Hi All.
I do appreciate the improvement to the tooltips in 1.1, but I do think that the planet governance screens could do a LOT better job at presenting the information and controls to players (especially new players). There are some fundamental weaknesses in the current UI screen layout, regardless of that it is very neat and pretty. How many times have you seen a newb say something like "Why should I worry about population. I will just build factories". This type of misunderstanding is only too easy to make because the game doesn;t present the information to the player in way that is intuitively understood.
1. The most important resource on a planet is POPULATION. Yet it is a tiny little number in a sidebar at the bottom of the screen. Population should be the first and biggest thing a new player sees on the screen. It is what he draws on for colonies and troops, and what drives the production levels of the planet.
2. The second most important thing to see on the screen is APPROVAL levels (despite it's current weak implementation in the game). The approval level, discontent level, rebellion level, etc is what modifies your population stats and determines your final PRODUCTION (and potentially whether your planet will rebel, or defect). Very old games like Civ and SMAC got it right, with a row of smiley/sad faces so you knew immediately where your planet was at.
3. The third most important thing to see on the screen is RAW PRODUCTION, which is a function of population and approval.
4. Next is the ALLOCATION of production to either manufacturing, research or wealth, and the display of the result in raw production numbers,so the player knows exactly what he is doing. I find the circle okay to manipulate, but i don't think it's the best visual way of controlling and displaying a planets focus. The marker on the circle is tiny, it's prone to pixel hunting, and it might not be intuitively obvious to some players that moving it on the edge of the circle is what locks out one or more resources. I would have preferred a set of three linked sliders, with a lock icon, so you can adjust any one value, lock it in place, then adjust the others.
5. Now, display the raw production allocated to manufacturing, research, wealth values, the bonuses applied as a result of planetary improvements, and in nice large numbers, the final resulting values for wealth, research, manufacturing.
6. Have the social/military slider directly linked to the manufacturing section, where it belongs, because this slider only effects the allocation of the final manufacturing value, and not the raw production of the planet.
Can I tag on here how disappointing the UI is in general? Beyond the production/planet screen being generally unclear for the reasons you already mentioned (not to mention little icons that aren't actually explained anywhere that I can see and don't have tooltips), the UI is slow and lags when doing things like clearing notifications. Meanwhile, I have to click all of my ships to know where they are going whereas in GC II I could see their paths on the minimap and had highlighted spots on the main view to identify spots ships were heading to while telling me how long they would take to get there. Also worth mentioning is that there are still spots where text doesn't fit and the game continues to be filled with glaring spelling and grammar issues. C'mon guys. I love you but really.
Stardock is a company that builds UI tools and upgrades for Windows and yet they struggle to make logical, efficient interfaces for all of their games. Go figure.
Actually, they should have a "production overview" tab in the planetary government view that would show the actual total production calculation in a nice graphical flowchart. That way it would be intuitively clear as to what is happening and why. The chart could simply be four boxes (or whatever looks nice) arranged in a row from left to right, each box connected with an arrow to the one next to it, and a 3-way split at the right. It would represent the chain from population to the flat bonuses to the percentage modifiers to the eco/man/res wheel split to the actual end result. Something like this:
+--> Eco:3.6
[P:10] --10--> [B:+2] --12--> [M:+50%] --18--> [W:20/50/30] --+--> Man:9.0
+--> Res:5.4
Hovering the mouse over the various boxes would tell you where the figure comes from e.g. "Terrain:+2" or "Approval:+25%, Basic Factories:+25%". Draw with nice graphics, or even animate the thing, and you have a simple clear view of what, where, and how that's understandable and useful regardless whether you are a novice or an expert.
Come to think of it, the chart should include the social slider split, too, with a shipyard shutdown indicator so that you immediately see if you have, again, forgotten to resume ship building and that's why your planet is building culture instead of churning out battleships...
One of the small things I also battle with is when cycling through planets to update build queues, I forget which planets are sponsoring shipyards, and i hate having to open the govern window every time to see where the social/military slider is, and whether it is movable (i.e., sponsoring a shipyard).
Would be great if on the main planet screen, you can see that this planet is sponsoring shipyard X, and so much of the production is going there.
I agree with the top post. I played a whole game on 'beginner' as a new player and I barely bothered with the population figure as I didn't know its importance.
Besides what has been said above, here are my suggestions for UI:
And we desperately need icon to quickly see planet bonus\penalty from moral choice upon planets colonization. Seriously... scrolling 50+ planets to find that one with +50% to research isn't fun. And why planet "trait" is displayed, but colonization bonus is hidden deep into % numbers in tool-tips?
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