 turn
• Wonders - The 'X' to exit out of a wonder screen and space race rocket launch screen is oddly placed far to the edge of the screen. This was likely done for aesthetic reasons. It's fine to keep it there, but hitting SPACE or ESC should do the same and exit us out
• Log - There is a notification for losing suzerain but appears to be no tooltip for regaining it when envoys are sent. Both should go into the suggested diplomatic log
• UI scaling unavailable at 1440p ( people are using workarounds currently)
• UI font is too small even at 1080p (people are using workarounds currently)

Combat

• General UI- When an enemy unit is in range for bombard, the reticule icon looks weirdly small and muted, it takes a while to realize that the game is prompting me to bombard something
• General UI - Hostile unit in sight of a city/unit's LINE-OF-SIGHT should generate a notification that goes into a notification log
• General UI/Unit commands - There is no sentry function for units to alert players when enemy troops are near

Trade

• Trade routes- Trade route can filter by type but cannot sort by yield
• Trade routes - similarly, when deciding on where to send a new route, there should be a way to sort by yeild (gold, production, food, faith, etc)
• Trade routes- When a trade route completes, there's no tooltip telling you which route the trading unit just completed
• Trade routes- There should also be an 'assign to last' function for trade routes
• Trade routes- Hovering over a trading unit doesn't show it's route. The graphics are certainly there as you see it when setting up a route.

Resources

• Resources- Luxuries and Bonus resources are listed together under the resource tab in reports, why are they not separated?
• Resources - There should be a report showing which city is benefiting from the amenities provided by which luxury
• Resources - UI should make it clear excess luxuries provide no additional benefit and show them as tradeable
• Strategic Resources / city build - It's not clear which unit requires how many copies of what resource to be buildable , hovering over a resource on the top bar (the banner) of the screen should show all researched/available units that are buildable and not buildable with the existing resources on hand as the tooltip that is currently there adds no new information.

Terrain & Unit

• Hills are not often obvious
• Hand off between a unit that is out of MP to the next unit is awkward, often resulting in the player moving the next unit to weird places because they thought they were moving the previous unit.

Bugs

• Counterspies will keep promoting even after their 3rd promotion and the spy cannot gain any more promotions, forcing players to reassign them to the city each and every time. There should be 'assign to previous city/assignment' button in addition to removing notification of a promotion after they are maxed out.
• When using hex view *show hexes* under certain conditions the borders will disappear all-together. Going back to reset 'show hexes' will fix the problem.
• City will show second to last item built instead of last item built when finishing something
  
• Edge-of-screen scrolling doesn't work when a side window is open.

 

[skyclad]

city will show second to last item built instead of last item built when finishing something
cannot move with numpad
scroll at edge of screen is borked.
have to select bombard circle twice to use it (for city not encampment)

 

[Agent_TBC]

Right, what the heck is up with showing the second-to-last thing you've built? It's useless.

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas & Suggestions.

 

[lilnev]

Edge-of-screen scrolling doesn't work when a side window is open.
Scrolling up doesn't work at the top of the screen/window, but in a narrow band slightly below the top.
I would love to be able to zoom back quite a bit more.

 

[TruthfulCake]

Great thread. Hope we can compile everything in an easily readable format, so that it is easier for the developers (if they check the forums) to get a clear picture of all the UI issues. Here's mine:

Hotkeys

• There is already an option for keybinding the In-Game Menu. The Esc key therefore should not have this function, as it is redundant. Currently Esc can interfere with the "close screen/popup" action that players do by showing the menu. Esc should only be used to skip cutscene/exit leader screens/close popups, and things along those lines.
• There are 7 lenses in-game, but only 6 can be assigned a hotkey currently. Give all lenses a hotkey option.
• Fortify and Sleep have virtually the same functions. Combine the hotkey for both.
• No unit seems to be able to attack both as melee and as ranged. Combine the hotkeys for Ranged and Melee Attack.
  
• Add the missing hotkeys to the main unit actions. Upgrade unit or repair tile for example. Unique builder actions that consume a charge don't need hotkeys, but generic ones that consume no charge do.
• Add keys to toggle Yield and Resource icons, like we have a key to toggle Grid.

Lenses

• Add new lenses for the hardest to read elements on the map, namely strategic resources and antiquity sites/shipwrecks.
• Religious lens should show the followers of each religion even though there is no majority religion in a city.

Minimap and Fog of War

• Be more thorough with the fog of war and add map drawings/lines for hills, marshes, or other terrain features. Use clearer markers for grassland vs plains, maybe using rough dots or something similar. Right now it looks more like a normal fog with a color swap, instead of stylizing.
• Minimap fog looks too similar in color to the uncovered area. Tweak it more for visibility with color-blindness in mind.

Notifications

• Allow players to filter the gossips they want to see. If they are currently prioritizing wonders, they might want to catch only wonder projects by other leaders. If they are currently trying to make allies, they might want to catch only diplomatic updates. A list with checkboxes should work.
• Allow players to close the notification banners manually. An X on the top right corner should work. Currently they lingers too long and players have no control over them.

Trade and Spies

• Separate trade destinations based on "domestic", "other major civilizations", and "city states".
• When choosing destinations for spy missions, simplify it and allow players to choose actions among the possible list of actions, then click "Confirm Placement". This does away with the two-step verification that is muchly redundant right now.

Others

• By default, the autosaves list should be sorted by name, not by last modified. Also sort it in descending order, like in Civ 5.
• Fix edge-scrolling so that there won't be any dead-zones on the interface (action button, unit panel, city panel, world tracker panel), and allow scrolling even when panels that cover the entire height of the screen are present, i.e. Production Panel and City Info Panel.

 

[UWHabs]

Some other ones:
-Bonuses to farms/mines/etc... should show up as icons in the science and civic trees. Or at the very least, they should be listed when you get the popup for researching the tech to remind you that your farms are stronger.
-Units without enough moves to continue (ie. moving along road, has 1/4 point left), and with no ranged combat should just auto-assume stopping (always seems to cycle back to them at the end when they have no moves left).
-Units that have been told to end their turn should show differently on the map than units that have exhausted all their moves
-When a side window is open, move the city info box over. Awkward when selecting what to build next in the city and half the city bar is hidden
-When clicking between cities, remember the view I'm on. If I'm on the faith purchase screen and click on another city, I want to see that city's faith purchase screen
-(it may be in and I can't see it) Have a way from the city purchase/build screen to cycle between cities. Often if I have excess faith I'll want to cycle through all my cities to see if I forgot to buy something.
*-another one: On the great person screen, tell me when they have multiple charges. So reading it and it says the Great Engineer gives 325 production to a wonder, that sounds under-whelming. But telling me that it will twice give 325 production is a lot better

And suggestions:
-Would be nice to have a small notification on the city bar to let me know when a city is working an "unimproved" tile. Saves counting how many hexes have improvements to know if I need a new builder.
-Hide traders on the main screen - when i have 20+ in my empire, hard to see what's under them, and I keep mis-clicking on them when I go to click on another unit
-When getting a eureka/inspiration, tell me what I did to earn it. Often it will be between turns and just tell me I got it, and I have to go check to see, "oh yeah, I guess my bank finished building"

 

[astog]

Trade

• Trade routes- Trade route can filter by type but cannot sort by yield
• Trade routes - similarly, when deciding on where to send a new route, there should be a way to sort by yeild (gold, production, food, faith, etc)

Trade and Spies

• Separate trade destinations based on "domestic", "other major civilizations", and "city states".

Not to sound like a narcissist, but my mod called Better Trade Screen addresses these issues, if you want to give it a try. I am already working on implementing the other suggestion in v2 of the mod.

 

[dexters]

@astog You're very welcome to advertise your mod.

The intent here is for them to add it into the base game as well!

 

[ViterboKnight]

Some text in the civilopedia and some extra tooltip help must be added for apostoles, reporting they can start inquisitions. Also, explaining how they work, and why the apostole is expected to be just lost without any visible effect.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Lenses

• Add new lenses for the hardest to read elements on the map, namely strategic resources and antiquity sites/shipwrecks.
• Religious lens should show the followers of each religion even though there is no majority religion in a city.

Minimap and Fog of War

• Be more thorough with the fog of war and add map drawings/lines for hills, marshes, or other terrain features. Use clearer markers for grassland vs plains, maybe using rough dots or something similar. Right now it looks more like a normal fog with a color swap, instead of stylizing.
• Minimap fog looks too similar in color to the uncovered area. Tweak it more for visibility with color-blindness in mind.

I suppose i should add to those comments right here instead of pushing another thread post!

LENSES: For me the essential stands in one important kind of feature... whatever colored layers are activated on the World-Map should be reproduced exactly as is on the mini-map without all the Cities and other UI artifacts -- simply to make it much easier to visualize WHAT & WHERE anything is as a global worldwide hint of the true facts.

MINIMAP: I was just about to start a new thread for this...



My random start happened to be far down to the left. There's a reason for it.. the world is flat & the pseudo International Dateline just has to be located somewhere via Firaxis code/logic or special mechanics. Thus -- the tiny "UI-Gear" overlay simply hides a rectangular area. I know it's fine-tuning.. and maybe some silly detail.

Yet -- a solution might be to **ALWAYS** instruct the LUA-Code/function to put the players' Capital(s) dead-smack in the (Vertical) middle of that box. I really don't mind if the whole set of symbols would end far up or down at the bottom!

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Not to sound like a narcissist, but my mod called Better Trade Screen addresses these issues, if you want to give it a try. I am already working on implementing the other suggestion in v2 of the mod.

I *do* have this precious device installed already.. always room for future enhancements, indeed.

BUT -- i'd suggest for you to supply some "snapshots" of what it exactly does within your promo thread.

 

[GlobalTree]

Really useful suggestions here,i want to give some of my opinion on it
i wish devs would be more honest at first glance i always thought the art style was really beautiful(the models,animation,lighting..etc) but the main reason they said they went for the artstyle was be able to see things clearly and distinguish between them which i thought was an excuse(same with dow3)...50 hours with the game and i am finding it really hard to see clearly and distinguish between units.
so here are some things i like to add (that wasn't already addressed by above)i feel like needs addressing (i may not word it right i am no expert but hoepfully i get my point across):-
- its really hard to distinguish between unit icons of resources like whale and fish,cattle and sheep...etc but some are ok like wheat ,citrus which are clear
- icons for building and wonders really can't know at a glance which building or wonder i am choosing it was so easy to tell in civ
- the event/notification bar on right hand side when you end a turn really really disappointed in it,first of all the icons are small and color scheme between icons is too same(not much contrast and color bleeding),one generalized icon for everything like it was nice in civ 5 when a wonder was build it showed the wonder which was build each with its own icon and color coding,like many other events,here you have just one icon which you easily miss and have to hover to check what was missed(also the sound of unit getting killed and wonder completion was much better in civ 5,is it even present in civ 6..??),some missing notification e.g, city ready to fire...and many more.
- too much empty space,unreadable font,not much contrast and color bleeding in menus
-like the way tile yields icon in civ 4 and 5 more
- the terrain feels really hard to distinguish i cant pinpoint what it is maybe the textures,color or boundary..??
- missing artworks for some stuffs like civ 5 had unique artwork whenever you entered new era.
- unnecessary double clicking on some stuff like card swapping in civics.
- hard to read what civic tree and tech tree,missing which tech gives what bonuses to resources,a single icon for civs just with different color way too lazy
- not showing icons on resources for building recommendation for builders like in civ 5.
- already discovered Fog of War, i like the map when its undiscovered but when its already discovered it i don't like the map look then,kinda hope its just went to civ 5 style dark and transparent look
- scores not being sorted
- city management feels a lot worse to me atleast
- border colors and lenses could use some improvements
- also there are dozens i am missing right now
-civilopedia is meh
- unit promotion and some other important icons need to pop out more like golden in civ 5

but also there are some good improvements
+ unit icons are actually better
+ during trade you can just click on cities to send them
+ many things added from info addict mod from civ 5

hope it helps

also do devs of civ read these forums,i don't know i am new,thats why i am asking

 

[Wurmloch]

I agree to all of improvement suggestions in this thread, additionally I really miss these:

• In Civ5 I always found it useful to enable the option to display yield on map when settler or builder is selected
• When hovering buildings/wonders in build list, the popup shows essential information about the bonus of this building, however, after building it, there is no way to get these informations from the city-details screen.
• I think the city-details pane on the left looks like a huge excel-table and should be presented in a prettier way (currently have no suggestion how )
• There is no popup showing the bonus received from a tribal village, there is only a "map overlay" showing +50 gold or someting like that, but if the fokus zooms away to another unit for example, it can lbe easily missed.
• Neigborhood bonuses, citizen yield and trade route bonus for districts can only be found in civilopedia, but should also been displayed in building list and city details (actual values!).

Minor:

• The show grid hotkey is not in sync with toggle-box, and the game does not remember my show-grid-setting after reload. I like playing without showing the grid, have to disable it every time I load a game.

 

[GlobalTree]

I agree to all of improvement suggestions in this thread, additionally I really miss these:

• In Civ5 I always found it useful to enable the option to display yield on map when settler or builder is selected
• When hovering buildings/wonders in build list, the popup shows essential information about the bonus of this building, however, after building it, there is no way to get these informations from the city-details screen.
• I think the city-details pane on the left looks like a huge excel-table and should be presented in a prettier way (currently have no suggestion how )
• There is no popup showing the bonus received from a tribal village, there is only a "map overlay" showing +50 gold or someting like that, but if the fokus zooms away to another unit for example, it can lbe easily missed.
• Neigborhood bonuses, citizen yield and trade route bonus for districts can only be found in civilopedia, but should also been displayed in building list and city details (actual values!).

Minor:

• The show grid hotkey is not in sync with toggle-box, and the game does not remember my show-grid-setting after reload. I like playing without showing the grid, have to disable it every time I load a game.

like this
https://imgur.com/a/vVSKB

not mine btw

 

[ViterboKnight]

In the research panel for technologies and cultural advances, only a progressbar is visible, without any indication of actual values (how much research needed? 10? 100? 1000?). There should be indication of the current research and of the total needed research (eg. 40% progress, 80/200 research).

Similarly, in the city screen, when showing the progressbar of the current build, a tooltip should be useful to show the number of hammers (40% progress, 80/200 hammers), without having to enter the Choose Production section.

 

[ViterboKnight]

This is not only related to ships, but maybe it is more visible with them, given the bigger movement rate.
Ship movement usually takes some time to complete, and IMO this waiting time can be reduced. It is boring to have to wait 5 seconds for a ship to advance 5 tiles!!!!

This should be achieved in several ways, here are two ideas:
- make ship movement animation faster
- add a Game Interface option to enable Fast Movement for Friendly Ships

 

[elitetroops]

Agree. Same for foodbar. Currently it doesn't even say how much is needed to grow. Not to mention culture needed to grow your borders...

 

[Zyxpsilon]

like this
https://imgur.com/a/vVSKB

not mine btw

Almost similar principles such as this suggestion from me too, btw...

 

[Namaspamus]

Agree with about everything here. Yet the UI base is great. I think that after Civ V's UI that had been blamed as a christmas tree, they wanted to make the opposite, more complete, with discreet icons and buttons, while staying readable, usable and pretty. Still plenty to fix but they mostly succeeded

• Allow players to filter the gossips they want to see.

This is maybe the biggest of all, and it's not just about filters. International infos really needs to be hierarchized.
A gossip tells me wich promotion Cleopatra has chosen for her last archer. Hhhhmkay. Then another, with the same discreet label, announces a war between Cesar and Gilgamesh. It's not the same importance at all. There should be differently colored labels, a drum sound or the like for DoWs, etc... Sounds are a good way to inform.