The 2000 Hour Club...

[Leyrann]

I'm not sure perked up is the right phrase. It's saddening that the market has gone so doormat that Civ 6 has a worse UI by objective measures than games 20 years ago and yet this isn't a serious issue for its sales. This game's UI is grossly inadequate and yet you still see multiple people claim they don't see the issue...even after posts like the one where I was just quoted.

Firaxis and Paradox both have active disregard for end user experience when it comes to physically playing the game and it's perplexing that the loss of respect for them over this isn't more universal. Apparently straight up lying UI, hidden rules, and hours more rote inputs/game than necessary (all objective measures) just don't matter to a large chunk of the player base, because it's not like people could actually refute these statements.

Though I mistyped in the quote above UI vs AI on the last line. My point is that I've yet to see a great AI in a strategy game, but much better UIs have existed from the mid 1990s until today. After improving significantly for Civ 4, Firaxis apparently forgot how and never tried again.

Have you considered there may be more to UI than inputs needed?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Have you considered there may be more to UI than inputs needed?

Asking me this after what is quoted is intellectually dishonest.

 

[Leyrann]

Asking me this after what is quoted is intellectually dishonest.

Alright, you mentioned several things.

The thing I want to say is, even though there are some things about a UI where you can objectively say what is better and what is worse, that's not true for all things. I haven't done any hard counting or anything, but the fact of the matter is, I like the Civ VI UI. A lot. And I often feel like the anti-UI people aren't willing to acknowledge that, to some people, the UI is actually fine.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Alright, you mentioned several things.

The thing I want to say is, even though there are some things about a UI where you can objectively say what is better and what is worse, that's not true for all things. I haven't done any hard counting or anything, but the fact of the matter is, I like the Civ VI UI. A lot. And I often feel like the anti-UI people aren't willing to acknowledge that, to some people, the UI is actually fine.

I acknowledge that some people believe the UI is fine and consider that an obvious part of the problem. It's why I call this a doormat market. People accept grossly inadequate standards for no clear reason, and this doesn't happen in most other game genres.

This game's UI adds hours per game in rote inputs. That's measured reality. It's no more "gameplay" than spinning your chair 180 and drumming your hands on the wall for 2-3 minutes each turn before turning back around again to play. I don't care if a subset of the population is perfectly fine staring at a wall, it's still not good gameplay because you don't need a game to do nothing.

Lying UI and hiding the rules are similarly unambiguously terrible. I've even seen design videos talking about "valid" reasoning for the latter (hiding core gameplay rules like how war weariness works). I hold their dishonesty in disdain.

In most game genres, if you want to constrain anticipation about what the game rules allow in the future, you can find the information documented for you. Often right in the game. When the UI indicates something will happen, it not happening is considered a significant bug. Information presented by the game is internally consistent. In most game genres, trash like unit cycling is not "fixed" by giving people the option to play without the feature and refusing to fix the feature.

Every genre has bad games. Very few have doormat market properties where the biggest market share competitors put a comically terrible effort into end user experience to the point where games made before 1995 have better conventions for moving/controlling units, a more consistently accurate AI, and a faster hotkey layout.

Though notably, even back then, Civ was not one of the games that did this. People figured out how to implement things like limited stacking, queues, and waypoints over 20 years ago. Competent teams have done so ever since. Why doesn't Firaxis bother? Doormat market.

 

[Archon_Wing]

That said, I agree Civ 4 wasn't great. It was just the only title in the series where the UI demonstrated at least some developer effort to consider end user experience.

Civ 4's UI is terrible.

Civ 5's UI is worse

Civ 6's UI makes 5's look good.

So it's not like any of them were ever any good, but rather it just seems to be getting worse.

Compare the notifications for the 3 games. Try looking up the last event where you built a wonder or destroyed an enemy 300 years ago.... oh wait you can't! How exactly did they go from Civ 5's flashy light, "can't miss it" notifications, or just Civ 4's "yea we have an event log" basic UI thing to whatever this is, resulting me in ignoring what actually happened.

Oh btw CQUI isn't perfect either, but hey, at least they tried.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Civ 4 is interesting because it's pretty good in the #input category but pretty bad in that some controls are bugged, and it is poor at presenting rules and accurate information.

I don't want to deny credit where it is due. The city list + sort-ability + ability to give orders to even selected groups cities based on how they're sorted is a feature that few TBS share. The shift/alt/control click queue from an instantly accessible drop down menu was a legitimately good implementation and I'm not sure how that particular interaction could be done better. Waypoints, loop queue, and continuous builds are all much appreciated too, and all lacking in Civ 6.

That is what it looks like when developers actually consider how the person interacts with the game and try making it better. It's a shame this wasn't extended to the entirety of the UI, and that Firaxes has actively disregarded it ever since.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Civ 4's UI is terrible.

Civ 5's UI is worse

Civ 6's UI makes 5's look good.

So it's not like any of them were ever any good, but rather it just seems to be getting worse.

Compare the notifications for the 3 games. Try looking up the last event where you built a wonder or destroyed an enemy 300 years ago.... oh wait you can't! How exactly did they go from Civ 5's flashy light, "can't miss it" notifications, or just Civ 4's "yea we have an event log" basic UI thing to whatever this is, resulting me in ignoring what actually happened.

Oh btw CQUI isn't perfect either, but hey, at least they tried.

The most unforgiveable thing to me is the misleading information presented to the player. That's a real bugbear for me, as to me it's a signal that the development team does not care about the quality of the product they're putting out.

Whatever else the UI does, it should not lie to the player. And when bugs are reported that show the UI is lying, you whip a patch out and fix it. Money be damned at this stage, it's about the quality of your product, for heaven's sake.

I guess this may be the difference between an indie team that cares about what they're putting out and a corporate product where even if the development team does care, they can't demonstrate it because they're not allowed to take the steps necessary to fix these issues.

Anyway, it's a bad look on Firaxis.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Civ 4 is interesting because it's pretty good in the #input category but pretty bad in that some controls are bugged, and it is poor at presenting rules and accurate information.

Well, this is I think the big problem. I suppose Civ 4 suffers from bugs while later games suffer from "this would be terrible even if it worked".

That being said, my gameplay background is like old 8-bit games and Blizzard, so I tend to have a pretty high standard for simplistic and working UIs. And even for Blizzard's games I'd still be annoyed somehow, such as Diablo 2's font making 5 look like 6 (how the hell do you screw that up?). But I do think a lot of games in general just have utterly useless UI and it is very discouraging. Hell, I almost ditched this game until I could turn unit cycling off.

Whatever else the UI does, it should not lie to the player. And when bugs are reported that show the UI is lying, you whip a patch out and fix it.

I wasn't aware the UI for 6 lied much.... maybe tile expansion? :S

Anyhow, back on topic. I've got 1250 hours, and I started playing in... June of 2017? Been a pretty good run and not really bored so the game should be doing something right. Bought 5 and 6 at the same time and played them equally for the first 50 hours and then I just played 6 exclusively after R&F despite 5 delivering the better impression. I think I play too much already tbh....

 

[Leyrann]

I acknowledge that some people believe the UI is fine and consider that an obvious part of the problem. It's why I call this a doormat market. People accept grossly inadequate standards for no clear reason, and this doesn't happen in most other game genres.

Well I'm not a doormat, sorry. Far from it, actually. But I still think the UI is fine. You need to not just "acknowledge that some people believe the UI is fine", you need to accept that your opinion is not the absolute truth. There's merit to what you're saying, but that doesn't mean there's no merit to what other people are saying.

This game's UI adds hours per game in rote inputs. That's measured reality. It's no more "gameplay" than spinning your chair 180 and drumming your hands on the wall for 2-3 minutes each turn before turning back around again to play. I don't care if a subset of the population is perfectly fine staring at a wall, it's still not good gameplay because you don't need a game to do nothing.

Also, you're exaggerating.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Also, you're exaggerating.

No, this is actually measured. Rote inputs from managing cities amount to > minute per turn per game once you have 10+ cities, and scales poorly (>> 2 minutes per for 20 cities). Measured outcome in standard settings is at least 2 hours longer compared to civ 4 and often significantly more than that. If you do the math it's not surprising (adding 2 minutes per turn over last 100 turns is 200 minutes, and this is consistent with timed outcomes in practice between the two games...I used to record videos so I have a sense of real time usage from Civ 4, and have experimented with timer in Civ 6 to track for comparison). Hours per game is the correct conclusion, and it's not realistic to play much faster than me because the game has broken (as in inconsistent) input buffering for actions.

This is before we get into IBT times and poor optimization, but that's not relevant to UI unless considering the poor interface in trade deal proposals from the AI. It *does* add up too though, and having animations being done off-screen is pretty pathetic.

You need to not just "acknowledge that some people believe the UI is fine", you need to accept that your opinion is not the absolute truth.

I can't generate "absolute truth" no matter what I do (nor did I claim this, so that's a red herring). I can, and have, pointed out that the standards TBS on the market today like Civ 6 and its non-TBS competitor in Paradox games are well below that of other game genres and also well below the standards that TBS actually attained decades ago.

My assertion that this is a "doormat market" is of course opinion. The fact that Civ 6 gets trashed by most objective measures of UI quality by a game made before 1995 is not. One may or may not prefer the look of a game, but in terms of input count, accuracy, and presentation of its own rules/information? Civ 6 can't match up to earlier iterations of the same series, and especially can't touch good TBS UI.

At least it lies less frequently than Paradox games, where sometimes 60 > 60 and other times join = not join. It's not too far off by misrepresenting when attacks happen sometimes when right clicking, but it's not as frequent or egregiously game ending.

 

[Disgustipated]

I'm still not seeing the hours longer bit. My games are longer only because in between turn times are longer. But that has nothing to do with UI. True, I can't tell all my cities to build a certain thing all at once, but I would never want to do that in Civ6. 1 UPT has changed the way UI can be designed, for better or for worse.

There is one thing the game desperately needs. Automatically recurring projects like for example campus project. It's pretty inexcusable not having this. I think the reason they missed this is because they didn't expect people to play the game a certain way.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

True, I can't tell all my cities to build a certain thing all at once, but I would never want to do that in Civ6. 1 UPT has changed the way UI can be designed, for better or for worse.

There is literally nothing about 1UPT that obsoletes the queue controls or unit/building selection list available in Civ 4. Same goes for waypoints. Having a loop would indeed be extremely useful when closing out conquest games, so you're not prompted to make something every 3 turns with poor cycling because you finished another batch of GPP.

Using civ 4 system, you could click on the city once, mouse wheel down, hold alt, then click on the campus project...and if so desired, you could do this for any selection of cities you desire for the price of exactly one extra input per city added. You could even do something similar adding a unit to the top of the queue then go back to the project automatically.

When you compare the number of inputs from JUST this example over the course of 100 turns, the difference in total number of inputs required turn to turn is staggering...but this is just one example.

I'm saying "hours longer" because I've literally timed it for both games. You could grab the best StarCraft 1/2 Zerg player in the world and put him on Civ 6 and he'd not be able to keep up with me in Civ 4 turn to turn, even if I had double his cities by t100. The difference is that significant.

I do admit that at least some of the hours added comes from between-turn times (IBT). IBT is worse than Civ 4 even if you era adjust but I don't think the marginal decline is as stark.

 

[Archon_Wing]

TMIT is right in my experience. I could finish a game of Civ 4 in less than 2 hours, Civ 5 a bit more, closer to 3. But 6 probably takes like 4+. Even in 5, it seemed easier to clearly end your turn while in 6, I often would make like 10 prompts on the turn I win.... though I guess I could just skip turn. But then I get stuck doing this kind of crap....

Yea well, this is why I don't bother with the micromanagement.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ 5 had similar problems to 6 but shackled them to a degree by mechanically limiting city count. You don't get a 20 vs 50 city comparison when you're heavily incentivized to stay on 4-6 cities and then pick a win condition.

 

[Archon_Wing]

^ 5 had similar problems to 6 but shackled them to a degree by mechanically limiting city count. You don't get a 20 vs 50 city comparison when you're heavily incentivized to stay on 4-6 cities and then pick a win condition.

I've actually heard that quite a bit, that people preferred not having to micromanage that many cities.

I wonder if bringing back puppeting would help.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

TMIT is right in my experience. I could finish a game of Civ 4 in less than 2 hours, Civ 5 a bit more, closer to 3. But 6 probably takes like 4+. Even in 5, it seemed easier to clearly end your turn while in 6, I often would make like 10 prompts on the turn I win.... though I guess I could just skip turn. But then I get stuck doing this kind of crap....

Yea well, this is why I don't bother with the micromanagement.

Everybody's going to have their own specific issues that impact them more than others.

For me, trading in Civ 6 is the worst. The Trade Screen won't tell me whether I currently own a Luxury offered by the AI, only whether I produce the luxury. So if I've already traded to receive a copy of that Luxury, I can't tell when trying to negotiate a new deal. I need to be out if the diplomacy screen to see what luxuries I'm getting in trade. And even then, I can't tell when that trade deal will end. As far as I can tell, there's no way to get the game to tell you when a particular trade deal will end.

Fortunately, I don't trade for luxuries a lot. I do trade luxuries away, however, constantly. There the frustration for me is the amount of time spent figuring out how much each AI leader will offer, and then after checking on all of them, going back and selling to the one offering the best price.

These are going to be non-issues for some players, and for me hopefully some day they'll be a mod to simplify the process of getting each AI's best gold offer. But right now, for me the amount of time spent on the deal screen adds a lot of frustration to the process of playing the game.

 

[Disgustipated]

TMIT is right in my experience. I could finish a game of Civ 4 in less than 2 hours, Civ 5 a bit more, closer to 3. But 6 probably takes like 4+

Strange. My Civ4 games always seemed to be the longest. But I played larger maps there often as well. I generally can't play huge maps in this game. The turn times get too slow. Civ6 seems even faster than Civ5 to me because I can win in an earlier year. Too early imho, but that's another matter entirely. But I admit I haven't actually timed them. I just remember my Civ4 games taking multiple days to finish.

Main problem I have now is my computer really isn't up to snuff. I can run large maps, but it can get a bit slow in later eras.

Less than 2 hours with Civ4 would be unheard of! Of course I also played Marathon in Civ4 where as marathon feels too long with Civ5/6 and I play epic speed on those 2 games.

 

[Leyrann]

No, this is actually measured. Rote inputs from managing cities amount to > minute per turn per game once you have 10+ cities, and scales poorly (>> 2 minutes per for 20 cities). Measured outcome in standard settings is at least 2 hours longer compared to civ 4 and often significantly more than that. If you do the math it's not surprising (adding 2 minutes per turn over last 100 turns is 200 minutes, and this is consistent with timed outcomes in practice between the two games...I used to record videos so I have a sense of real time usage from Civ 4, and have experimented with timer in Civ 6 to track for comparison). Hours per game is the correct conclusion, and it's not realistic to play much faster than me because the game has broken (as in inconsistent) input buffering for actions.

Then I'm going to assume we play differently. In fact I think I typically need less time per city to select production in Civ VI than in Civ IV, though part of this will be familiarity (I have more hours in Civ VI than in Civ IV). Also a really stupid thing about Civ IV is that you physically cannot save your game during the start-of-turn sequence (to my knowledge, at least). Once that start-of-turn sequence takes 5 or 10 minutes that becomes really annoying.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Strange. My Civ4 games always seemed to be the longest. But I played larger maps there often as well. I generally can't play huge maps in this game. The turn times get too slow. Civ6 seems even faster than Civ5 to me because I can win in an earlier year. Too early imho, but that's another matter entirely. But I admit I haven't actually timed them. I just remember my Civ4 games taking multiple days to finish.

Main problem I have now is my computer really isn't up to snuff. I can run large maps, but it can get a bit slow in later eras.

Less than 2 hours with Civ4 would be unheard of! Of course I also played Marathon in Civ4 where as marathon feels too long with Civ5/6 and I play epic speed on those 2 games.

I'd definitely never play marathon in Civ 6. Even epic is kinda. :S Maybe on a huge earth map, I'd be inclined to do such, but that would just be for the Earth Map experience.

 

[Tuvok694]

Steam says I have 3560 hours. And still I cannot win about 19 out of 20 games on emperor(!) level. Hard to believe, but sadly true. Maybe I should kill myself.