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Pi2repsilon -> RE: Praise to Vic's UI Design (6/28/2020 5:43:38 PM)
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For a tiny studio, the UI is a decent attempt. A lot of work has gone into it.
There are lots of ways to improve it though.
There are still a number of instances of "my UI is lying to me", and that's NEVER good in a strategy game, even if it is simple things like events saying that X happens while in reality Y happens, or tooltips that are either wrong, or they are right but the rest of the UI doesn't reflect this (e.g. +10 to war tactician card doesn't actually show +10 to war, but it does show something else, so what's going on? If it DOES add 10 to war, then the war value should indicate this, e.g. 50(60); if it doesn't, the tooltip shouldn't say so), or values that aren't updated when they change, stratagems that aren't removed immediately when they are rendered invalid (e.g. crackdown on syndicate).
Then you've got the cumbersome interactions. As an example, since you schedule many important actions through your secretary, the main screen should have a link to your secretary present at all times - or at the very least when the regime foldout is shown in the bottom fourth of the screen, rather than forcing you to go through the profile view or through the management/leaders view.
Or the "you know, I like manuals as much as the next guy, but not presenting this data in-game is a crime against good UI design" issues. Take an obvious example such as model design, when choosing weapons you don't see what targets the weapon is good at (pg 325), but it would be trivial to present the data for each weapon along with its cost so the player would know it when choosing. Or when picking engine, why doesn't the interface tell you the speed mod (pg 324) given the total weight including this engine? So long as the engine is chosen last, you can tell the player exactly the consequences for speed of choosing the different engines, and this is something of extreme importance to the design. Why would you want the player to perform the engine power/total weight division and consult with a manual table to see the effects of their choice during design?
Or given that each budget priority of a council is governed by one (1) skill, why the hell does the player need to learn these by heart or keep referring to the manual to see which skills different councils use, and which of their budget priorities use which skills? Just add the skill in question to the budget line whenever it is shown, and make the tooltip for a council position list all the relevant skills.
I could go on, and if I'm sick one of these days I'll probably do a professional one-over of the interface in a suggestion post, because it is a crying shame how the UI is letting the game down; Not by being bad - it isn't bad at all - but by being unpolished and omitting many quick wins, that would make it a much more approachable game.
I've been playing wargames these past four decades, and while I appreciate much about this game I can't help fearing that the UI's lack of polishing plus the absurd turn times once the game gets going will in the long run doom it to a mediocrity it otherwise doesn't deserve.
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