Are you sure there isn't method in their "madness" i.e. what If leading players to 20+ cities was their goal, wouldn't your comment look foolish then?
? My implication is that the game's incentives *obviously* push the player to 20+ cities, and presumably the developers know that (hence their lack of attention to basic conventions being pathetic).
The alternative is that the developers did not intend the mechanics to push the player into having tons of cities. That...would arguably reflect even worse, and not on me.
Despite the vast popularity of enhanced UI here, whose code is readily available to everyone, most of those changes are rarely integrated into the game. And while it is possible that they with their fancy degrees, experience and usage hard data, are all pathetic, negligent, fools compared to you.. is it possible that you don't see the whole picture for the "objective" measurement of yours?
They're not the only ones with fancy degrees, and unless they have degrees in specific things that are *not* programming, those degrees will do less to aid in interpreting data. The developers are human beings too, prone to the same potentials for success and failure as anybody else.
There's a reason you don't see me calling out the music or artstyle. There is a reason I haven't pointed fingers much at 1 UPT as a concept, split tech trees, districts, or wonders (after pre-release speculation). There is a reason I don't come down nearly as hard on the AI insufficiencies as I do the game's optimization and controls, despite the AI insufficiency strangely being the most common complaint on the board.
That reason is evidence. I give Firaxis the "pathetic" tag for UI because 1) UI is something many games get right, despite a wide range of budget constraints. 2) TBS as a genre was ahead of civ 6's UI 20 years ago. 3) Firaxis itself put out a superior UI in a previous title by any objective standard set you can use, 10 years ago.
Right now, I am playing Rimworld. Rimworld is mostly programmed by one person, and it's in alpha. Rimworld has vastly superior UI to Civ 6, because a) it doesn't lie to the player about what will happen b) it does not deny as many gameplay rules to the player c) it more clearly represents how to accomplish something you want to do and d) it does not mire the player in large numbers of unnecessary inputs.
I won't name-call Firaxis as "fools", but I will happily point out that this aspect of the game is not only negligent, but grossly negligent and obviously deprioritized. You want me to buy that Firaxis put in solid market research about how to best implement its user interface, measured how people react to the game when presented differences? That they have a realistic, evidence-based measure of which aspects of its design keep users focused on the gameplay? That they even bothered with a metric like "inputs per turn" or "inputs per average task" or "inputs per ANYTHING"? How about a measure of accessibility of information? If they even gave a crap about accessibility information, they wouldn't have gameplay rules (WW) and even the specifics of pushing a victory condition (culture) hidden outright in a release version. There's no 3rd option I'm seeing presented here. They either didn't care about this stuff, or they did care but were sufficiently incompetent to completely neglect the implementation regardless. I'm erring on the side of "didn't care", given apparent market incentives. The latter is more effortful and fits more poorly with the evidence.
I will buy that they're using knowledge from "degrees and experience" to control for quality of these things if I see evidence for it. The evidence I've seen so far is against the notion that they've even bothered. As for "experience", that only matters if it's successful experience. Firaxis hasn't put out a competent UI in its TBS side of things in a decade, so where's that "experience"? The strongest evidence in favor of what I'm saying is the state of civ 6 as measured above when compared to many TBS over the past 2-3 decades.
I'm not sure what "usage hard data" means, you probably meant to say "use hard data", as if hard data pulled from gameplay can easily give feedback about UI.
