[Suggestion]Improving the building interface

[Niko92]

This is a suggestion how I think the building interface could be improved. At the moment, the building screen looks like this:

It's all fine and dandy. It's fine, especially in early game, when the amount of buildings is little and the level of improvement in provinces is equal. However, in late game, I find myself spending so much time on choosing what to build. A large portion of that time just goes into hovering my mouse over the images and trying to remember what they are, what they give me and what monarch point they use. Sometimes you have that situation where you are sitting on some extra monarch points. At that point, you think "might as well spend them on building stuff", and then comes the job of remembering which building uses the points you have extra. This can turn quite tedious.

I suggest the following to fix this: Once you click the +-sign the view expands to look like this:

In this view, the buildings have been categorized, and choosing which monarch points to spend becomes much easier.

And there's more to come! Once you expand one of these individual views, it looks like this

No more hovering your mouse over to see the tooltips. In this view, you see building's name, the pretty picture attached to it and what it does. What more would you want? Btw, the brown thing is a slider, in case you mistook it for a two headed arrow snake that swallowed a palantír.

Comments?

 

[RockoW]

I agree that it needs changing up to make it more easy to look through and build. And while at it, make it possible to create armies/fleets with the click of one button. It needs an interface in which you set number of units of say 50 x infantry, 30 x cav, and 20 x cannons and preferably a go to province. That way it wont take such insane micro management to create new armies/fleets in late game.

 

[Stategem161803]

Agreed. Much better interface.

 

[Schmoekoeksklok]

Agreed, the interface isn't great, especially when I play a country where I'm not used to their different pictures yet.

 

[Anthropoid]

Nice!

 

[TheBloke]

This is a suggestion how I think the building interface could be improved. At the moment, the building screen looks like

Comments?

I really like your re-design, it's far better than what we have now. Good work!

The current building list doesn't even seem to be in a sensible order.


As an aside: how amazing would it be if interface modding was flexible and sophisticated enough to allow the community to create this for ourselves? I so hope that, one day, a future engine will do everything through a standardised API, allowing modders the same access to information and features as the developers have. Then the UI could be changed completely, in a myriad of ways, with multiple versions to suit every taste and playstyle. The developers could then spend their time exclusively on complex new game features and balancing while the community handled the more mundane, but still highly useful tasks like a more comprehensive UI and a greater variety of Ledger pages.

 

[Atlanteax]

Hopefully this is something that can be done for 1.4 or 1.5

 

[grisamentum]

OP deserves a medal

 

[grisamentum]

I agree that it needs changing up to make it more easy to look through and build. And while at it, make it possible to create armies/fleets with the click of one button. It needs an interface in which you set number of units of say 50 x infantry, 30 x cav, and 20 x cannons and preferably a go to province. That way it wont take such insane micro management to create new armies/fleets in late game.

This would actually be easy; lots of other games have "shift-click to build 5" and "control-click to build 10" and things like that. No excuse for EU4 not to have that.

 

[TheBloke]

This would actually be easy; lots of other games have "shift-click to build 5" and "control-click to build 10" and things like that. No excuse for EU4 not to have that.

This would be useful. I do find that it's rare that I build loads of units in one province. For expedience, I tend to want to spread the building over several provinces. So I build my Army buildings in little clusters, four or five in one area, and then spread new unit creation amongst those. It would be useful useful to shift-click to add 5 to a queue at once, but that's about as many as I ever queue in a single province, so I wouldn't personally ever use a 10 or more multiple.

What would be most useful is "Theatre Building", which I believe that Vicky 2 has, and I know that HOI 3 has (though they're a little simpler than I suggest below, I think.)

This further correlates with another UI improvement request that various people have made at various times - Rally Points.

The idea would be that one can configure one or more Theatres. In each Theatre I can choose multiple Build Provinces that will be used to recruit the units, and the Rally Point where they collect after being recruited.

I click the Production Interface, then Add Theatre. This brings up the Region Mapmode, and I select Europe, thus creating my "European Theatre". Then I get a province selector interface, where I select each province that I want to be a Build Province in the European Theatre. I select five provinces, these being "these five provinces in central France where I've been building the the Army line of buildings". Then it asks me for the Rally Point, and I click once more to select the Rally Point Province.

Thereafter, I could click on the Production Interface, then select European Theatre from a list of theatres, and then shift-click on each unit type to quickly queue, say, 20 inf, 6 cav, 20 artillery. The build orders would be automatically distributed, round-robin, between the Build Provinces - 46 units amongst 5 Build Provinces queuing 9 units in four provinces, 10 in the fifth. As each unit is recruited it moves automatically to its defined Rally Point province. Each unit created in a single build order will auto-merge its stacks upon arrival, so I end up with a single stack of 46 regiments in my Rally Point.

That would be awesome.

 

[Jaol]

Hmm. Definitely like the idea of seeing more information on the screen (I'd also like the price to be visible--perhaps under the Building name).

BUT--I like how in the current system I can easily compare buildings across categories. You lose that by giving every type of building its own menu.

Also, when I'm looking for specific types of buildings, I go to the ledger. Perhaps an improved ledger UI would be more useful.

 

[Jankie]

A building screen like this would be nice. After hundred of playing hours I still have to hover all this images to memorise the effects, the name and the costs.

 

[TheBloke]

BUT--I like how in the current system I can easily compare buildings across categories. You lose that by giving every type of building its own menu.

Good point. Ideal solution I suppose would be to have an "All Buildings" view, as well as the per-category views.

So adding to what the OP already designed, have an All Buildings first category; in that All Buildings category, the category name should be shown against each building, and that should be sortable.

In fact all the building lists should be sortable, and thus should be tabular.

I would have the following columns:

1. Building Category (only shown in the All Buildings section)
2. Building Image
3. Building Name
4. Monarch Point type
5. Monarch Point cost
6. Gold cost
7. Building effects

Of these, the OP's design mock-up is currently showing 2, 3 and 7 - I would add columns 4, 5, 6.

Then all the columns should be sortable, except the Building Image. Or in fact columns 2 and 3 could be one column, "Image - Name", and thus sortable on the Name.

Also, when I'm looking for specific types of buildings, I go to the ledger. Perhaps an improved ledger UI would be more useful.

Yeah, the Ledger Building pages are awesome. I only very recently learned that I could use them for building Buildings, and since then I've found it by far the preferred method.

This needs more advertisement, I bet many people, like me, did not realise that they could build Buildings in the Ledger, or didn't realise how much better it is. It's so nice being able to sort on columns and choose to build, for example, Manufacturies in the priority order of where they will have most effect.

 

[InnocentIII]

Sounds nice. In the meantime, I'd settle for the mapmode I have chosen not changing when I'm also doing buildings from build mode. It's fine until I actually put up a building. I want Production buildings in all gold provinces, why make me go to each one or else swap modes, or remember a few and swap back every couple of provinces? Lots of times I want to build (quickly, without mouse-over) trade buildings from the trade mapmode. Just stop auto-changing the mode.

 

[pgroves]

+1

 

[TheBloke]

Sounds nice. In the meantime, I'd settle for the mapmode I have chosen not changing when I'm also doing buildings from build mode. It's fine until I actually put up a building. I want Production buildings in all gold provinces, why make me go to each one or else swap modes, or remember a few and swap back every couple of provinces? Lots of times I want to build (quickly, without mouse-over) trade buildings from the trade mapmode. Just stop auto-changing the mode.

I dunno, I do like the Buildings mapmode, because it shows me at a glance where I can build whatever building, and whether I can't build it because it's missing a required lower-level building, or because it already has this building, or because it's doing something else (e.g. coring.)

If the Production Interface didn't switch mapmode, we'd need a key to go into the Building mapmode (it wouldn't be appropriate as a general mapmode.) Is that what you're suggesting? So it doesn't auto change out of your current mapmode, you decide specifically to go to the Building mapmode with a new key?

The Trade example is a good one because I do find myself swapping to Trade mode to check I'm building in the right Node. But as far as I can recall, that's pretty much the only time I don't want to be in the Building mapmode. And it's only a single key to switch to another mapmode if I do want it.

So I think that if the Building Production Interface did not swap mapmodes, and I had to use a key to get to it, I'd end up pressing that key a lot more than I currently press a key to go back to my original mapmode.

Am I understanding your request correctly? Maybe I use Production Interface differently. I only have it open when I'm building, and close it with Escape as soon as I've built as much as I want to/can at the present time.

 

[thesodality]

Good job OP.

How about some new images as well? Having the same ones we had is EU3 in just plain pathetic.