Please make the Civilopedia useful

[Galumphus]

As it is, it's very hard to use.

1) Looking things up by icon sucks. I mean hard core, big time. All the icons look the same.

2) Allow text searches. Let me type in "Artillery", which I can do much faster than I can click on some cutesy buttons and scroll down a list.

3) More hot links. Everything should be linkable.

 

[tegilbor]

I can only agree 100%.

 

[Johnny Tsunami]

I think they should be able to link the 'pedia to a unit, etc, via right click as that functionality is included in the game (right clicking and doing somethings w/ the units) currently.

You can turn on right functionality through the options menu.

So hopefully well see something in a future patch - but the first patch will deal more w/ tech problems then adding functionality are my thoughts...

 

[AsnoT]

absolutely

as it is, it's pretty much unusable.

btw - as unusable as the german handbook, where they translated all units etc, but left the lists sorted as they were IN ENGLISH.

 

[tegilbor]

absolutely

as it is, it's pretty much unusable.

btw - as unusable as the german handbook, where they translated all units etc, but left the lists sorted as they were IN ENGLISH.

Yea, the German manual is a major disappointment. At first I thought "Wow! 200 pages! Finally a game with a decent manual!" But the manual is fairly useless. There are way too many thing that aren't described in the manual nor in the Civilopedia. For example, I don't think it says anywhere that you can press "SHIFT" to add an item to your build queue or "CTRL" to add it to the beginning (I think you only get that from the hints you get while the game loads). Also, there are a lot of small errors... for example, the properties of the Roman and the Persian cultures were mixed up in the manual. Not a big deal, but that kind of stuff just adds up.

And yea, this is not a bug report per se, but I do hope that Firaxis considers providing a more thorough and complete manual within the Civilopedia, or else we can only buy the strategy guide - which may be what Firaxis wants us to do.

 

[Harkonnen]

Hints are available from text index on the right in civilopedia TOP menu. Yet, I don't think it should be listed only in hints section. In civ3 you had access to units description via right-clicking and picking bottom-most item (several items as per unit type in a stack), there there is no such opportunity.

Heck, there was helpful "worker actions" section in civ3 civilopedia which is missing in civ4. Also, both roads and railroads are binded to letter 'r' (and are available together), so I had to click icons to avoid ambiguity.

 

[jened]

what's ironic is that the manual touts the hypertext of the civpedia. can we just mod this thing ourselves to do so.

 

[Claudia]

I just want a damned alphabetical index of everything. I don't care if I can right-click to a unit listing, so long as I can definitively tell what is and isn't *in* the Civilopedia.

 

[SlyFrog]

I just want a damned alphabetical index of everything. I don't care if I can right-click to a unit listing, so long as I can definitively tell what is and isn't *in* the Civilopedia.

Well, the sections are alphabetical, just not with words.

 

[Holywhippet]

Admittedly it's more a problem with the units than the civiliopedia, but for my first game I was scratching my head trying to work out what kind of ship I could load my settlers into in order to send them overseas. It looked like the first ship I could do it with was the transport, I found out later that it should be the Galleon.

 

[Big J Money]

Yeah, the civilopedia really got dissed this time around. I can't figure out why they didn't keep the Civ III model of it. The wonderful Civilopedia was probably THE best unique feature of Civ III.

Also, I think the information in the Pedia about how combat works is wrong. I seem to remember it saying each successful combat attack reduces the opponent's health/power by 10%.

=$= Big J Money =$=

 

[neriana]

I do find it useful, but making us look up things by icon only was a big mistake. They are alphabetical, but it's not as simple as it should be. They should have made it a vertical list with icons AND names. Everything should be linked everywhere, too.

 

[forgotten fans]

absolutely

as it is, it's pretty much unusable.

I agree, it's a complete waste of a once cool feature. I cannot understand what the designers were thinking. Maybe by making some of the interfaces worse they can use "new improved interfaces" as a selling point for Civ V.

 

[angeleyes]

My opinion (complaint) is that the designers has done too much effort to
make it look beautiful, and that messed up functionality

 

[Harkonnen]

Yeah, picture buttons were always attracting Delphi "programmers" and alike...

BTW, when I discovered a "new land" on terra, I build in a rush 3 settlers (had to switch to universal suffrage for that), just to discover that damn caravels can load almost anything but the settler... galleys can load settlers but cannot leave the coast.

 

[TeeAhr1]

I totally agree. It does look pretty, but I can't find ****. And is it just me or the Game Concepts section totally lacking any useful material? Ex.: The game I started last week, the most attractive first city site was over a resource. I checked the manual, I checked the pedia, and nowhere was I told what happens to resources under a city. As it turns out, I tried it, and it's the same as CivIII, it does automatically access that resource (once the appropriate tech is discovered, of course), but damn, you'd think in half an hour of looking, I could have found that information.

That said, sure, it's pretty and all. But a search bar, for the love of god...

 

[zifn13]

I'm not sure if this fits in the descushion(sp) but in the whole I found that the funchtion(sp) of everything was down graded not to mention the avisors(sp) ,which I found helpfu, l where gone with the wind.

 

[Amatir]

The civilopedia is really annoyingly confused/confusing. I hope it just takes time to get used to it and it will all be better... nice looks and functionality, how nice that would be.

 

[Zany]

The Civilopedia is as ugly as sin and completely useless. It is truly an atrocity, it has no right to exist the way it is. The Civ III one was great, full of valuable info for the game, interesting historical info as a bonus, AND EVERYTHING WAS A DAMN LINK! Oh yeah, and it used something called WORDS! Civ III used WORDS! I can't believe I have to search through the whole damn list of icons to find something, I can't just click on a link. This might be the worst thing in history of computer games or video games, seriously.

 

[BeefontheBone]

Worse than Plumbers Don't Wear Ties?