This suggestion is a really simple idea in principle - which still would in my opinion really help with a lot of the frustrating UX in this game: let us have multiple menu tabs.
To start with, what do I mean by "tab"? Basically it is any UI window that opens if you click (most) of the buttons on the left side of the screen. These tabs take up about 1/3 of the screen vertically. I am calling them tabs because they have a lot in common with browser tabs, a UI paradigm that we regularly encounter in every day life: you can close them, you can click "hyperlinks" (buttons etc) to navigate to another tab, and you can use the "backwards" button to go back to the previous tab.
Here's the buildings tab as an example:
However one thing we cannot do with these tabs - that we are all used to from using web browsers - is having more than one tab open. If I click any button or "link" that opens a different tab, the new tab takes the current tab's place.
In my opinion this creates a very tedious and frustrating user experience. Take a look into the spoiler tags for example screenshots which illustrate the kind of workflow that I think is made cumbersome by this:
(Sorry for the somewhat flippant tone in these examples but it's a lot of typing and I had to entertain myself somehow.)
The point of these example is that there are two main problems in the way the UI currently works:
This is what gets us to my proposed solution: simply let us open more than one tab!
See here for this mockup of what it could look like in the above example:
This would be: expanding building list for Motor Industries -> clicking "Puerto Rico" -> Motor Industries in Puerto Rico tab opens -> clicking "Electricity" -> Local Electricity in Puerto Rico market tab opens
And this would be after clicking "Power Plants" in the Puerto Rico electricity market tab from the above mockup: the "Motor Industries in Puerto Rico" tab closes, and the "Power Plants in Puerto Rico" tab opens.
(Please excuse the ugliness of these mockups they are just here to get the point across.)
I hope the benefits of this are evident:
- I can inspect the Power Plants while still getting the full information on the local electricity market
- I can immediately decide to inspect a different relevant building from the local electricity market tab and it would open without closing that tab
- I can decide that I am done with Puerto Rico and immediately resume looking at Mauritania from the leftmost tab
Much more information at my fingertips! No more annoying backtracking or starting from scratch!
Here's a similar mockup of what this could look like for the trade interaction (extra ugly because of the trade lens popping up in between). I think you get my point.
What happens if more than three tabs would open? I think the game would need to make a choice which tab to close to make room. Even in the worst case this is no worse than the current situation because now the game always closes your current tab. Some ideas for basic rules to make this choice:
- the leftmost tab gets never closed
- no two tabs of the same type are open at the same time, like in the example above: "Motor Industries in Puerto Rico" closes when "Power Plants in Puerto Rico" opens because both are "buildings in state" tabs
- new tabs open to the right of the originating tab: all tabs that are already to its right get closed. In the trade example above, if I select a different good from the leftmost tab, both the "Automoblies in Spanish Market" and "Market Interaction" tabs close to show me e.g. "Coal in Spanish Market"
- if the rightmost third tab is the originating tab, the middle tab closes
- if in doubt, the user always has the option to close a tab manually using the X button
"But all those boring tabs obscure the beautiful world map" Sorry but I value access to information and not having to go through annoying UI flows higher than being able to look at the map. I think the map is beautiful, but right now I want to do a specific task to accomplish a specific goal and the map is rarely of help for that. Yes, sometimes there is information displayed on the map, and sometimes I can perform actions by clicking on the map. But in 95% of cases the same information is more readily accessible in a tab and the action is more easily performed from a tab.
I can enjoy the map when I am done making changes to my nation and am letting the clock progress. There is enough time in the game where you do nothing but that. Please do not get in my way when I want to interact with the game. And of course - for people who really do not want tabs to take up their entire screen, there can always be an option to limit the number of concurrently open tabs.
Two final suggestions that are not directly related to the main proposal but would nevertheless help a lot:
I genuinely hope this is being considered in some form. I know the development team is putting a lot of stock on tooltips but as we have seen, tooltips sometimes do not have the required information either, and they introduce additional waiting time and often do not have a way to make their information actionable. Tabs already do these things very well! Let us look at more than one of them. On balance there is not much of a difference in clutter between three open tabs and three open nested tooltips.
Victoria 3 is fundamentally a game about interrelated systems so it is extremely common that we need information from one aspect of the game to make decisions in another. Currently the UI is actively working against doing that. Allowing us to open more than one tab at a time is a cheap way of addressing this problem without doing any fundamental redesign of any game system or UI element.
Thanks for reading all the way through.
TLDR: if it's good enough for a browser from 2009 it is good enough for Victoria 3
To start with, what do I mean by "tab"? Basically it is any UI window that opens if you click (most) of the buttons on the left side of the screen. These tabs take up about 1/3 of the screen vertically. I am calling them tabs because they have a lot in common with browser tabs, a UI paradigm that we regularly encounter in every day life: you can close them, you can click "hyperlinks" (buttons etc) to navigate to another tab, and you can use the "backwards" button to go back to the previous tab.
Here's the buildings tab as an example:
However one thing we cannot do with these tabs - that we are all used to from using web browsers - is having more than one tab open. If I click any button or "link" that opens a different tab, the new tab takes the current tab's place.
In my opinion this creates a very tedious and frustrating user experience. Take a look into the spoiler tags for example screenshots which illustrate the kind of workflow that I think is made cumbersome by this:
As you can see in the screenshot above I am trying to electrify my motor industries. The problem is that the local supply of electricity is different and it is not a good idea in every state. So I cannot just make this change nationally. I have to look at individual states.
So I am forced to expand the building into a list of individual buildings by state. This list is very long and never fits on one screen unless you are playing a very small nation. I am forced to scroll down and check each state individually. The aggregated view of all buildings in the nation is out of sights.
I identify that Puerto Rico has problems - switching would create a shortage. So I click on the Motor Industries building in Puerto Rico to take a look.
I can make the switch to see the actual "after" situation. To see the actual production/comparison I am forced to make a tooltip pop up. Not great. But at least I can click on it to open the "local market" view of the electricity good:
I have to say - this is actually a very good tab. I see the production and consumption and who contributes to it. I can immediately change PMs or expand/downsize buildings to address an imbalance. I never had to use this tab before the local good rules for electricity and transportation forced me to but I really like it. I am both given the relevant information and the ability to take action to address it without being forced into waiting for tooltips or clicking into a different tab. Thanks to whoever made this.
However there are two quibbles: 1) I cannot see the exact situation of each building. Are they fully employed? Are they profitable? This is important information to decide whether to expand or downscale them. 2) To get this information I would need to go to the building tab. But I cannot just click the building icon/text. I am forced to wait for the tooltip to show up which then contains a button to go to this tab.
After doing this I see that my power plant is profitable, almost fully employed and currently hiring. Looks safe to expand so that I can fully supply my Motor Industries. Great!
However - recall back to the original image showing the building tab. It showed not only Puerto Rico in the red but also Mauretania. What if I want to look at Mauretania again?
The answer is that I am out of luck. I have two options. 1) I hit the "backwards" button a dozen times until I am back in the buildings tab again or 2) I manually click the buildings tab button again. Even worse, the buildings tab reopens at the top of the list and I am forced to scroll all the way back down where I was. In this example I only care about two different states but this tedium quickly compounds if you need to adjust 10+ states separately. This is already a lot of fuss under ideal circumstances and the UI really should not make it even harder.
After a lot of scrolling and clicking my way through I eventually made it to the equivalent tab for Mauretania. This tab is still great and I still wish I could click through directly to its Power Plants.
I am including this example mostly to show why you need to click through. Unlike Puerto Rico, Mauretania struggles staffing its Power Plants. Expanding would be a bad idea and make its problems even worse. Clearly this state is not ready to electrify. This is great to know but really should not have been so much effort to figure out.
So I am forced to expand the building into a list of individual buildings by state. This list is very long and never fits on one screen unless you are playing a very small nation. I am forced to scroll down and check each state individually. The aggregated view of all buildings in the nation is out of sights.
I identify that Puerto Rico has problems - switching would create a shortage. So I click on the Motor Industries building in Puerto Rico to take a look.
I can make the switch to see the actual "after" situation. To see the actual production/comparison I am forced to make a tooltip pop up. Not great. But at least I can click on it to open the "local market" view of the electricity good:
I have to say - this is actually a very good tab. I see the production and consumption and who contributes to it. I can immediately change PMs or expand/downsize buildings to address an imbalance. I never had to use this tab before the local good rules for electricity and transportation forced me to but I really like it. I am both given the relevant information and the ability to take action to address it without being forced into waiting for tooltips or clicking into a different tab. Thanks to whoever made this.
However there are two quibbles: 1) I cannot see the exact situation of each building. Are they fully employed? Are they profitable? This is important information to decide whether to expand or downscale them. 2) To get this information I would need to go to the building tab. But I cannot just click the building icon/text. I am forced to wait for the tooltip to show up which then contains a button to go to this tab.
After doing this I see that my power plant is profitable, almost fully employed and currently hiring. Looks safe to expand so that I can fully supply my Motor Industries. Great!
However - recall back to the original image showing the building tab. It showed not only Puerto Rico in the red but also Mauretania. What if I want to look at Mauretania again?
The answer is that I am out of luck. I have two options. 1) I hit the "backwards" button a dozen times until I am back in the buildings tab again or 2) I manually click the buildings tab button again. Even worse, the buildings tab reopens at the top of the list and I am forced to scroll all the way back down where I was. In this example I only care about two different states but this tedium quickly compounds if you need to adjust 10+ states separately. This is already a lot of fuss under ideal circumstances and the UI really should not make it even harder.
After a lot of scrolling and clicking my way through I eventually made it to the equivalent tab for Mauretania. This tab is still great and I still wish I could click through directly to its Power Plants.
I am including this example mostly to show why you need to click through. Unlike Puerto Rico, Mauretania struggles staffing its Power Plants. Expanding would be a bad idea and make its problems even worse. Clearly this state is not ready to electrify. This is great to know but really should not have been so much effort to figure out.
Another common interaction I find myself doing all the time is balancing undersupply by importing goods.
Every once in a while I open the trade tab, sort by market price, and import expensive goods. Looks like Radios and Artillery are having problems, maybe I should also import some Automobiles, Coal and Wood also are no brainers.
My rule of thumb is: keep the deficit in mind to know how much I want to import. So let's import Automobiles - my economy needs about 2.2k of them.
It takes me to the goods tab. The market balance is now quite hidden but at least it's still there. Let's click the import button. (This is my preferred flow - you can also right click the good in the trade tab and select "import" in the context menu. In my opinion both have about the same amount of friction. Why not a faster way to get there?)
We are now in the "market interaction" tab which in my mind I call "create trade routes" tab. The trade lens has opened for us which is nice. The market balance is no longer shown, which is less nice. I hope you have good memory or like to keep notes while playing numbers heavy video games. For whatever reason the "Automobiles" tooltip in this tab is different than the ones in the previous tab because it is missing all the context of the good in your actual market: price, supply/demand/balance etc.
So the information I would like to have is no longer in this screen. To be clear, at this stage of the game it is more of a moot point because if a good is in high demand the market balance deficit is so large that trade cannot satisfy it anyway, but it really matters in the early game. I just didn't want to recreate an example just for that.
Remember all the other goods we wanted to import? I hope you like the "backwards" button or recreating this entire process from scratch because those are the options.
For example, here is me importing coal. How much coal do we need? Clearly more than we can import, but the actual answer is impossible to know because I deliberately did not upload the screenshot of the tab that got us here.
Every once in a while I open the trade tab, sort by market price, and import expensive goods. Looks like Radios and Artillery are having problems, maybe I should also import some Automobiles, Coal and Wood also are no brainers.
My rule of thumb is: keep the deficit in mind to know how much I want to import. So let's import Automobiles - my economy needs about 2.2k of them.
It takes me to the goods tab. The market balance is now quite hidden but at least it's still there. Let's click the import button. (This is my preferred flow - you can also right click the good in the trade tab and select "import" in the context menu. In my opinion both have about the same amount of friction. Why not a faster way to get there?)
We are now in the "market interaction" tab which in my mind I call "create trade routes" tab. The trade lens has opened for us which is nice. The market balance is no longer shown, which is less nice. I hope you have good memory or like to keep notes while playing numbers heavy video games. For whatever reason the "Automobiles" tooltip in this tab is different than the ones in the previous tab because it is missing all the context of the good in your actual market: price, supply/demand/balance etc.
So the information I would like to have is no longer in this screen. To be clear, at this stage of the game it is more of a moot point because if a good is in high demand the market balance deficit is so large that trade cannot satisfy it anyway, but it really matters in the early game. I just didn't want to recreate an example just for that.
Remember all the other goods we wanted to import? I hope you like the "backwards" button or recreating this entire process from scratch because those are the options.
For example, here is me importing coal. How much coal do we need? Clearly more than we can import, but the actual answer is impossible to know because I deliberately did not upload the screenshot of the tab that got us here.
(Sorry for the somewhat flippant tone in these examples but it's a lot of typing and I had to entertain myself somehow.)
The point of these example is that there are two main problems in the way the UI currently works:
- The tab that contains the information that prompts me to take an action, and that is necessary to take an action, is a different tab than the one where I can actually perform the action
- If I need to perform the same action multiple times for different entities (multiple goods, buildings, states, what have you) I often have to either start over or backtrack
This is what gets us to my proposed solution: simply let us open more than one tab!
See here for this mockup of what it could look like in the above example:
This would be: expanding building list for Motor Industries -> clicking "Puerto Rico" -> Motor Industries in Puerto Rico tab opens -> clicking "Electricity" -> Local Electricity in Puerto Rico market tab opens
And this would be after clicking "Power Plants" in the Puerto Rico electricity market tab from the above mockup: the "Motor Industries in Puerto Rico" tab closes, and the "Power Plants in Puerto Rico" tab opens.
(Please excuse the ugliness of these mockups they are just here to get the point across.)
I hope the benefits of this are evident:
- I can inspect the Power Plants while still getting the full information on the local electricity market
- I can immediately decide to inspect a different relevant building from the local electricity market tab and it would open without closing that tab
- I can decide that I am done with Puerto Rico and immediately resume looking at Mauritania from the leftmost tab
Much more information at my fingertips! No more annoying backtracking or starting from scratch!
Here's a similar mockup of what this could look like for the trade interaction (extra ugly because of the trade lens popping up in between). I think you get my point.
What happens if more than three tabs would open? I think the game would need to make a choice which tab to close to make room. Even in the worst case this is no worse than the current situation because now the game always closes your current tab. Some ideas for basic rules to make this choice:
- the leftmost tab gets never closed
- no two tabs of the same type are open at the same time, like in the example above: "Motor Industries in Puerto Rico" closes when "Power Plants in Puerto Rico" opens because both are "buildings in state" tabs
- new tabs open to the right of the originating tab: all tabs that are already to its right get closed. In the trade example above, if I select a different good from the leftmost tab, both the "Automoblies in Spanish Market" and "Market Interaction" tabs close to show me e.g. "Coal in Spanish Market"
- if the rightmost third tab is the originating tab, the middle tab closes
- if in doubt, the user always has the option to close a tab manually using the X button
"But all those boring tabs obscure the beautiful world map" Sorry but I value access to information and not having to go through annoying UI flows higher than being able to look at the map. I think the map is beautiful, but right now I want to do a specific task to accomplish a specific goal and the map is rarely of help for that. Yes, sometimes there is information displayed on the map, and sometimes I can perform actions by clicking on the map. But in 95% of cases the same information is more readily accessible in a tab and the action is more easily performed from a tab.
I can enjoy the map when I am done making changes to my nation and am letting the clock progress. There is enough time in the game where you do nothing but that. Please do not get in my way when I want to interact with the game. And of course - for people who really do not want tabs to take up their entire screen, there can always be an option to limit the number of concurrently open tabs.
Two final suggestions that are not directly related to the main proposal but would nevertheless help a lot:
- Now that we can have multiple tabs open: in the buildings tab, please make the list of buildings by state pop up into a new tab on the right, rather than below the building. It would do a lot to save us from scrolling, unclutter the buildings tab, and make it easier to close/unfold the buildings by state list again
- Please change it so that I can open a lens without autoclosing my open tab(s) on me. Often when I open a lens I want to take action on information in an open tab but you are hiding it from me. A common example is once again the trade screen: I see a market imbalance -> I open the buildings screen to construct more buildings to make up for the imbalance -> I no longer know what the deficit is
I genuinely hope this is being considered in some form. I know the development team is putting a lot of stock on tooltips but as we have seen, tooltips sometimes do not have the required information either, and they introduce additional waiting time and often do not have a way to make their information actionable. Tabs already do these things very well! Let us look at more than one of them. On balance there is not much of a difference in clutter between three open tabs and three open nested tooltips.
Victoria 3 is fundamentally a game about interrelated systems so it is extremely common that we need information from one aspect of the game to make decisions in another. Currently the UI is actively working against doing that. Allowing us to open more than one tab at a time is a cheap way of addressing this problem without doing any fundamental redesign of any game system or UI element.
Thanks for reading all the way through.
TLDR: if it's good enough for a browser from 2009 it is good enough for Victoria 3
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