Pet peeves about the interface thread

[Crossender]

This thread is dedicated to the nuances of the new Civ V interface that may annoy us.

To start:

I find myself unable to find out where in the interface is listed all the strategic resources owned or traded by your empire; having to open up a trade with a civilization to see what you have is the only option i know of right now, but that is a bit ridiculous.

On the subject of trade, i find the 'Deals" screen a bit confusing: i made a trade with japan consisting of my pearl for 9 gold per turn and 100-something gold. The trade is set to "last" 30 turns. Now, 30 turns have long elapsed yet the deal has not moved to the "completed deals" log, leading me to believe that it is still active?
It should be over, but that surplus pearl does not seem to be available to me again, as it is not displayed when I try to make an offer to another civilization. Whether this is a bug or something I missed, it is very confusing either way.

Unit's pathing doesn't seem to care to avoid going through/stopping inside borders of city states you are not Friendly with yet when instructed to move to a point past them, thus invoking their ire. Now this would not be so bad if you could set multiple waypoints along the way (by using the shift key, for example) but I'm not sure if that is possible.

Pressing enter with units still needing orders does not center you on them, forcing you to click the button instead! Unforgivable.

And lastly, for now, the opening cinematic is pretty stubborn about skipping itself; it was very glorious and awe-inspiring the first time, but an option to disable it would bring peace of mind.

Edit: In my first paragraph, I meant to say Luxury resources rather than strategic. I'm aware you can see how muc hof a strategic resource yo uhave left by mouse-over, but i don't understand why the same can't be done for luxury ones.

 

[drubell]

I only had a chance to play for an hour this morning, but I think the most annoying thing so far is the fact that my automated explorers don't really care about city-state borders so far ;p I'd imagine that would be fixed though?

I was playing the tutorial anyway for just a small amount of turns though. The tutorial seems a little underwhelming compared to the Civ4 one. The tutorial is basically just "Play on a settler/duel continent." Oh well.

Edit- Also, how can I toggle resources without going into strategic view? I'm sure there's a toggle that I haven't had the time to check yet, of course.

 

[Wieke]

I find myself unable to find out where in the interface is listed all the strategic resources owned or traded by your empire; having to open up a trade with a civilization to see what you have is the only option i know of right now, but that is a bit ridiculous.

I'm quite certain this is displayed at the top of your screen, next to all the bits concerning happyness, goldenage, gold, etc.

Personally i miss the city radius option, would be usefull when deciding where to settle.

 

[sgrig]

Pressing enter with units still needing orders does not center you on them, forcing you to click the button instead! Unforgivable.

Press "c" to center on the unit!

 

[Buccaneer]

The game desperately needs a CTRL-I.

 

[carstuar]

This is just a minor issue, but I found it cumbersome and time consuming to queue multiple items to city production.

Other than that, the demo left me wanting the actual game even more. Since I'm in Europe I'll have to wait :/
I really don't miss Religion or Espionage AT ALL. Good riddance.

 

[Thorn]

Another minor issue but I would love to have the option to move units by using the LEFT mouse button instead of the RIGHT. This option was in Civ4!
Oh, and is there a way to turn of the 'god light' that shines on a unit when it is it's turn?

 

[Bill Bisco]

You use the Right-Click button to move a unit, and the Left-Click button to change where you're looking on the map (to move further up, down, or whatever). What happens is that you'll have a worker and right-click to try to move the worker, but then left-click to move around the map and look where to move the worker.

What happens is that you hold down right-click, hold down left-click, find where you want to go, but let go of left-click and then the unit automatically moves to the last location the mouse was. If this could be mended that'd be great. This issue wasn't present in Civ4.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Yeah I find it hard to know how many resources I have. Can't there just be a "you have these resources" and where they come from, kind of screen?

I don't know what the relationships are between the civs either. Like, I don't have the slightest idea if Siam is crazy in love with China, or if they're about to kill each others.

 

[Delgar]

One problem I had was with the AI civilizations declaring that they would 'pledge to protect' a certain city state. That would mean the AI would go to war with you if you declared on said city state, wouldn't it? The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to track which AI has 'pledged to protect' which city state. If this info is not currently available then it has to be added in, imho.

I understand that one way is to look at the history log but that is way too tedious...

 

[MercuryP]

I don't like how when you go into city view, it zooms so far out that you can't reliably see what any of the tiles are producing you, and you have to keep zooming in every time you want to tweak them manually.

 

[globaooba]

When it tells you your civ name, leader name and year at the begining of each turn

 

[MercuryP]

The Civilopedia does not list what extra bonuses the improvements get from what technologies in the improvements section. For the bonus resources, the Civilopedia doesn't really indicate things like the fact that putting fishing boats on a fish increases tile yield by two gold.

 

[Venereus]

Press "c" to center on the unit!

I used to do that with the mouse middle button. That doesn't work anymore (in the demo at least).

 

[Dozmonic]

The UI (and lack of diplomacy information) are the two things I feel that're letting the game down right now.

I hate how chunky the UI is - even when you tell it not to upscale and to use compact mode, it's still pretty chunky. I also don't like it hiding options by default. Yes, this is my warrior, yes I'lll want to fortify him, no don't hide the option under an "ooh extra moves" tab please.

Not a fan of the removal of keyboard shortcuts such as toggling showing resources on the map. Why? Just why? Having keyboard shortcuts is always preferable to clicking. I know the CivRev people were involved in this UI but please, we're not console users having to click everything. In fact, if anybody has found a list of keyboard shortcuts, please let me know. The downloadable manual didn't have one and you can't access them ingame unless you hover over each and every button (and find all the ones that're hidden in sub menus and the like).

Also don't like that I can't have a worker selected, drag his movement over a tile and it won't show me what can be built there. It did show it in Civ4 and it was a good feature.

I liked being able to click a city to access it, not just having to click its name.

Other than the UI, it's fun and will probably be as enjoyable as Civ4 in time to come

 

[Biz_]

City screen takes way too many clicks to find out the useful information

everything is in it's own inefficient submenu. all those extra clicks will add up to several days of time I will never get back!

everything needs to be on 1 screen and we need the queueing shortcuts back.

 

[Interslice]

It's the little things that are missing that annoy me.

I"m sure some of these have been mentioned, things like no middle click to center, no border preview when settling a city, no path when ordering a worker to build a route, no queuing shortcuts. etc.

And why they thought it was a good idea to put fortify in that less used menu is beyond me.

 

[Lophostrix]

No option (as far as I can tell) to remove combat and movement animations in single player.

Also no option to bring up the tech tree or production screen immediately after finishing research or building a city. I have a very bad short term memory, and I strongly prefer to have these things come automatically when they are needed. I know Firaxis tried to streamline it by not bothering you immediately, but it would help me a lot.

Overall the interface doesn't guide the eye enough. My subconscious has a hard time zeroing in on important pieces of information. It's not instantly (quickly, but not instantly) clear how far along production or research is.

 

[squadbroken]

The inability to directly change production with the queue active kind of annoys me.

 

[nomikos]

I think an UI improvment thread is great... and seem to recall several when Civ4 & Civ3 were released. Ha!

I find myself unable to find out where in the interface is listed all the strategic resources owned or traded by your empire; having to open up a trade with a civilization to see what you have is the only option i know of right now, but that is a bit ridiculous.

Yes. An easy view - preferably part of the main-screen diplomacy pull-down - to see all the civ's resources (and gold) available for trade would be helpful. It's information you have access to - it's just very tedious (and un-stremalined) to expect us to each civ each turn to get it.

I don't know what the relationships are between the civs either. Like, I don't have the slightest idea if Siam is crazy in love with China, or if they're about to kill each others.

This and the lack of listed civ to city-state conditions. I'm no sure yet how I feel about not having a numerical representation of diplomacy (although inconsistently we get one with every city-state) - but there should be a screen with at least a 'text' explanation of all civ to civ and civ to city-state relations [along with pledges & alliances]. Perhaps resources here too.

MORE INFORMATION PLEASE!

I don't like how when you go into city view, it zooms so far out that you can't reliably see what any of the tiles are producing you, and you have to keep zooming in every time you want to tweak them manually.

Talk about un-streamlined. Also how the tiny 'click points' for each plot are often not aligned correctly near the screen edges [presumably by the 'tilt']. It would be far less tedious if we could just click the plot to change the icon.

Also how 'insert' doesn't open the nearest centered city, but always your capital. Tedious for keyboard users.

Also on the minor peevish side I'd also like to be able to re/name cities.

Note: Issue addressed below as it's apparently a design choice to only allow workers to remove roads. Still annoying though. Was: And there seems to be no way to permanently remove [for example] a road. When trying to streamline my road costs I found that while you can pillage your own roads (which I forget if it gets the underlying improvement first or road/rail) - it's still always there for the 'repair' (not sure if tile or transport gets first repair). Perhaps we could set it so when you 'pillage' your OWN roads/improvements it actually takes.

[OT: I'm really enjoying social policies (although 30% add per city seems high so far), tile limits, and enhanced combat so far - and I haven't missed religion or corps at all.]