Imperator DD #102 - UI rework

[Bovrick]

Next up is Character UI:

View attachment 637461

I take it the Character Interations are a bit WiP here? Grant Holding and Revoke Holding being where they are suggests so. I do wonder if all of the extra Schemes real estate you could move the buttons to select Schemes into that area? Likewise with the larger artwork for Family/Relationships, would it be worthwhile making those buttons too? So Spouse art links to Arrange Marriage; Child art links to Adoption etc? Not sure if others would agree, but might be a path to freeing up some room.

 

[Mulleks]

I do wonder if all of the extra Schemes real estate you could move the buttons to select Schemes into that area? Likewise with the larger artwork for Family/Relationships,

I always liked how in CK2 it was an expanding button basically, click schemes and then select the scheme from the list.

 

[GloryGloryByzantium]

Should the province info be shifted from bottom left to bottom right? I find that I do not often look at province-specific research pts, trade routes, or manpower. I instinctively know that if I building more academies / libraries / training camps, that I can adjust those things. And several of those quantities are more important on a national or regional level than a province level. I am normally more concerned with which new buildings to add when I come to a province unless I am managing unrest issues.

 

[jpm1983]

Any plans for some more music along with the UI update? The music in the game is very good in my opinion, but it gets repetitive with so few tracks.

 

[DeceitfulCake]

This all looks great!

I don't know if this falls under the remit of the UI rework, but would it be possible at some point to get the ability to turn off the alert for individual decisions being available to take? Like how it works in EU4, where you can set specific decisions to not raise the "decisions available" flag. I almost always play with the mixed gender rules game rule enabled, which means the "abolish social equity" decision is basically always available to take. As such, the "available decisions" alert is basically always there or I dismiss it and then it's never there; either way, I never actually get notified when a different decision is available to take and often miss it unless I specifically go into the decisions tab to check the provinces I need in order to create a formable or something. This problem is most pronounced when mixed gender rules are enabled, but applies with any other decision one meets the requirements of but doesn't want to take too, and it seems like it could be an easy fix?

Unless of course I'm an idiot and there's always been an option to do this, and despite my searching I just never found it.

 

[SAS]

I like everything about this new UI except I miss the larger pie graphs for culture and religion. Those new ones are hard to see.

 

[Norton AntiVirus]

I might be wrong but I swear one of the models in the naval battle is a different ship of the already in-game ships, maybe a new content pack for some Diadochi country in the future??

Yeah they're not new, they are the ship skins from the Deluxe edition of the game.

 

[Nerdman3000]

If I can make but one suggestion, for decisions, can we have a way to click whether or not we want to be notified or not about a decision?

 

[Decius]

@jiroro At first let me say you did a phenomenal job so far on the UX! Also loving the style and the art I would like to recommend some suggestions. So without any further ado here they are:

1. The province/territory tab
I guess the picture is self explanatory but I provide a small description.
- I want to switch the food and province loyalty bar, because in my opinion the loyalty is more important and was on top since the beginning of the game. Also the addition of indicators, if food and loyalty increase, decrease or remain constant would be fine to see at first glance.
- Same goes with province investments. There is space, so you can move the icons a bit upwards and add the number of province investments below the icons, including which one is currently getting one (if this is the case at the moment).
- On the far right side I would add the manpower and the research points of the whole province and move the trade route icon a bit to the right. Icons are aligned in one straight column that way too.
- With the trade route icon moved, there should be enough space to add two more trade goods without overlapping trade good icons (I guess overlapping icons will be the case, the more trade goods in a province occur). If the two icons get added, I would expand the "Import" button to match the lenght of all trade good icons for aesthetical reasons^^
- Small suggestion for the future - more detailed pictures/icons for the buildings in the building tab

I like that there is now a queue list in the building tab

2. Character tooltip
Already made this suggestion in another thread, but I put it here into one post.
- The powerbase and personal wealth icons should be aligned in a straight column with the sex and age icon.
- Below of the personal wealth the traits of the character should be shown. This opens up the option for future updates to implement events, where your choice has to be related on the traits of the event related character. Because related characters are shown in an event message you can hover over them to show the tooltip and then hover over the traits to get the information you need for your choice in the event.
- Increase the size of the character portrait/model. - It appears a bit too small imo - I know there are some "large persian hat" issues, if you increase the size, but don't let hats rule character portraits sizes

3. Character screen/UI (not tooltip!)
If you look at the character screen on the picture of Antigonos Monophthalmos, I would enlarge the "model" of Antigonos I Monophthalmos resp. characters generally. It's the character screen/tab and he appears too small on a window about him. If you look at the picture you also notice, that there is enough space to the top and the right to enlarge the character model (portrait) without hiding anything important in the background (of the throne room). Same goes here: Don't let hats rule the character tab

4. Nation overview
I love the new design Only suggestion: Please swap the "Provinces" tab and the "Nation Decisions" tab. So if you open the nation overview the provinces are shown by default and are placed first. Because if you think about a nation overview, provinces and interactions with them are more on my mind than decisions I make just every few decades. Also this preserves, what is shown currently first if you open the nation overview.

I hope my suggestion can be implemented. Thanks again for your good work on the UX/UI

 

[Seleukos.I.Nikator]

But I would like to request, once again, that this be removed from the game.
View attachment 637537
I don't think it improves the experience or immerses one in any kind of roleplay to know exactly how healthy a character is to the level where you know the very month of their death years in advance. It adds nothing but gameyness to the game, in the worst possible way. Can we take more tips from CK3 and implement their obfuscated system?

I just want to second that.

This would indeed add so much to the game's immersion if this way of displaying the character's health is replaced with something of CK3's style. Currently, that's extremely unrealistic and gamey to be able to predict each character's death with the day's precision.

 

[Uxigadur]

You are Hermes like Jiroro, and for that i mean godssend!
Really beautiful work, i can already see how it will improve my experience

 

[nachinus]

For the proposed province layout, there is no info on two of the most important province indicators: neither happiness of the pops (either average or by pop type) nor their output. Right now, at least, there is a mask showing the level of happiness (and you have to hover the mouse to see output).

This, for me, has been one of the main issues on managing your empire in IR

This! Please add easy to browse info on happiness!

 

[Arheo]

I just want to second that.

This would indeed add so much to the game's immersion if this way of displaying the character's health is replaced with something of CK3's style. Currently, that's extremely unrealistic and gamey to be able to predict each character's death with the day's precision.

I’ve actually gone on a purge of ‘odd to have’ info that isn’t represented here. Health in character screen; manpower and gold in diplo screen are currently gone, with more to come probably.

 

[nachinus]

Currently, that's extremely unrealistic and gamey to be able to predict each character's death with the day's precision.

Agreed. Even worse, you are able to predict civil wars or provincial revolts with days precision too. Both things need to be changed.

 

[Todie]

I've one big issue with the new Settlement-UI: You cant see buildings and Pop-Classes together! I need to know which pops living in my city to build the best buildings!

In this point, the old Territory-UI is better than the new one!

Please Paradox do not hide the most important information about a settlement, the pop-classes and buildings, in different folders!

This is a good point, good feedback.

Maybe informative (nested?) tooltips can mitigate this to a large extent, as the info you want about the effect on pops should ideally all be provided in the tooltips in the building UI ()and in the macro builder) -- it should not demand of the player to look at the settlements pops separately and "do the math" as is the case now more often than not.

I think we could go on for several meaty paragraphs about building-tooltips alone; In several cases, the numbers in the 1.5 UI don't give you ANY accurate or relevant information, so there can be several layers of UX-considerations about how to do things differently (and all this assuming that buildings aren't fundamentally changing in 2.0).

Examples: buildings that change the pop-type ratios will over time end up changing the composition of pops by +x or -x number of pops depending on the total number of pops and the other pop-type-ratio parameters that are in place (existing buildings, laws, territory status etc). the current tooltip is far away from reflecting this, so you need to look at the pops separately, more in-depth if you want to make an informed decision.

Similarly, regarding matters of the degree of integration, assimilation, conversion -- that does involve some buildings, the current building-tooltips will only tell you the very same base-info that the building has, not any of the computations in next step. that is, it only tells you the effect on base conversion/assimilation speed from theatres and temples, and their happiness bonus to corresponding pops -- it doesn't take current % modifiers to conversion/assimilation speed into account and it doesn't tell you how the happiness bonus will affect the average happiness (much less the average happiness per pop-type)

Then there's the matter of buildings for the higher classes, courthouses and libraries. the usefulness of these actually depends indirectly on the local demographics. building pop-type ratio buildings ought to show players both what the ideal and the actual current pop type ratio is in the tooltip, and what it will be after construction.
(there are deeper considerations too: without enough integrated pops locally, these biuldings are significantly less useful even over a long period of time, becasue promotion to citizens and nobles will be bottlenecked by assimilation speed &/or matters of integration.)

There are UX considerations here for sure - a new or returning player will not intuitively know or understand how pops and buildings interact, so the UI ought to clue them in - but how?

... when it comes to what could be done with tooltips to improve on this, the sky is the limit. I don't know how much magic to expect regarding this - I suppose some important part hinges on some back-end coding or scripting in order to present numbers and computations correctly.

Regardless of the building-tooltips, we need some more / better pop-info at a glance on the territory and province levels.

In the pops tab of the territory-level UI from last week, there's a bunch of free real estate. show us more demographics here? share of integrated pops? share of state-pantheon pops? mouse-over tooltips on these with info on the pop-type breakdown? ... share of integrated pops should also be included in the province-level UI. its more important than the circle diagrams listing all cultures, as the meaning of each culture & their color-code depends on their integration-status.


Maybe a messy post, sorry.

 

[Bovrick]

All really good suggestions these! Broadly agree with most, though there are a few suggestions where I'm fine with the proposed new look. A few points I'd add:

- I want to switch the food and province loyalty bar, because in my opinion the loyalty is more important and was on top since the beginning of the game. Also the addition of indicators, if food and loyalty increase, decrease or remain constant would be fine to see at first glance.

I think breaking into a couple of chevrons at the end of the bar, pointing in the trending direction, would sort this nicely.

- On the far right side I would add the manpower and the research points of the whole province and move the trade route icon a bit to the right.
- With the trade route icon moved, there should be enough space to add two more trade goods without overlapping trade good icons (I guess overlapping icons will be the case, the more trade goods in a province occurs). If the two icons get added, I would expand the "Import" button to match the lenght of all trade good icons for aesthetical reasons^^

Another option: Have Tax/Manpower/Research next to the Culture/Religion/Class pies, and aligned. Keep the Trade Routes separate (as they're Province-led that's reasonable) and have their # shown under the Trade Goods shown with a similar sized Import button. I can see an argument for having the key incomes on the right as a natural place to look though.

- The powerbase and personal wealth ivons should be aligned in a straight column with the sex and age icon.
- Below of the personal wealth the traits of the character should be shown. This opens up the option for future updates to implement events, where your choice has to be related on the traits of the event related character. Because related characters are shown in an event message you can hover over him to show the tooltip and then hover over the traits to get the information you need for your choice in the event.

Nitpicking, but I'd personally have Loyalty and Corruption as the metrics below age, as they generally carry the most direct weight for any decisionmaking, and those positions stand out. Then have the 4 metrics to the right of them be Prominence-Popularity; Powerbase-Wealth - this way like concepts remain paired.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

I’ve actually gone on a purge of ‘odd to have’ info that isn’t represented here. Health in character screen; manpower and gold in diplo screen are currently gone, with more to come probably.

Thank Jupiter! And thank u for listening to our concerns

 

[Decius]

I think breaking into a couple of chevrons at the end of the bar, pointing in the trending direction, would sort this nicely.

Another option: Have Tax/Manpower/Research next to the Culture/Religion/Class pies, and aligned. Keep the Trade Routes separate (as they're Province-led that's reasonable) and have their # shown under the Trade Goods shown with a similar sized Import button. I can see an argument for having the key incomes on the right as a natural place to look though.

Nitpicking, but I'd personally have Loyalty and Corruption as the metrics below age, as they generally carry the most direct weight for any decisionmaking, and those positions stand out. Then have the 4 metrics to the right of them be Prominence-Popularity; Powerbase-Wealth - this way like concepts remain paired.

1. Good suggestion!

2. I guess both of our suggestions would be a nice solution

3. I might have the solution to fit in your and my suggestion: Add Loyalty and Corruption below Age and place the character traits infront of the characters body (on the bottom of course, infront of the characters chest)

 

[Paghalay]

The only thing I would personally change is this:

I'd personally like more of a 60/40 split on displaying terrain and city as right now it feels it represents people living in a desert more than the buildings. It's more of an immersion thing than a game play thing. I don't expect this to be changed though as I can imagine artwork is expensive and takes a fair bit of time.

 

[Telenil]

Not sure about that teal color. To me it feels strange among those brighter colors.