Poor interface

[Silverdawn]

* No Unit List

If you click the unit name in the selector UI, it brings up a scrollable list of all your units.

Spoiler :

 

[beorn]

Beorn make sure you have the scroll enabled. For me it was disabled by default. Still doesnt work that well as you can read in this thread though

Thank you! That was indeed the case. It's kind of touchy anyway, but I'm sure I'll soon get used to the way it works.

 

[Tesludo]

Fortunately, there IS a way to reduce the tooltip delay to zero. Hold the Shift key; extremely contrived yes, but at least it should be possible to change the default tooltpi behavior since it seems to be variable.

Also, you can rotate the camera, using Alt+Left Mouse button, but the damn camera doesn't stand still and resets when you release any key/button. I managed to get it to stay put ONCE, but can't reproduce it. =(

 

[AriochIV]

There are some questionable UI choices. Some of it just takes getting used to, but some of it is just annoying extra clicks.

Case in point: the city bombard icon. In Civ V, you could just click on the bombard icon (regardless of what was currently selected) and you were immediately in the bombard interface. Now unless you already have the city selected, clicking on the bombard icon selects the city. In addition to the annoying extra clicks required, you can't really tell by looking at the city whether it is selected or not (the UI that changes is at the bottom of the screen), and if there are multiple units in and around the city, things can get screwed up pretty royally with just a few clicks in the wrong context.

Having sleeping or fortified units indistinguishable from moved units is a very poor choice that leads to a lot of units not getting moved that could have moved. It's just non-subjectively a poor design choice.

 

[godotnut]

Edge panning is killing my fun, and it seems you can't remap the keys to even use WASD but are forced to do it with the arrow keys, which sucks. Everything else I can wait on.

 

[Atwork]

Having sleeping or fortified units indistinguishable from moved units is a very poor choice that leads to a lot of units not getting moved that could have moved.

Yes, experienced that annoyance several times this morning.

 

[Abraxis]

I have issues with the city interface, it seems like a step backward. I get that they tried to hide all the details in a secondary display, but they did not implement it very well at all. I'd rather just click on a city to go into it and see everything I need to see. Hiding the housing and amenity section behind another button click is annoying. If I'm focused on a city, I don't need empty screen space to see irrelevant sections of the map. Just give me my info please.
What's worse, as far as I can tell there is no display of food surplus outside of that detailed display. This is one of the first things you should see.

Also what is going on with the compass at the bottom right. There is a rectangle thing above it to "go to next unit" or do whatever tasks you have that should be done before ending the turn, but also a circle thing to the bottom left of it which seems to serve the same purpose?

At the end of the day I'm thrilled all my complaints are so petty, but man are they ever annoying.

Edge panning is killing my fun, and it seems you can't remap the keys to even use WASD but are forced to do it with the arrow keys, which sucks. Everything else I can wait on.

This is very frustrating as well. I've started clicking and dragging the map with the mouse though instead, with edge pan off. It's not so bad as giving yourself carpal tunnel trying to use the arrow keys.

 

[Atwork]

I have issues with the city interface, it seems like a step backward. I get that they tried to hide all the details in a secondary display, but they did not implement it very well at all. I'd rather just click on a city to go into it and see everything I need to see. Hiding the housing and amenity section behind another button click is annoying. If I'm focused on a city, I don't need empty screen space to see irrelevant sections of the map. Just give me my info please.
What's worse, as far as I can tell there is no display of food surplus outside of that detailed display. This is one of the first things you should see.

Also what is going on with the compass at the bottom right. There is a rectangle thing above it to "go to next unit" or do whatever tasks you have that should be done before ending the turn, but also a circle thing to the bottom left of it which seems to serve the same purpose?

Agreed. The devs shouldn't try to anticipate why I am most likely to enter the city screen so that I have to dig through multiple levels to access the info that I'm actually looking for. As you said, give me all the info in one screen grab. As it is the UI is presented in a way that consumes far more screen space than seems necessary. It needs to be streamlined and cleaned up so that all the city's info can be presented in one place.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Is it actually impossible to move units with the numpad now? When I use the mouse, mistakes happen. So I don't use the mouse. Scanning through the thread, it looks like I'm not the only one with this issue.

Dug through files and haven't found any hidden keybind options as of yet.

 

[Ramkhamhaeng]

I've watched a few Let's Plays and was really amused about the puzzles, the UI gives the players
One unmentioned thing in the diplomatic screen is the tiny rectangle for the current offer. I mean,
there is a whole screen available, but you has to scroll to see the complete offer?!
And the gold coin icon in 10 times bigger as the numbers.

 

[Jeckel]

The diplomatic screen is terrible. So much space wasted with that giant leader animation and the info is squashed into a tiny box on the side. Even in that tiny box things aren't good. In the game I'm watching my buddy play right now, the scrollable box where actual gossip/access/relationship info is displayed isn't even two cursors high. On a 42 inch tv it is less than two cursors high! Meanwhile, the practically static norway leader has four fifths of the screen to just stand there and do nothing useful. Whatever department head that approved this should be fired and whoever designed it should be drummed out of the programming world entirely. From the professional perspective, this is disgraceful.

I develop front end and take pride in building functional applications. I have been using computers for 30 years and my knowledge comes from experience.

In the recent years there seems to be a new job called "User Experience designer" and probably something more strambotic and pompous like "UX master facilitator"

Then your boss eats the bullfeathers and calls one of this "experts" to improve the UI. It doesn't matter that the users are happy with the app, the important thing seems to be creating a beautiful , albeit unusable, app to show it to the big bosses in meetings. As important of destroying the usability of an application is to drop as much buzz words as possible: breadcrumbs, user path, colour pollution, hicks law...ffs they are talking about "pinkies" now

All this being delivered by an "expert" who is a young girl that has read a few books and uses whatsupp to chat with her mates.

End result: massive efforts done in a massive development project like this being massively let down by the decissions of an unqualified junior

Ah, yes, UX Designers, also known as people who would be GUI Designers if they had any idea what they were doing. I've met a few and they are as painful to deal with as marketing suits.

I've worked on front end and back end stuff over the past ten years (mostly smaller stuff, but a few larger projects for small businesses), but much prefer front end work as for whatever reason it just seems so intuitive what should go where. That it is a problem caused by suits interfering makes a lot of sense, as does over-educated and under-experienced little suits getting their grubby mitts on everything. Those kinds of people should be sat down in front of a console application and not let near a GUI until they learn how to make something useful, informative, and intuitive. I'm not even sure I want to know what "pinkies" are and will just count myself lucky that I'm mostly retired at this point and don't have to deal with that nonsense anymore.

 

[PendragonWRB]

I mean, the alternative is just a boring loading screen. Is that really better?

No, the alternative is what we had for Civ V, just the wonderful music and the leader screen. I feel lots of little quality of life things like this where left out. Most seem trivial to clean up so if we have to wait months for a patch they better get them all in.

 

[jadel]

Fortunately, there IS a way to reduce the tooltip delay to zero. Hold the Shift key; extremely contrived yes, but at least it should be possible to change the default tooltpi behavior since it seems to be variable.

Also, you can rotate the camera, using Alt+Left Mouse button, but the damn camera doesn't stand still and resets when you release any key/button. I managed to get it to stay put ONCE, but can't reproduce it. =(

You can edit the tooltip delay yourself in the lua \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VI\Base\Assets\UI\ToolTips

local TIME_DEFAULT_PAUSE :number = 1.1; (change that 1.1 to anything from 0.0 up

Its 1.1 seconds currently, you can make it longer and shorter to your hearts desire.

Its realtime too so you can save it switch to game and see how it goes with different values, no game reload required

 

[elitetroops]

The lack of a proper city screen is ridiculous indeed. Currently clicking the city banner serves no purpose at all, except to bring out the buttons to select what else you want to do. Clicking on the city banner should center on city, open city details on left, build menu on right (with a build cue) and the option to assign citizens/buy tiles on the map in the center. There's room for all of that. I can't see any reason why the current system with multiple clicks would be better.

And pleeeease Firaxis, I do not care about how much food my city is producing, I want to know the food surplus!

The Esc key opening the game menu is so stupid it's funny. I mean, I've seen it happen all the time in previews, and I keep doing it myself all the time. If there's one thing I know about UI design, it is that if everyone intuitively expects something to be done in a certain way, it's best to allow it to be done that way. And to make everything more confusing, Esc does indeed close the City Details display! Other than that, it seems to always open the game menu.

I don't know if it is because I'm not using a lot of new apps and games, but this is the first application I can recall where ctrl+s doesn't open the save menu. Another one of those things that could be done the intuitive way.

And yes please to the back button in civilopedia. It's badly needed.

 

[TruthfulCake]

The lack of a proper city screen is ridiculous indeed. Currently clicking the city banner serves no purpose at all, except to bring out the buttons to select what else you want to do. Clicking on the city banner should center on city, open city details on left, build menu on right (with a build cue) and the option to assign citizens/buy tiles on the map in the center. There's room for all of that. I can't see any reason why the current system with multiple clicks would be better.

And pleeeease Firaxis, I do not care about how much food my city is producing, I want to know the food surplus!

The Esc key opening the game menu is so stupid it's funny. I mean, I've seen it happen all the time in previews, and I keep doing it myself all the time. If there's one thing I know about UI design, it is that if everyone intuitively expects something to be done in a certain way, it's best to allow it to be done that way. And to make everything more confusing, Esc does indeed close the City Details display! Other than that, it seems to always open the game menu.

I don't know if it is because I'm not using a lot of new apps and games, but this is the first application I can recall where ctrl+s doesn't open the save menu. Another one of those things that could be done the intuitive way.

And yes please to the back button in civilopedia. It's badly needed.

The city info on the left side of the screen that you can toggle is actually quite thorough. Food surplus is definitely one of the info shown there. The rundown on how many food you gain from what source is there as well. I don't think this was there in CiV before EUI, but I may be wrong. The whole city interface takes time to get used to, and it is definitely less streamlined than CiV, but it can be quite thorough in terms of the information given.

And I also mapped the quicksave hotkey to Ctrl+S (and load to Ctrl+L). Good thing this is at least customizable; there are other buttons that I can't customize, like upgrade or promote units.

 

[grandad1982]

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks the city screen is a steaming pile of turd. Why in God's name do i have to click those little buttons at the bottom? Just open centred on the city with the details bar, citizen assignment, production bar and tile purchase indicators (with an indicator for which ones may culture expand because this is missing why?). The people who designed this screen interface must have been tripping balls to think it was any good. Oh yeah the esq key ad well....

My next biggest complaint is about the units not having 'wait' or 'alert' options and the bubbles for fortified units being grey like units that have moved. Seriously? This is so basic it's untrue.

Not being able to rebind scroll to WASD is also frustrating (HoI4 sites this to!).

The jarring difference in styles between the map and fog of war makes at a glance info gathering really hard. Really hoping for a good mod for this.

Goody huts are seriously hard to see.

No keybind for resource bubbles or tile yields.

Cramped/small/wasteful /stupid diplomacy screen. Make the actually useful part at the side bigger.

An improved/unimproved resource lens would be nice.

On eureka popups tell me what triggered it.

Tell me when a city grows. Tell me when a city acquires a tile via cultural growth.

More to follow I'm sure.

 

[grandad1982]

You can edit the tooltip delay yourself in the lua \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VI\Base\Assets\UI\ToolTips

local TIME_DEFAULT_PAUSE :number = 1.1; (change that 1.1 to anything from 0.0 up

Its 1.1 seconds currently, you can make it longer and shorter to your hearts desire.

Its realtime too so you can save it switch to game and see how it goes with different values, no game reload required

I tried changing it to 0.3 but instead of faster tool tips I get no tool tip.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Yep, another complaint about the terrible, terrible implementation of the edge scrolling. Yes, there are UI elements around the screen but other games (including Civ5) figured out how to implement edge scrolling without interfering with the UI.

Sitting on QHD (1440p) and not getting the upscaling option either. Most UI elements are fine but the minimap is basically useless at this size. Civ:BE and Civ6 seem to hate the very concept of a minimap - a minimap run over somebody at Firaxis or something?

 

[Disgustipated]

I miss the city screen so much. I hope if we complain enough they can "fix" this. In fact, pretty much every interface "improvement" I dislike. I say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And for the most part, Civ5's interface wasn't broke, it only needed a few tweaks here and there.

The interface is seriously slowing my games and turns down. Especially the edge screen scroll. I ended up disabling it because it is so bad and doesn't work like Civ5, Civ4, Civ3 etc. And the notifactions boxes on the bottom right side. argh, this interface is so bad. Clicking on the notifications sometimes moves my unit to the tile underneath the notification, or I can't see info on the notification but instead tile info pops up after an agonizingly long 1.1 seconds.

 

[Dracul JOSHI]

I actually really like the UI for what is there... I just want more mnemonic things, such as double clicking culture to open culture victory screen...

oh, and renaming cities... I want that back.