Imperator DD #102 - UI rework

[Marcus Pica]

I dislike the fact that the main circular buttons at the top have been removed, this became such an I:R signature for me (I dont like the CK3 navigation on the right But that at least ušes different color for different tabs)

I dislike the change from 3D-ish pie charts (for presenting pops percentages class, culture, religion) to the new ring pie charts

I liked the fact that the old UI was more relief-like, things stood out from the screen, were 3D, now windows, buttons are flat. The pie charts change is an example of that.

 

[Arheo]

@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

View attachment 637538

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

View attachment 637539

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

This is super useful constructive feedback, we'll take a look over some of the issues mentioned. On a general note, this is the kind of actionable critique that is a pleasure to see from the community - there are many such instances in this thread, so a big thanks to all responsible.

 

[defekt]

S'alright I suppose but the UI isn't/wasn't one of I:R's biggest problems.

 

[fabius]

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.

Please don't get rid of all intel type info on other countries.
Stuff like that adds context and a sense of what is happening in the game world.
Please add more information to the ledger, especially foreign wars.

This information could be obscured a little, like maybe estimates of Gold and manpower. But remember things like the diplo view and ledger add a window into the game world that can be seen as modelling a range of information sources, eg, spies, emissaries, traitors, sell swords, merchants etc etc.

One of the pleasures of a Grand Strategy game is seeing and having insights to the foreign countries too.

 

[Svenska Super]

Dear Jijoro,
i appreciate you communicating everything like that. I see you get much help. Im detoxing from bashing prdx.
I do think that rest of team must listen well to gameplay alterations and they are much needed!
Than a good UI can be created.
I do like it the side bar, good analysis that top is not easy to recognise. Still making the icons marble, bronze or gold, silver UI is more classy. So as wood and or iron for more tribal nations.
My biggest concern remains the gameplay. It is good that combad width is increased with naval battle, as most of time sea has unlimited space.

But we need more refined units, buildings (also more), defensive structures etc.
This goes to slow, these changes not make me re-install the game

 

[Daser von Wulf]

I will miss the top navigation bar .

 

[Sebastián Machado]

Good day!

I’m Jiroro, the UX designer on Imperator: Rome. I’ve been on the Stockholm team since November 2019. Nice to finally meet you officially!

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So… what is UX?

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Sometimes UX and UI get mixed up. The
UX - User experience - designers at Paradox are focused on grouping and presenting information, taking the players’ perspective into account. We want to make approachable games, design experiences with a flow that feels intuitive and natural (and sometimes we get it wrong, lol, so thank you always for your feedback). Are concepts introduced properly? Is information achievable? What is the players’ expectation in this system, this game? Are colors, icons or words used in a consistent way throughout all corners of the game? We analyze, then put things into their designated place in the UI, using the gorgeous bits and pieces that our UI artists created. So sure, I do UI. However, I don’t create the color schemes, ornaments or textures of our UI. I design the experience the player will have in the UI.

UI Rework
It’s finally happening, people! The UI rework has been my main focus since I started working on Imperator. Me and my little Stockholm based strike team have been working away from the shadows for a while now. We wanted to take our time to truly figure out our new direction and identify some pain points that needed attention.

To summarize, my UX mission is: Declutter and reorganize the UI for the whole game, without reducing the amount of information you can access. If we removed parts of the core game, it wouldn’t be Imperator: Rome anymore. Sounds like a fun challenge, huh?

Some high priority points for me:

• More art! Let art take up more space to enhance the feeling of immersion. Without letting gameplay or functionality suffer.
• Visual consistency. Introduce a visual language that makes a distinction between what’s clickable and what’s not, for example.
• Tabs and headers to group information.

And now that 2.0 is announced, I can finally get into some details with you all!
Small disclaimer is of course that this is under development as we speak, and the final result may look slightly different from the screenshots.
Let’s start with… probably the busiest window of the game: Province & Territory UI.

View attachment 637455

You know this view.
What I did first was to analyze what we have here. What does everything mean, what belongs to what? I usually create flat uncolored vector icons - low fidelity - to avoid getting distracted by styling at this stage.
After identifying some problems that I want to solve, it’s drag and drop time. Grouping the pieces to add some structure! I ended up with a wireframe like this:

View attachment 637433

And through some sort of dark, mysterious magic it turns into this latest version, implemented (usually by Arheo or myself) in game:

View attachment 637456

Tadaa! We decided to have a designated color for buttons in the UI rework. Everything clickable is now teal colored in some way, with the exception of flags. In headers, buttons are white since it blends in better than teal.
In Province & Territory UI, we still have Province on top, Territory on bottom. The two sections get a clearer separation now with our bold headers.
Various things have been cleaned up and aligned, like the progress bars, Province income is now combined into one value (you can still find commerce and tax income separately in the tooltip). Trade goods get more space than before, too.
The terrain image is used in a bigger format to bring more focus to that. On the right side we have new illustrations to show the territory status (this one’s the settlement image).
And, of course, the tabs. Pops, Buildings, Tactical.

Moving on to the top bar navigation. We scrapped that and moved the buttons to the side:

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The gods in the old buttons are extremely beautiful, but it was often hard to remember which god represented which UI. We went for a flat icon approach instead. I want players to quickly recognize icons for the UI they want to open. I also changed the order slightly, it makes sense like this I think. The opened UI’s icon will highlight to tell you where you are.

Another UI that got a makeover is Nation Overview:

View attachment 637459

For 1.5 I decided to move Decisions into the Nation Overview. Here it is in the new UI for 2.0. Now, you select a decision to read more about and enact it with a separate button.
And oh, you will be able to access Nation Overview by clicking the big Nation flag in the corner. So many of us try to do this all the time (yes, we tracked it in usability tests, and I’ve seen your comments about it). So I added that for the UI rework.

We also gave the Outliner some love:

View attachment 637460

The Outliner has gotten a more compact look. It’s slimmer, information is tightly packed within it to avoid too much scrolling, some added consistency for the button hiding or showing the Outliner and Queued Events.

Next up is Character UI:

View attachment 637461
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This view has gotten some of that art boost I mentioned as one of my goals for the rework. I felt that characters should have more of a personal touch to them. In fact, we have added a series of backgrounds for character portraits for this update, and in the detailed Character UI - as well as in the Nested Tooltip card - you see the full width version of that image. The backgrounds provide flavor and contextual information. Apart from terrain images based on the character’s location and government related backgrounds, we also have specific images behind characters who are dead or imprisoned.

That’s all from me for this week. I appreciate all your feedback on last week’s UI rework reveal. Not to mention improvement suggestions here and on other platforms before that. Your comments and suggestions influence my work and that’s a really cool position for me to be in. With UX design, I truly believe there needs to be a back-and-forth. Thank you.

/Jiroro

...... But wait!
Before we wrap up completely, Arheo has something to share:

Hi all! In usual fashion, we can't leave a dev diary without a small teaser of something new... without telling you what it is, naturally. Thus, with no further comment, I'll leave this (WIP) window here:

View attachment 637450

I am a fan of this game. It's great to see all these new changes. I will wait for you anxiously. Congratulations to the team

 

[lnCarvalho]

-is there still gonna be a circle in the number of a trade good to indicate that it can (or cannot) be exported?

Maybe the highlighted goods are the ones we can export?

 

[Decius]

This is super useful constructive feedback, we'll take a look over some of the issues mentioned. On a general note, this is the kind of actionable critique that is a pleasure to see from the community - there are many such instances in this thread, so a big thanks to all responsible.

Thank you for your kind words and taking my feedback in consideration

 

[pch91]

This lacking detains them From the rulers and important people,

 

[Weyird]

I'll be honest, I don't play Imperator. I've tried it twice when there were free trials and both times I just gave up after a few hours because I just hated the entire interface. So I think it's good that it's being reworked.

 

[Argead33]

Changes look very positive so far, definitely excited to see how they unfold.

 

[aldrigsova]

New UI looks great, as a side request I wish demanding money in peace deals would make a comeback.

 

[Inspecta]

I guess someone can be unhappy with piecharts. But if you dont want to remove them, then simply make culture colors unique, like Eu4 did, where one specific color was picked for the culture group, and the game qutomaticly would change the shade of it. But I guess you'd have to recolor some of the cultures. Like I see that Latin Red and Terracota colored culture group could be mixed up in this. Or, you know, just color each culture individually. But I guess, that Eu4 way would be MUCH faster to make, you just have to find which culture group has the most culture entries in it, and then find shades that could be seen even from far away, but keep the theme of the group.

 

[Theuthis]

While the new UI looks much more appealing, I'd like to give some feedback on what has been shown on both this dev diary and the previous one:
- Overall senate support wasn't displayed anywhere in the republic government tab, and it wasn't displayed either in the top bar. Considering how important this value is for republics it should be displayed in either of those places, but preferably in both of them. Another thing I'd like to mention about the republic government tab is that the contrast given to the ruling faction to differentiate it from the other two is too low, I'd suggest colouring the faction border as well to make it more easily distinguishable. Lastly, the faction of the candidates that will succeed the current rulers isn't displayed, I think it would be better if there were little faction icons next to the pictures.
-It seems that in the character menu the character names of characters belonging to a great family are no longer highlighted in the colour of the great family (and presumably this is also the case in other menus where this highlight was present) . I guess this was changed because it was deemed unnecessary due to the character portraits now having a ribbon to represent that they belong to a great family; but to me the ribbon doesn't seem as easily distinguishable as the name highlight, so I'd suggest that the highlight be kept as it is.
- The new territory menu seems clunkier to use, now having to navigate through different tabs to see information on pops and buildings, which you usually need together to make decisions on what to build. At the same time I understand that the current UI is pretty messy and there wasn't a good way to fix that without compartmentalizing the information. What I don't understand, however, is the design of the pops tab. To me it seems like it is borderline redundant, serving mostly as a way to open the "Additional pops information" tab if you want to know anything other than the number of pops of each type. What makes this even more disconcerting is that around 70% of the space (at a glance) is being "wasted". I'd strongly recommend making better use of the space by moving the pop icons and their corresponding number slightly upwards, to make room for a happiness slider where the numbers are located. On top of that I would make use of the space on the left of the tab by including two pie charts displaying the cultural and religious composition of the territory. I feel that these suggestions would greatly enhance the functionality of the new pops tab while keeping it easy to read.
-About the summary part of the territory tab I'd just like to mention that the "None" is confusing and should definitely be renamed to "No modifiers" like in the concept picture shown in this dev diary. I'd also like to mention that the modifier bar could be slightly cut to make room for the "Make holy site" button/Holy site icon, which looks quite ugly in it's new location (I just mention this in case the way it looks is not a placeholder).
- In case this isn't the plan already, I'd like to ask you to let us build directly from the buildings tab, without having to access an auxiliary menu.
- Before I go into the province tab I'd like to talk about a menu that hasn't been shown but could use some improvement in the current version of the game, the province "Import" menu. This menu is missing some key functionality: the ability to see and cancel province exports. The reason this is really important is that right now if a province is losing food because it is exporting a food trade good there is no way to see this from the province interface (including the "Import" auxiliary tab) other than hovering the mouse over each of the arrows that appear in the map to indicate exports, which is not ideal. Once you have figured out that the province is exporting food, you need to open the "Trade" national tab, search for the province in question and then search for the specific trade good you want to cancel, making this process unnecessarily cumbersome. Because of this letting us see and cancel exports from the "Import" tab (which then should be renamed "Trade" or something similar) would really improve the user experience.
-The province tab doesn't display whether food or province loyalty are increasing or decreasing. I think it should let us know how these two values are changing, preferably giving us the specific number.
-This isn't too important, but I think that the holding owner of a territory could be shown non-intrusively by showing their portrait in the cutoff from the terrain type picture to the territory type picture.
-While the new decisions tab looks significantly better than the current one it is unclear whether the biggest annoyance of the current one (at least for me) has been fixed. There should be a checkbox for each decision which determines if a decision is ignored or not for the purposes of the top bar notification. Right now the notification becomes redundant if I am allowed to take a decision I'm not interested in because I will no longer know if there is a newly available decision I want to take (like "Imperial ambition") or if it is the one I don't care about (for example "Adopt Plutocratic Monarchy")
That's all, thanks for reading and sorry for the wall of text, haha.

Also, I've just figured out what looked off to me in the various character menus that have been shown. Loyalty, prominence, popularity and corruption are grouped together, and so are martial, oratory, finesse and zeal. This is fine, since the stats in each group fit thematically with the other ones in the same group, but what doesn't look right to me is that they are arranged in a 2x2 grid. Wouldn't it be easier to read the UI if each of these two groups was arranged in a column? I don't know if this is completely subjective, but to me it feels more natural to look for something in a 4x1 column rather than in a 2x2 grid.

 

[klopkr]

This is some of the nicest UI work i've seen at paradox.

I'm so so glad the giant image button design style that started mid way in EU4 is officially dead. Cute idea for a way to give artists something to do but absolutely useless in terms of knowing what they do.

 

[Kyoumen]

I always find these looks at the "backstage" parts of game design really interesting, so thank you for that!

 

[Jernau_]

My most wanted feature is an improved macrobuilder similar to EU4, with more info to help you decide what and where to build etc.
Any chance that this will come?

 

[The Keeper of the Links]

As someone that has held off on buying this for the longest time, I might have to consider it. This looks amazing.

Paradox never just give up on a game. If they make a mistake they work damn hard to win players back

 

[Squashyhex]

If you're doing a UI overhaul, can you PLEASE include a dark version of the UI. You already have a beautiful black marble texture during the loading screen and main menu, could you reuse that? It would be so much easier on the eyes.