V1.09 - Interface / Usability / Accessability improvements

[Mercade]

From the perspective of interface logics / usability / accessibility I have the following suggestions for improvement on top of the 1.09 patch that has been released.

Diplo / Negotiations
1. Pressing ESC during Negotiations should be the same as clicking the Farewell button (like in Civ3).
2. If you went into Negotiations from the Diplo Advisor, Farewell should return you to Diplo instead of the Earth map.
3. When someone asks me to cancel a trade with a 3rd party, it should allow me to see which trades I am asked to cancel.
4. If someone doesn't want to trade something with me (red), perhaps I should be able to ask it as tribute anyway.
5. When you look at the active deals, it should clearly show which elements make up one trade if there are multiple trades with the game partner.

Civilopedia
6. The Main Index should be sorted like all other indices are sorted.
7. National Wonders and World Wonders should be on a separate page (either together or separately).
8. The Worker Actions Road and RailRoad have no Civilopedia entry and should be added (to Terrain Improvements?).

Right clicking
9. Unless there is another action attached to it, right-clicking anywhere should lead to the related Civilopedia entry.
10. If you enable the right-click menu on the main map, it should have links to the Civilopedia in it.

Random leader
11. When you select a random leader it shows "[default]" for the country name (etc), but if you enter "[default]" for the leader name, you are named "[default]" instead of the default name for that leader.

Save / Load window
12. The Save/Load window should honour the 24h style option. Now it always uses AM/PM for file times. (Otherwise it should at least honour localisation settings).
13. It should be possible to cancel saving/loading by pressing ESC.

Confirmation Dialogs
14. A confirmation dialog should always summarise the action, i.e. "Are you sure you want to exit to desktop?" Just asking "Are you sure?" doesn't say if I'm confirming the right action or not.
15. The disband unit confirmation dialog should name the unit. "Destroy this unit?" doesn't confirm whether I selected the right unit.

Technically the above observations aren't strictly bugs, but I believe they would improve the usability of when implemented.

 

[Mercade]

No opinions on this whatsoever?

 

[ZombieEater]

I had a similar point as #3, and I thought someone answered that if you are in negotiations, try hitting F4. I think that (still) opens the diplo screen and you can see what's going on.

re: 4 - maybe they would refuse it anyway, even if it meant you going to war with them?

 

[Mercade]

I had a similar point as #3, and I thought someone answered that if you are in negotiations, try hitting F4. I think that (still) opens the diplo screen and you can see what's going on.

re: 4 - maybe they would refuse it anyway, even if it meant you going to war with them?

3. I'll give F4 a try. Later I also noticed that while you're in negotiations, you still get the roll-over tooltips on the victory table on the right, but that only lists their feelings towards you and not the open trades.
4. Likely that they'd refuse it anyway. That's at least the way it's implemented now. It's not a big deal.

 

[oldStatesman]

My suggestion is for accessibility - for me, the icons in the Tech Tree are way too small. Especially the ones for required techs on the top right. Tech Boxes need to be bigger.

I like icons, but overall the game seems to sufffer from a tad bit of icon spam. Too much of a good thing is not good.

 

[ironduck]

I would like text instead of icons in the civilopedia. I can rarely tell what the icon is supposed to be, so if I'm looking for 'knight', just let me look for the word..

I also liked how in civ3 one could search for 'concepts' and such, there basically seemed to be more content..