List Your Biggest UI Grievances

kamex

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List all of the things which annoy you about the UI which should be added, or modded in; both in game and menus.

Here's my list in no particular order:
  • Game does not remember your settings from previous game, you have to set everything up every time
    - This should be really easy to do and we had it with Civ V since day one. What's the big deal?

  • No restart button
    - Again this should be easy. Very annoying when combined with above

  • No Hall of Fame
    - This is just inexcusable

  • No option to disable tech / civic popups or disable pointless AI babble (screens where you don't need to make decisions)
    - Slows the game down, again we had this in Civ V on day one

  • Scenarios in game where popups and/or diplo screens happen together, and quotes are often interrupted or played twice
    - This makes my OCD twitch real bad...

  • Civs are ordered alphabetically, leader first in the set up menu
    - I really think it should be civ first not leader; when we get more leaders per civ, have the list of civs only first, then an indented list for leaders, just like in Civ IV

  • No build queue!!!
    - #@?!!&!
 
- How much war weariness will X action give me? Go ahead and mentally add another line here for each rule the game hides from the player.
- Right click ranged unit to attack a target, shows potential damage. Unit moves instead of attacking, does not attack. Sometimes this exact interaction instead actually attacks.
- Next turn =/= Next turn
- There is no sortable city list that lets you change what they are building from that list.
- There is no sortable trade route list that lets you assign trade routes from it.
- No build queue
- No waypoints
- No saving build orders
- Pathing 10 units from one side of an empire to the other to get ready for a new war takes an absurd amount of inputs.
- Unit cycling is still a false choice, non-functional option 3 patches into the game, double demerit for being a carry-over from civ 5 and to a lesser extent 4. This has never been okay so why is it around in some fashion for a decade?
- Input buffering is inconsistent, which is about as bad an implementation of input buffering as you can get.
- UI will sometimes list a greyed out unit and tell you why you can't build it. But it won't always do that. Sometimes it will just not display a unit you could build if meeting the conditions, despite that you have the tech for it.
- Interactions with cities/units/builders on a per-turn basis require many more inputs than is necessary if UI were streamlined into something resembling good conventions in the last 10-20 years.

The game is a slog to play, most of the above results in spending a lot of time on non-decisions, exacerbated by the turn times. But this thread is about UI, and there is PLENTY broken about UI.
 
I dunno, they are all rather minor.
I'd say the trade route UI annoys me most in not displaying what the last route was.
 
I dunno, they are all rather minor.
I'd say the trade route UI annoys me most in not displaying what the last route was.

2 hours per game lost or more doesn't seem that minor. Having the UI lie to you about what will happen is *definitely* not minor!
 
Trade route sorting/automation is the biggest one for me.
Next is the religion system where it's confusing as hell exactly what benefits what city is getting - you have to click like three different buttons and mouse over to figure that out.
And can I actually see instantly what I did that caused a city state to give me an envoy?
When city states give you inspiration/eureka quests can they immediately tell you how to get that inspiration/eureka so you don't have to do 4 mouse clicks to figure it out?
The extra envoys given by techs/civics are displayed in the tree but not in the drop down menu in the main screen?
Resources screen which has tiny luxury resources packed down at the bottom where you cannot tell what resource is coming from where (other civs? your own?) For that matter diplo screen should immediately tell you what resources you have extra to spare and what resources you have
 
Anything that can reduce clicks. Expansion is back, now make it less clicky to manage.

Working off the prior list :

- Build queue (You're always going up a slight grade...queues give you a downhill)
- Waypoints (or better pathfinding when sending units on marches)
- Improved spy handling (longer assignments/sub menu to re-assign)
- Improved trade route handling (longer assignments/sub menu to re-assign)
- Notification hovering should work better see multiple wonder notifications
- Tune notifications ( barbarian camp spawned - on, Germany razed encampment - off)
- Automate workers :p
 
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2 hours per game lost or more doesn't seem that minor. Having the UI lie to you about what will happen is *definitely* not minor!
I was only talking about the grievances that I had with the UI, if I wanted to comment on your list, I'd quote it. :p
 
- It would be nice to get a warning when a lux trade deal expires
- In the diplomacy screen it would be nice to see at least that bottom line from one of the reports tabs, with all the luxes you have. Now you either must get out of the diplomacy and go to check the reports, or train your memory really well, else you risk buying a lux you're already getting from a CS, for example. All in all, the diplomacy screen is such a mess, that it should be redone entirely.
 
- It would be nice to get a warning when a lux trade deal expires
- In the diplomacy screen it would be nice to see at least that bottom line from one of the reports tabs, with all the luxes you have. Now you either must get out of the diplomacy and go to check the reports, or train your memory really well, else you risk buying a lux you're already getting from a CS, for example. All in all, the diplomacy screen is such a mess, that it should be redone entirely.
Oh right! That's another one I forgot about.
 
Many of the above plus:
- Sleeping/Fortified units are almost invisible
- Tribal huts need to be pinned to see them
- Not showing ranged units potential fire zone if the cannot actually target anything. (Hills/forest are often hidden)
- Ranged units moving instead of attacking (UI does not make it clear which will happen because of above)
- Selecting anything on top of a trade cart ALWAYS selects the trade cart first (WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT???)
- Amenity and housing alerts should be reduced to more serious situations somehow, not sure how, maybe we don't even need housing alerts
- Units that have NO possible actions being marked as needing attention
- City fire notification
 
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- No restart button
- No clickable notification when barb camp spawns
- No restart button
- No last trade route
- No restart button
- No last spy mission

Oh, and did I mention no restart button?

- Ranged units moving instead of attacking (UI does not make it clear which will happen because of above)
Oh yes, forgot this also, that is a MAJOR ANNOYANCE. I have lost count on how many times I need to reload because my archer will exit town to stand right next to enemy cavalry unit because it looks like I can fire on him. :mad:
 
Once upon a time we had civ4, and we had stacks of doom and that was a problem... apparently (alright, alright, let's not derail here.) Civ5 fixed that with 1UPT and along the way we discovered that this caused a new problem with unit routing. This routing problem was identified (at least here, maybe the devs don't pay attention to what's here and they should) very very early in Civ5's existence, but was never fixed. Now civ6 is out with the same (well, similar) 1UPT rules, so they knew that there was a routing issue to be addressed...

...and what did they do to fix it? Very little, almost nothing. Now units can be combined into armies which I guess helps, but the fact remains that the later you are in the game, the lower the amount of unoccupied tiles there are, particularly in the vicinity of cities.

Additionally, what makes this unendurable, slam-your-face-against-a-wall obnoxious, is that religious spreaders need to find a route to their destination using only unoccupied tiles. By far, the single hardest and most frustrating aspect of a religious victory is getting your spreaders to their destination cities.
 
Lack of build queue
Summary screens using lists instead of charts so you can't actually use them to compare anything
Trade routes handling
Diplomatic screen for handling deals (as in how many times do I have to ask you if that deal will be ok, can't you tell me how much gold you want?)
Ridiculously small button that I have trouble selecting when I want to fire from a city. Plus if I move the map around, it's a pain to actually select it and click it, I'm very likely to center the map on the city instead :(
Totally useless GreatProphet page creating a big blank in the midle of the great people screen, which is itself too large for its worth.
All the reports/notices/gossips, and the difficulty to get back to them in a decent, easy to find, journal.
 
The settings not being saved and no restart button definitely get my nod of approval...

I will say this though. I really don't care for the build queue. I feel like it would encourage poor play when the right thing to do is to constantly be tweaking and changing thing to use whatever cards I currently have active. The point of a build queue is so that you can reduce the warning between building things that are trivial in nature, but the direction Civ 6 took seems to make those individual decisions instead have more weight and take a lot of time on their own anyways, and the smaller decisions become gold or faith purchases. Unit production later in the game has you make corps and armies. Districts take a lot of time. The earlier buildings can be bought, the later ones take reasonable amounts of time to where I would want to micromanage when they are done anyways. Maybe there is something to be said when you have 10-20 cities, but I find that even with huge sprawling empires, I still mostly focus on 3-4 main cities to churn out most of my stuff.

That said... I have my own.

That Barb Sound that has a new camp pop up, should have an additional right side trigger you can click on to see where in the fog the camp spawned.

The Auto-Select... Sometimes I love it as it streamlines all the moves I want to do in a turn, other times I think it's the spawn of Satan wanting me to lose all my units and waste precious efficiency... A slightly smarter auto-select or one that recognizes when you are doing attacks, or recognizes when units have been moved in succession before. Maybe if you could make unit groups where auto-select was smarter within that group?

Citystate quests need better markers, I should be able to tell at a glance at least the type of quest a city-state might be asking so I can decide if it's something I can complete.

Barb camps need an indicator when it has access to a strategic resource that makes it more lethal.

When I get to swap my policy cards, I should be able to save my changes to go look at my empire, see what immediate effects certain cards might have (Example: if you take a 100% adjacency card, you'll get +x), and finally a slightly better warning when I'm about to end a turn without doing any free changes than what it is now. Typical frustrating turn, finish a civic, go to government screen, want an overview of my empire to decide on if I want certain cards and how long they might be in play so I close that screen... Do a bunch of things, forget I was swapping cards... End turn without changing anything by accident.

The great people screen is lacking a little something. You need to scroll and hover a lot to get the information you want, as well as do math, and it's infuriating when a project doesn't say how many points you will get even though it scales by Age.

Culture victory screen is pure guess work. Bunch of modifiers, feeding into meters one can barely understand. It's not clear when or if you are in a winning position. It's clear when you are first, just not clear if you'll win in 50 turns, or 500 turns which would be a short way of saying you won't.

Sorting the "stacks" you can get now. It just becomes difficult to select units when you end up in stacked situations. Sometimes it's easy, like a support unit and a unit... But other times it's a mess, like when you have two units on one spot due to one coming out from production.

Targeting ranged attacks is still unclear. Also some issues with actually getting an attack to register, especially with cities.

I'll edit if I can think of more stuff.
 
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Summary screens using lists instead of charts so you can't actually use them to compare anything

I've subscribed to the mod "Unit Report Screen" in the Steam Workshop. On the city table you can click a check box to hide the buildings and then each city gets a line and you can sort each column. So closer to what was present in CiV. Hopefully, this is functionality they can put in the base game.
 
Ah yes. I hate the way trade routes don't tell you what the previous route was.

Also, on the reports screen, you can't sort cities by greatest production etc.
 
In addition to the complaints above, the menu screen is just plain ugly. It's basic to the level of Civ II. But Civ II had an excuse, I have no idea how they went from the beautiful of Civ V's art deco to "let's make everything blue"
 
- More info on loading screens.
"A Unique Land Unit" doesn't tell me what makes that unit unique. In Civ V you could hover over the icons to see what was special about the unit/building etc. Either do the same here, or simply put the additional information on screen.

- Faster Leader Screens.

The leader screens are pretty but very slow. It takes ages for the game to actually let you interact with them. This is especially infuriating when all you can do is say "Goodbye" when an AI talks to you about their agenda. It's come so far now, that I just repeatedly press esc to skip their stupid animation, after which I often miss out on trade deals or diplomatic relations. Just have all the options and interactions on screen immediately, no fade in. We're playing this game for hours, make it so we can do things as fast as we want.

- Remove weird delay on "Wonder built elsewhere" pop-up.

Everytime someone builds a Wonder somewhere, I have to wait till it's my turn so I can awkwardly click/hover it a few times, before it will actually show me what Wonder we're talking here. Would be best if the Wonder's unique icon was used here as well, so you can see at a glance what Wonder was built. Again, that's how it worked in Civ V.

- Improve placement of spies.

The current menu for spies is just weird. You send 'em to a city first, then you 'confirm placement' after which you select a district. That's odd, and also confusing because you have to check the map to see which district is where. The location is important because adjacent districts are also affected. Make it easier to place spies in the districts you want.

- Builder Actions.
Perhaps I'm the only one who has had this problem, but the 'harvest resource' button is fairly close to the 'improve resource' button. It's easy to hit the former accidentily since they're so close. I'm also not sure about showing all possible builder improvements and actions at all times, with most greyed-out. Just line up the actions that the builder can perform, and nothing else. It clutters the screen.

- New Government.
After getting acces to a new government type, the 'Next Turn' button brings you to the government screen instead of advancing the game. There's no need for this. Simply put a message on screen that says: you got access to XXX government type. Do you want to change? (Yes, bring me there.) / (No I'm good.)

- End game techs.
After you've researched the final technologies in the tech/civics tree, the game will keep asking you to select your new research. There's no need. We can only research 'Future Tech' and such to boost our score. Just have the game repeat this tech without asking. It's annoying.

- Score and Ranking.
I find it hard to see what rank I've achieved. Put a border around the achieved rank to make it easier to find in the list.
 
Points all ready made here that I find a real nuisance:

- No sortable lists in info screens (both 4 & 5 had this).
- No Hall of Fame.
- Unit cycling moves away from events too fast.
- Lack of relevant info in trade screens. We should be able to check the resources screen, and all current deals we have with all AI and how long they have to go (I currently manually write out this info as to not get caught out).
- A double check at the end of any turn in which social policies could be changed - that we have completed that process; as Furycrab spells out really well.

I'll add:

- No numpad movement key bindings
- No report screen key bindings
- No "wait" instruction and key binding. I know I can skip over a unit with the key bindings I have, but if the unit cycling is turned on, it will continually jump back to that unit I am wanting to leave till last! A wait instruction has been in the game for as long as I can remember, and it is the thing I miss the most turn after turn. Pleaaaase... bring it back :hammer2:
 
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