Support for the Colour Blind

[Shards]

One thing that Civ has always done well for me is it's use of clear iconography meaning that my colour-blindness has never affected my gameplay.

However, I'm rather concerned by the new screenshots showing the city screens and resource icons as they're all small circles in colour ranges that those with red-green colour blindness are going to struggle to discern.

Specifically, this shot http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=2906&c=36

Are there any other colour blind civvers out there that agree with me, or am I just being overly paranoid? If nothing else, here's hoping for a "colour blind" option in the menus!

 

[Tylerryan79]

I hope your able to play, however if not perhaps a kind modder could help you out, and rework the color scheme. Theres always a chance!

 

[Gamemaster77]

Civ3 actually had a color blind option. Where it would label certain things that color blinded people couldn't easily make out.

 

[Dbob]

I'm red-green colorblind and I can see them pretty well, plus after a while with the game I will hopefully memorize what all the tiles produce anyway and don't need the icons.

Plus I have a nice big screen so the icons in the circles should show up well for me.

So to summarize, I'm not really worried that the game will be unplayable for me.

 

[2K Greg]

Keep in mind that the screenshot you linked is being displayed in your browser much smaller than the game will actually appear when you play it.

I think you will find that the iconography of the food, production, and gold tile yields will be easily differentiable.

Civ V definitely continues the trend of having clear iconography throughout the entire game - cities have an icon on their name badge that tells you what civ they belong to, for example.

 

[Shards]

Thanks for your note Greg,

However, I'll be playing the game windowed on a laptop who's screen isn't that much bigger than the screenshot resolution (unless it's unsupported of course ), so the bigger screen argument doesn't carry that much weight I'm afraid!

I'm sure that you have a more than capable graphic design team, but I'd still like to point out that if there are multiple similar shaped items on a screen, then it's always going to be a bit of a struggle to summarise things at-a-glance. It may break up the graphical consistency, but I'd always at least want an option to display the icons as different shapes instead of/in addition to different colours.

On another, uber picky note, on that same screenshot, the formatting of the descriptive text for the Harbor is confusing as it essentially reads:

Forms a Trade Route Trade Route with the Capital Capital over water (if they're not already trade route connected by land). +25% Production Production when building naval units.

I like the use of consistent iconography in the descriptive text, but it's not much use going for both text and icons like that as it impedes the ability to scan read the section. Alternatives would be to have the icon in brackets after the text (though not ideal as it would clash with the use in the lower-left for +22 Production Production / turn) or possibly to just display the iconography but with tool-tips for the description when the user mouse-overs?

And, whilst I'm here, does the Trade Route symbol indicate a +3 Gold trade route or a +x Gold trade route? The icon looks similar to +3 gold icon on some of the terrain?

Sorry for the long read!

Thanks,

 

[GigaNerd]

Well, hopefully someone at Firaxis will discover this thread and try to help you out. Who knows? Maybe they've already decided to implement a feature like that! I guess we'll just have to wait for the game's release in September.