Imperator DD #106 - UI rework part 2

[IsaacCAT]

The issue with that is we would want the information in the places where we make decisions, like in the Province view. If they can nail a good version there, it may as well be ported around the other menus too.

Those are nation wide information charts. The province decisions are mainly about governor’s policies. These policies require info about POPs, their culture, their production, etc... related to that province.
I would like to test the new UI and see how it works, there are new buttons that i do not know what they do

 

[religiousphanatic]

Can we have macro slave mover? Moving slaves is key however it is very bad in the current state, we have to check territory per territory in the map. I suggest a big window with all the regions, then we click in the region and see all the provinces ( and trade goods within province), and then we click in the province and see all the territories showing the trade good & amount of slaves needed for surplus/pop capacity/slaves number, and we can sort it out. And we have the move slaves button in each territory.

it would be also good to not have slave scaling by numbers and instead use the culture or religion filter, how many times did i depopulate my teritories cause of that.

block of trade on provincional lvl instead on national lvl would be useful also so that block surplus actually haves a real meaning , (sensitive in capital province , (playing with 0 stability is possible if you keep 25 earthenware for citizens example))

removal of seek treatment option for prisoners would be more then welcomed

 

[Tardigradus]

I think the fact that people are now complaining about the pie charts really indicates how far this game has come since launch.

Btw, I agree I would like to see more numbers than a chart, and integrated vs non integrated cultures in the province view. If possible.

 

[Ketchup & friends]

More of that flavor!

Does it mean you will add more interactions for non-pantheon holy sites? Adding and removing relics etc.

 

[Martocticvs]

So I agree with Lambert that the pies aren't particularly useful, but I don't agree that they're inherently bad. The problem is that they are trying to show us the wrong information. As an overview (be it nation or province), the most important pieces of information to me are: proportion of accepted culture to non-accepted, and proportion of state-religion to non-state-religion. That gives you a nice clear two colours on each pie so you can see the most important info at-a-glance. Perhaps the more detailed pies could then appear within the tooltips (accompanied by a table of all cultures/religions in your empire)...?

Also, the art is looking great! However, if there isn't diversity of art, the richness of it will actually work against itself. If you're going to go down that route, you need to go all the way and have plenty of variety. As a Germanic tribe, we should never be seeing exquisite statues and Greek architecture, etc etc. But I am definitely liking the overall look

 

[AlleyTheToaster]

Some of these Roman and Greek temples on those few arts already lack in colour. Roman and Greek statues and Temples were not white, but brightly coloured. Was one of huge negatives for me about the old UI, is it being white marble, instead of brightly coloured marble. Regardless, maybe you wanna rethink what colour palette using on those?

 

[Arheo]

Does it mean you will add more interactions for non-pantheon holy sites? Adding and removing relics etc.

You will be able to remove relics from non-pantheon holy sites, yes. As you would receive no benefit from adding them (which is as designed), there will not be functionality for adding them.

 

[Lyyr]

I like the region based grouping of provinces. It just feels right.

 

[Testeria]

Good day, Jiroro here!

The UI rework is moving along nicely. We still have things to do before we can call it finished but it’s starting to come together. Since the last time I posted, we’ve polished and refined the UIs and their components, so if you look closely you'll notice some differences from last time. Personally, I have a pet peeve about alignment and spacing in UIs - or lack thereof - so I’m trying to set aside some time for polish too. It’s been really cool to read your comments on my previous Dev diary (#102) because it turns out most of your feedback matches well with what’s currently on my to-do list.

Sooo, today I’m back again to share some UIs.
First up we have some new additions to the Nation Overview.

View attachment 648734

You’ve seen this UI before, but what’s new here is that you can enable or disable the alerts for individual Nation Decisions now! This is something I wanted to add for quite some time now, so it’s great to have it in. Some of the decisions you simply care a little bit less about Now you can toggle them on or off as you please.

View attachment 648735

Previously you’ve seen the Nation Overview with Provinces as a list at the bottom of the view. We made it into its own tab, called “Management” for now. More space for Provinces was definitely needed. In the Province Management tab, you might notice there are two ways of viewing your Provinces now: The regular Provinces list as well as grouped by Governorships. Grouping by governorship makes a lot of sense, but one problem is that you wouldn’t be able to sort as freely on Province level this way. We are exploring how it feels. For now, we have both lists available.

Next up is a little something in the Macro Builder:

View attachment 648736

Now, you can cancel or destroy buildings from the Macro Builder, just right-click on the territory on the map in this mode. It makes a lot of sense to be able to do that here.

Final peek for today is Religion view. Here’s how it looks:

View attachment 648737

View attachment 648738

We are letting the descriptions for treasures and Deities take up more space, which makes me so happy. More of that flavor! We're also adding different images depending on the tier of Holy Site (tier is based on Territory rank just like before) and place them as background images in the UI. The close ups are one of the tier 1 as well as tier 3. Our artists have some serious talent, all this gorgeous art really makes the UI come alive!

View attachment 648739
View attachment 648740

That's all from me for this time around. Have a great week everyone and talk to you soon!

/Jiroro

1. One problem with the tabs, esp. the big ones:

Because active tab is light and clicable tabs are dark (teal) - it should stand up more from the background. It is misleading the way it is now.

2. Also lists with big clicable icons do not look good:

Maybe allow icons to blend more with each row or make borders lighter? Not sure yet.

Still grateful for all this work!

 

[Marcus Pica]

This looks great. But for nation overiew, somebody will not like pie charts, since they are practicly useless. But if you'd add different color shades to every specific culture, it will become MUCH more practical.

Thank u! I really like those pie charts

Edit: whilst numbers would represent more data, I like it as a representation of a pie chart as not only does it remind me of Vic II but I like it artistically to show how diverse my empire is rather than just numbers

Showing a number, the most important part of what that is supposed to represent, would take up less space than the information devoid pie chart.

If pie charts were somehoe linked to the period.. like the Romans REALLY loved pie.. then I could look past it... but it aint. It looks bad. Pies are really awful ways of displaying information... and information must be displayed!

The basic premise is that pie charts are poor at communicating data. They take up more space and are harder to read than the alternatives. The brain's not very good at comparing the size of angles and because there's no scale, reading accurate values is difficult.

The Worst Chart In The World

www.businessinsider.com

And they look bad.

dont understand why so much hate for the pie charts, some of us are visual types and prefer a graphical presentation of fractions. Besides, this is not CK, we dont have only liege culture and county culture, every pop has a different culture, religion and class. The world of IR is detailed, there are minorities, each culture has different rights. Pie charts belong to IR as much as they belong to Vicky and I want the original clean pie charts back!

 

[Rebel1776]

I find this a complete 180 from the disgraceful condition of Release. It was clear to see that the lack of passion in the Release build was evident after the first 5 Pre-Release Dev Diaries. It was a clear Re-skin of EU:Rome with an incoherent amalgamation of mechanics that had reasonable intent, but never executed appropriately. I must say Paradox got complacent by taking many of their loyal fanbase for granted, and subsequently got a well-deserved kick in the arse for it.

It's nice to see a Team has finally been put together that actually seems to give a damn, and is actually passionate, about the time period. As well as making Imperator truly Unique within the Paradox Library.

I look forward to what you have to offer in the Future Imperator Team, keep up the good work.

 

[IndigoRage]

And they look bad.

Bad form to spread lies on the internet. Pie is the most aesthetic chart. I will not hear otherwise.

 

[Valentinius]

Don't really understand the hate for pie charts, the option is histograms, graphs or tables that take up a lot more space.

There must be a way to compromise and achieve having enough info at a glance to quickly make a decision, yet also provide an easy opportunity to see everything for those who want to.

What if the primary culture piece of the pie is given a gold or white bloom/glow effect and the percentage is written together with the culture name? Then a hover-tooltip which can be expanded to show everything. It's conceivable to have upwards to 10 cultures in a territory, or more, and constantly visualizing all of them takes up a lot of screen space. Imperator already has a nasty habit of hiding the map, it should be minimised at all cost.

 

[Lord Lambert]

Bad form to spread lies on the internet. Pie is the most aesthetic chart. I will not hear otherwise.

P I E C H A R T S A R E B A D

 

[nikkythegreat]

I would like to put into record that in the governorships tab, it only shows income and number of pops. What is notably missing is manpower, is this a simple UI design choice or does that mean we will in deed move towards a levy system.

 

[Splorghley]

[Nation Overview screenshot]
View attachment 648734

I am incredibly excited for the UI rework, but I must say I hope this isn't a final pass over the Nation Overview screen. There's a lot here that still seems either unnecessary (the Xs cluttering the decision list don't appear to be conveying any information) or unclear (I don't know what the numbers and sliders in the top right represent).

Great progress though! The UI has been my number one issue with IR since 1.0, so I'm very pleased to see it being worked on.

Edit: On reflection, the Xs are probably decisions you can't presently take. If this is the case, rather than repeating an oversized X ad nauseam, perhaps the decisions that the player can / can't take could be differentiated stylistically (e.g. button colour, font boldness, thickness / style of button outline, a separator between the two sets of decisions, etc).

 

[Bovrick]

This screen is definitely something I'm excited about! In terms of functionality, I'd also like to see:

• A sort bar at the top, which allows for sorting Regions by values that are being shown at that level (so on screen for now, Governor/Region Name/Income/Pops).
• When a Region is expanded, have another thin sort bar appear below it to allow sorting by the values shown at the Province level, where the sort applies only within the shown Provinces.
• With the Governor portraits, hover should give us the expanded tooltips, while click should bring us to the character screen. Would be nice to have a button to change Governor from this screen, but not essential (maybe have this as part of the hover tooltip?).
• Additional information that would be welcome at the Region level would be overall Manpower/Research generation (if still applicable), Governor Loyalty, Finesse and Corruption (if there's a way to fit it in, Governor Powerbase and commanded Cohorts would be nice, but definitely low priority). Governor details could all be part of the expanded tooltip if they're too cumbersome in this screen I guess.
• This type of screen as an option for the Character menu too, with Characters classed under their Family, Faction or Office Type (Court/Governors/Generals) as appropriate.

Mostly these are nice-to-haves rather than must-haves, but just things to consider

 

[Jimmyfeellucky]

Ooh, they're red, white and blue.
Best colors.

 

[Keesje]

Loving the changes! Especially appreciate the use of community feedback.

 

[Cagallo]

Previously you’ve seen the Nation Overview with Provinces as a list at the bottom of the view. We made it into its own tab, called “Management” for now.

Instead of showing only food and loyalty per province, they could show average pop happiness levels that is more useful for management.