My biggest Civ3 gripe - interface

[rychan]

I just got done playing a nice long emporer game and I've concluded that what makes me want to stop playing civ more than anything else is a relatively minor interface issue-

Focus should not automatically switch.

That's it. I can decide when I'm done working on a particular region and press a key for the next unit when I'm ready. You don't need to randomly zip me around the map playing whack-a-mole with every unit I left unfortified at the end of the previous turn. Likewise, I know the order that I want to use my artillery, bombers, and cavalry so I'd rather just click on them myself.

The automatic focusing is most annoying after I move across the map to adjust some unit, click fortify or space so that I can adjust his neighbor, and zooomm.. I'm back across the map.

It's just rude to move the focus around like that. Give me some respect as a user. Let the mousewheel move between available units or something.

My tendancy when I play is just to fortify every stack/unit as focus comes to them, and then go back and issue orders as I want. That way after I do something it sits at 'end of turn' without moving the "camera" rather than taking me somewhere else.

The need to fortify everything and come back is worsened by the fact that the wait command does not actually put a unit at the end of the focus queue, which would seem intuitive. I've had to "wait" a unit two or three times before other units gain focus for the first time.

Likewise on large maps with many cities the beginning of a turn is excruciating, as they bombard you with information that you need to remember to go back and address, and the cities default to building unintelligent things. (And you can't just enqueue a reasonable build order because of building dependancies)

None of these interface issues are a problem with small empires.. 10 cities or less maybe. But once you get to 50 or 100 cities and 300 or 400 units it becomes an amazing chore to play.

And if there's an easy way to avoid this, please call me an idiot and inform me of it I will be very pleased

 

[davidcrazy]

i have the same problem as you do.. and that's why i like the first half of the game when everything is still under control.
but if the game doesn't auto-focus, maybe everyone will be complaining about it's hard to find those newly-produced units. you have to find them and the game doesn't auto-focus onto them.
maybe there should be an option in the game set-up screen about autofocus.

 

[rychan]

Ok I must be in bizarro world here. I typed out the long post you see above, clicked submit, and IE crashed. I came back, fumed, rewrote it again, clicked submit.. and it submitted the thing I wrote the first time? *twilight zone*

 

[zurichuk]

i also find this annoying in the later game, it won't be changed now though i doubt

btw your 'other post' is in the conquests forum (so every thing in the twilight zone has an explanation )

 

[alamo]

In SMAC you were able to hit 'v' and have the focus go to a tile instead of a unit, and it would go into the focus order. Yet another nice feature lost.

This is also annoying when trying to use a stack of workers - midway through focus will jump to another bunch of workers. When this happens I manually sort the workers, taking each as it pops up and putting it in a stack until I have enough for that work group.

Maybe a patch could give us control of the focus order. Until then you can manually rearrange the units to get the desired order. If a unit of another type pops up in the wrong place then fortify it and go on.

To take care of new units, give them GOTO CITY orders so they're all in one place when you need them.

 

[sealman]

For the most part, there is a set order for your units moves.
1) Bombard units
2) Unfortified units
3) Units on go-to orders and automated workers
4) Units that you gave the "wait" comand to
5) Units that were on go-to orders that still have movement points left.

Within these groupings, espiecially #2, the order tends to be in such a way that units that are grouped together will be the next to move. At least this is what I have noticed. However, if you manually choose a unit, you mess up the order and experience what you describe. I am not saying that it is designed correctly, just if you know what is happening, it makes it easier to say "in theatre".

So for example. If you are on the bombard series and you click on a tank to take a city that you just weakened, you have to cycle through all the units to get back to the bombard unit that was scheduled to move before you chose the tank.

ADDITION: BUt I agree that there should be less jumping around.

 

[Alexnm]

Yep, the globetrotting in the later stages of the game also pisses me off.

 

[Tomoyo]

You can fix the problem of finding new units by pressing "c", but no "v". This is the reason why whenever I decide that I'm finally going to get that elusivee Deity military victory, I take the short way out because of this. Now I have like 5 million Diplo wins...

 

[Milan's Warrior]

I wholeheartedly agree with the post: the furious changes of focus are one of the most disturbing thing in the game.
They can even be a migrane trigger for some people (some people with migrane are disturbed but rapid flash of luminosity). I close my eyes when I see that the zoom madness begins.

I also agree that the beginnin of the turn with a cascade of info that you have to memorize and can't address immediately is annoying.

A third annoyance (as I wrote in a separte post) is the fact that we have to confirm to things (improvements, units, wonders...) that WE put in the building queue

 

[knacki]

The automatic focusing is most annoying after I move across the map to adjust some unit, click fortify or space so that I can adjust his neighbor, and zooomm.. I'm back across the map.

I also totally agree with you. When u own a ultra huge empire, it's alread a PITA to perform all your unit actions, all the more since u have to scroll ur entire empire thousands of times during ur turn.

And I think it could be easy to keep going with the order pointed out by Sealman (btw, this for sure is very interesting), but for the units u can see on ur screen first, then the focus could switch to another unit on another part of the map (would make it way easier when invading some territory...).

During these invasions, I use to wake or activate every stack of units / single units I'm about to use in the reverse order I want to use them, and that kind of arrange the queue in a way that's more relevant (for me)

Concerning workers sometimes I'm just fed up and ready to automate them... Of course since I'm quite a masochist I never do that.

 

[Bartleby]

mebbes not ~exactly~ the same thing but I don't like it when it tells you forty or fifty time that "order restored in..." in the event that you got caught out by war weariness