I own a PC and an xbox360.
It's *obvious* that this new "steamlined" UI has been specifically designed with console users in mind.
Look at how the two big info bars sweep in from the left and right. This is going to correspond to left bumper press and right bumper press.
The absurd way of adding new units to the queue. Check button, for add, new window, buttons to move up and down, *no drag and drop*, *no control click*. Ever tried to drag and drop or control click with a console controller? Exactly.
The horrid bright green citizen "check box" icons you must select to move your population around int he city window. Again this has been done to make it easy to do on a controller.
I like the 360, but I feel a bit miffed that this UI is patently designed for console already in mind. I expect they did as much common code as they code. They will then split the code to console and PC versions, with the PC version having slightly more functionality.
I'm running this on a High End PC and the UI totally fails at 1900 by 1200. The tech tree has what I call the "toilet roll" feature, whereby the top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 of the screen is basically black, in the middle is the tiny squashed tech tree. If you run in very high rez you also see this effect on backward websites which seem to think people are still running 4:3 monitors, you get a narrow toilet roll in the center of your screen instead. Did I mention there was a lot of black?
This won't be a problem on the console however, as 720P is considered high def in the console world. Meanwhile in true HD, I can hardly even see the super "Art Deco" icon designs, they are so tiny, they look like meaningless blobs. I thought the UI was supposed to scale? Well it's only a half baked job.
Since the AI is borked anyhow, I think it may be worthwhile waiting to pick this game up when it comes out on the console. It will prolly look at lot prettier and be optimized for the specific platforms.