Keeping notes = bad UI design

[rwmjlally]

I believe it is a sign of bad UI design when I have to keep pen+paper notes to manage a basic aspect of the game.
In the case of Civ VI this means keeping notes on when trade deals expire. Surely this would be simple to fix?

 

[aieeegrunt]

I cannot make sense of the Trade screen

I think one of the yield tabs, like the resources one shows you what resources/luxuries you are trading and I think it also shows you the time remaining

As far as I can tell the only indicator you get that a luxury resource trade has ended is suddenly the AI starts offering deals

 

[fy00sh]

Doesn't completely solve the underlying problem, but I often use this mod to keep notes to remind myself do to x thing in y number of turns: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2052074567
Other than that, I believe there is at least one mod that makes a notif appear when trade deals run out, tho it'd take me a bit more digging to find it

 

[Jaybe]

Better Report Screen mod. Use it. Deals screen shows turns remaining.

BRS doesn’t include the monopolies screen; it is accessed via the report screen button at the upper right corner.

 

[intellectsucks]

Yeah, the UI in Civ VI is hot garbage, which is really surprising since it was AMAZING in Civ IV (the Civ game I played the most prior to 6). How much longer do you have until open borders expires? Who knows. Which amenities are being used by which cities and why? Who knows. When do trade deals expire? Who knows. Want to know how many farms or factories you have left to build for a boost? Better start counting. Even the information that is displayed (unit experience and promotions) is not displayed in a user friendly way. I don't understand why they changed the promotion display from the easily identifiable unique icons that were used in Civ IV to the generic ones they use in Civ VI. More than once I've accidentally turned two units with the same promotions into a corps because I didn't hover over the promotions to verify they were different. This mistake would never have happened in Civ IV. And don't even get me started on trading....I only have twelve hours before I need to sleep and don't want to get so worked up that I have insomnia.

 

[rwmjlally]

It seems to me the whole Civ VI development team is focused on big flashy ideas (new modes etc). It is shame no member of the team is working to fix all the many annoying little things that are wrong with the game.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I'm kind of used to everything already mentioned here, or my issue has been address over time--the one major thing I still have left is the policy card page. I don't know how they could fix it. Getting blasted with a wall of yellow and red text makes it kind of hard to find what you want though.

Simplifying it and making them all icons might make it harder though as that gives less information. So I don't know what a good answer would be.

 

[Mount Suribachi]

It seems to me the whole Civ VI development team is focused on big flashy ideas (new modes etc). It is shame no member of the team is working to fix all the many annoying little things that are wrong with the game.

Unfortunately they seem trapped in the cycle of mini-DLCs to keep the cashflow ticking over. No-one is going to pay $5 for a DLC that fixes bugs, improves the UI and adds QoL improvements. They will pay $5 for another OP Civ to play with.

 

[The Civs 6]

Previous games had notifications about trade deal endings (instead of notifications about 3 city Georgia "no longer seeking a domination victory")

Not trying to be negative, but one of the astounding things about Civ 6 is how many quality of life things they removed from previous games.

 

[MrRadar]

It is not even User interface, it's just something devs must have stapled together to get them by during the development and testing stage, and they left it at that.
I can hardly believe that those who made this deal screen or reports tables or traders' screen gave even half a second of thought about how to make them more user friendly. And no significant improvement in this area over 4 years tells me that most probably there will not be any. Civ VI is doomed to be stuck with trash UI

 

[Catalytic]

So what do we want here from the developers?

• A trade route screen that tracks the time remaining in turns on each trade route
• A resource management screen that tracks the duration of 30-turn sales of luxuries so we know when they can be traded again, and the ones we purchased won't be providing amenities any longer
• (this one's my own frustration) A diplomacy screen that tells me which leaders I have made promises to and on which turn. Did I promise to stop spying, stop converting, move troops, stop settling? I don't always remember that perfectly when coming back to a save the next weekend when I have time to play. Then I get huge diplo penalties for breaking these agreements.

These are basics that should be in the default UI, not something that has to be modded in.

Feel free to add to the list if you have your own requests.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

So what do we want here from the developers?

• A trade route screen that tracks the time remaining in turns on each trade route
• A resource management screen that tracks the duration of 30-turn sales of luxuries so we know when they can be traded again, and the ones we purchased won't be providing amenities any longer
• (this one's my own frustration) A diplomacy screen that tells me which leaders I have made promises to and on which turn. Did I promise to stop spying, stop converting, move troops, stop settling? I don't always remember that perfectly when coming back to a save the next weekend when I have time to play. Then I get huge diplo penalties for breaking these agreements.

These are basics that should be in the default UI, not something that has to be modded in.

Feel free to add to the list if you have your own requests.

For leaders with temporary conditional bonuses (mostly those tied to a Declaration of War) like John Curtin, Robert the Bruce, Cyrus, Tamar, and probably more, there should really be an on-screen timer to indicate how much longer you have left, similar to (or heck, identical) to the countdown of global emergencies and competitions.

Additionally, can we have an option to turn notifications off? I'm not talking about gossip, I just mean those little circular ones above the "next turn" button that stack up turn after turn and clog up the side of your screen. It gets tedious to spam right-clicks every single turn, especially when the game keeps reminding me about "low amenities" for the 50th turn in a row

 

[intellectsucks]

Not trying to be negative, but one of the astounding things about Civ 6 is how many quality of life things they removed from previous games.

This is so true. I played Civ 4 for a long time and information that was critical to your game decisions was much easier to find and process.

The 1UPT combat mechanics don't really bother, the change to districts and wonder placement don't really bother me. The stupidness of the AI doesn't bother me. But the little dumb things like trading, or checking unit promotions, or knowing when open borders expire all add up into a big frustrating pile. The Civ series had this stuff figured out and perfected for decades, what made them abandon it?

 

[IsabelBraganca]

For leaders with temporary conditional bonuses (mostly those tied to a Declaration of War) like John Curtin, Robert the Bruce, Cyrus, Tamar, and probably more, there should really be an on-screen timer to indicate how much longer you have left, similar to (or heck, I dentical) to the countdown of global emergencies and competitions.

Additionally, can we have an option to turn notifications off? I'm not talking about gossip, I just mean those little circular ones above the "next turn" button that stack up turn after turn and clog up the side of your screen. It gets tedious to spam right-clicks every single turn, especially when the game keeps reminding me about "low amenities" for the 50th turn in a row

The timer would be useful for other civilizations too. There is the Warlord's Throne...

The other problem are the Vampires. There is no way to check the amount of kills without hovering a possible attack. I name them so I know the most powerful.

 

[UWHabs]

The timer would be useful for other civilizations too. There is the Warlord's Throne...

The other problem are the Vampires. There is no way to check the amount of kills without hovering a possible attack. I name them so I know the most powerful.

Yeah, there's plenty of timer effects that certainly would be useful to see them. Even if they simply added that to the city panel when you hover, so it was something like "+15% (10.6) - Kilwa Kisiwani. +100% (+42.2) - Liberation War (3 turns)" for yields that get modifiers, would help sort it out. Otherwise I always have to double check a few cities to compare in case one city is getting a weird bonus that another is missing.

And for the vampires, I'm kind of surprised the kill counts don't appear in the tooltip where you see the other modifiers. Like, they did a good job at making sure that stuff like the Matterhorn bonus or barracks bonuses are retained on upgrade, and you can look them all up. So I would have thought that would have been a logical place to show the vampire-specific bonuses.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Yeah, the UI in Civ VI is hot garbage, which is really surprising since it was AMAZING in Civ IV (the Civ game I played the most prior to 6). How much longer do you have until open borders expires? Who knows. Which amenities are being used by which cities and why? Who knows. When do trade deals expire? Who knows. Want to know how many farms or factories you have left to build for a boost? Better start counting. Even the information that is displayed (unit experience and promotions) is not displayed in a user friendly way. I don't understand why they changed the promotion display from the easily identifiable unique icons that were used in Civ IV to the generic ones they use in Civ VI. More than once I've accidentally turned two units with the same promotions into a corps because I didn't hover over the promotions to verify they were different. This mistake would never have happened in Civ IV. And don't even get me started on trading....I only have twelve hours before I need to sleep and don't want to get so worked up that I have insomnia.

Well I mean there was a personal change after IV so...

It seems to me the whole Civ VI development team is focused on big flashy ideas (new modes etc). It is shame no member of the team is working to fix all the many annoying little things that are wrong with the game.

They come up with excellent concepts and mechanics and then the actual implementation is just awful.

I'm kind of used to everything already mentioned here, or my issue has been address over time--the one major thing I still have left is the policy card page. I don't know how they could fix it. Getting blasted with a wall of yellow and red text makes it kind of hard to find what you want though.

Simplifying it and making them all icons might make it harder though as that gives less information. So I don't know what a good answer would be.

Pretty sure there is a mode that does this really well.

As well as showing you how your yields will change BEFORE you commit to them

Seriously how the fudge did THAT get past QA?

 

[The Civs 6]

This is so true. I played Civ 4 for a long time and information that was critical to your game decisions was much easier to find and process.

The 1UPT combat mechanics don't really bother, the change to districts and wonder placement don't really bother me. The stupidness of the AI doesn't bother me. But the little dumb things like trading, or checking unit promotions, or knowing when open borders expire all add up into a big frustrating pile. The Civ series had this stuff figured out and perfected for decades, what made them abandon it?

Yeah. Another example is the factors that go into relationships with AIs. In 4, you could hover over the AI and it would immediately pull up information about the +'s and -'s (your borders are too close/you are the same religion/etc.). 5 had a similar thing.

6 has no hover information. It just has that face which only tells you 6 things (alliance/friendship/neutral/upset/denounce/war). Then you go to the diplomacy overview, and instead of getting helpful information you get the stupid agendas. You have to go to the secret relationship page. And even when you get there, instead of information being displayed in the easy parse ways it was in the previous two games, there is the scale and a bunch of large numbers.

This is one of the bees in my bonnets about civ 6 - you have this combination of a) slick, highly developed features in terms of graphics that contribute very little to your ability to read and react to info; and b) this combined with a game mechanic that makes much less sense than in previous games. I class other features like amenities, appeal, tourism and cultural victory, when you can place certain districts (sorry but the dam tooltip isn't at all helpful, and I don't want to have to memorize that stuff).

I brought this up in another thread, by I think the most inexplicable change they made from 5 to 6 was getting rid of the "swap" feature. In 5, if you have two units who have the same amount of movement points (let's say 2) who are close enough to complete a valid move with respect to one another (let's say, they are 1 tile apart), but doing so would consume all movement points, you were able to swap the two. You can't do that in 6 anymore. You have to move the unit to an empty hex, and then move the second unit to the original place. This is often tedious (such as when you are moving large armies along roads) but it can be downright strategically disruptive (such as when you want to move an injured unit to the backlines and replace it with a fresh unit).

 

[auximenes77]

I brought this up in another thread, by I think the most inexplicable change they made from 5 to 6 was getting rid of the "swap" feature. In 5, if you have two units who have the same amount of movement points (let's say 2) who are close enough to complete a valid move with respect to one another (let's say, they are 1 tile apart), but doing so would consume all movement points, you were able to swap the two. You can't do that in 6 anymore. You have to move the unit to an empty hex, and then move the second unit to the original place. This is often tedious (such as when you are moving large armies along roads) but it can be downright strategically disruptive (such as when you want to move an injured unit to the backlines and replace it with a fresh unit).

I'm playing Vanilla and if I have 2 units next to each other with enough moves left they will swap places. Most often I run into this situation after capturing a city when I move a defensive unit onto the city hex to replace the offensive unit which captured the city.

 

[Stringer1313]

I feel I am the only one on the forums that asks for this, which baffles me, but the ability to list cities in order based on yield of a particular thing like production- with each city taking up one line.

 

[bbbt]

I feel I am the only one on the forums that asks for this, which baffles me, but the ability to list cities in order based on yield of a particular thing like production- with each city taking up one line.

The aforementioned 'Better Reports Screen' mod does exactly what you are asking for. List of cities in the reports, you can sort them by production/gold/etc