Issues With: The User Interface (UI)

[fantasma]

In that case you have to triple click, and try several times, Zeldor.

I really would appreciate anything that makes the mechanics a little bit easier, although I really understand that JK, UI programming is boring and tedious.

The game is really fantastic and the deep content and sophisticated mechanics make up for UI problems by far. I must say it is the only game I bought for years.

That said, I must say the already mentioned items would really be a nice improvement to speed the micromanagement part of the turn.

- goto to assassinated commanders, site searched provinces
- monthly forge
- bigger lab
- remember position in F1 as in spell selection menu
- mark commanders done
- exclude provinces from gem pooling or enable pooling for one province only
- some improvement to the t/y menu that facilitates management of 50+ commanders. Some automatic spread of commanders. Make a place around commander checkbox.
- count of communion slaves in t/y screen; imagine that you have only 15 instead of 16 and then all die of fatigue because you miscounted ...
- t/y screen gets unresponsive if there are many troops.
- set a fill personal gems automatically to X for mages, from lab or non-caster.

These are just wishes, the game is great even with the UI as it is, although it takes hours to prepare the turn past turn 50.

[SsSam]

Lots of mine have been mentioned here.
One big one that I've not seen is the ability to see national builds when designing a pretender. I know...I know... you get to a point where you don't need it, but it would be nice to see and make the learning curve just a bit less steep.

[MaxWilson]

Dana said:
I'd love a way to sort a large garrison, especially when I'm playing Pangaea, and all the masses of small green units look alike. I mean, sure, picking out the elephants is easy. Finding the Mandragoras, though? Damn near impossible. Is it a royal pain to sort the garrison by unit type? I hope not, because that would be awesome.

Hold down Alt and click on a unit to select all units of that type.

-Max

[thejeff]

Sure that's great for selecting large numbers of the mass troops. But when you're trying to pick out the handful of decent troops scattered among hundreds of chaff...
It doesn't work so well.

What I've had to do is assign the chaff to various commanders, just to get them out of the garrison to find the useful troops.
A pain especially because you often don't have a lot of high leadership commanders around.

[capnq]

Zeldor said: Double click does not work for me with a lot of units in province [not garrison].

I stopped trying to use double-click for that, because <alt>-click does the same thing more reliably. <ctrl>-click and <shift>-click also work to select/deselect individual units and groups of units, respectively. Also, <return> clears all current selections.

[Zeldor]

I have just realised that in my province with ~150 mages and ~3,5k troops when I browse it dom3.exe eats 90% of my processor power... that may be the reason that it has problems with unit selection.

[Ballbarian]

There was an ancient thread that discussed the double click issues and some UI alternative wishlists in the following thread:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=501912

I am still convinced that it is directly tied to the CPU.
(I think that my example images were hosted on Gandalf's now deceased server. )

[fictionfan]

What I would like to be able to assign a commander to start going to a Provence that is a few turns away. So I do not have to keep remembering where everyone is going.

[lch]

Bump because I think that this thread is important. I've listed UI issued before, too. I think that the UI usability and the AI are the biggest factors for an evaluation of the game by a player, so issues about the UI should definitely be considered as important to fix.

If it wasn't listed before, some things I remember from the back of my head:
- in-game load/save editor of pretenders you've created before
- being able to cancel/backtrack from anywhere in the main menu UI, as far as I remember that's not always the case when you create a game, if it prompts you for a game name

[Ming]

My most desired UI changes:

1. Have province info show both resources left for the turn (in addition to the resource provided per turn currently shown), including in the Nation Overview. [Currently I need to click on the Recruit button to check if I have already done my recruiting for the time. By late game with more than 20 recruiting centres it is easy to miss some and time consuming to double check.]

2. The End Turn button should be placed well away from the other buttons. I have prematurely ended my turn in SP several times when I meant to click on the Options button (usually to save the turn when it is a very complex and critical - and interesting - turn and cannot be finished in one sitting). [This can be very devastating as I tend not to copy the saved turns to another folder - to prevent the temptation to "cheat" in SP and load from a previous turn when something nasty happens.]

3. Replace the Magic button with the National Overview button. The Magic button is identical to the Lab button anyway while National Overview is essential to me in late game and saves me much time in completing the turn. The font size of the National Overview table should be smaller as currently some info got cut out (eg. the number of turns remaining for completing a castle with a long name) due to lack of space. The Map filter button should be placed under options as it is not often used (by me at least).

The above changes, if implemented, will save the time I need to complete a game by at least 15% and probably do the same for other players too (pure guesswork). However, I am no programmer and have no idea how much work would be needed to implement.