(Info Panel refers to the menus on the left side; this is what the tutorial calls them)
A lot has been made about some UI decisions, such as information that is only hidden behind tooltips. I fully agree with pretty much all of them. Nothing should ever only be behind a tooltip; all information should have a permanent, directly accessible home. Everything from pop needs to military projection is only indirectly available.
But that's not what I want to talk about here. The frustration with the tooltips has allowed a secondary element to the UI to go relatively unremarked on due to the other issues but is absolutely awful, and it's the layout. The actual geometry of what information is where and how much space it takes up is a mess. There is an incredible amount of dead space, unhelpful information is prioritized where helpful information is hidden, things aren't given thought as to where they are, and the result is a lot of extra scrolling and clicking where you just...should not have to?
As such I am going to go through the side menus one-by-one listing all of the glaring examples that I have noticed, with screenshots to illustrate my proposed improvements where I think a visual might help (forgive my poor paint skills, they won't all look gorgeous but my point is just to address layout, not make pretty pictures). Places where the player is being forced to do needless work to do the same action because of how large a piece of information is, what information is being given, and how it's being laid out, or other places where space is just used really inefficiently. I would encourage others to chime in with more examples since there are enough that I'm sure I won't capture all of them.
As a final note, I have a 1920x1080 resolution monitor. Obviously larger monitors will experience less problems with scrolling, and smaller ones will have that be exacerbated. But I frankly am of the opinion that just because you have a larger monitor is no reason to be wasteful; a UI that is laid out well is more functional for smaller monitors than not but looks more professional and better no matter what. Even the most decadent monitor should be able to appreciate a UI that conveys all of its information as efficiently as possible.
pretty ornate (edit: pretty isn't the right word, since a well-laid out UI is prettier than otherwise tbh), relatively inefficient UI layouts. This is not one of those games. There is way too much information to keep track of to be able to waste space the way V3 does right now.
A lot has been made about some UI decisions, such as information that is only hidden behind tooltips. I fully agree with pretty much all of them. Nothing should ever only be behind a tooltip; all information should have a permanent, directly accessible home. Everything from pop needs to military projection is only indirectly available.
But that's not what I want to talk about here. The frustration with the tooltips has allowed a secondary element to the UI to go relatively unremarked on due to the other issues but is absolutely awful, and it's the layout. The actual geometry of what information is where and how much space it takes up is a mess. There is an incredible amount of dead space, unhelpful information is prioritized where helpful information is hidden, things aren't given thought as to where they are, and the result is a lot of extra scrolling and clicking where you just...should not have to?
As such I am going to go through the side menus one-by-one listing all of the glaring examples that I have noticed, with screenshots to illustrate my proposed improvements where I think a visual might help (forgive my poor paint skills, they won't all look gorgeous but my point is just to address layout, not make pretty pictures). Places where the player is being forced to do needless work to do the same action because of how large a piece of information is, what information is being given, and how it's being laid out, or other places where space is just used really inefficiently. I would encourage others to chime in with more examples since there are enough that I'm sure I won't capture all of them.
As a final note, I have a 1920x1080 resolution monitor. Obviously larger monitors will experience less problems with scrolling, and smaller ones will have that be exacerbated. But I frankly am of the opinion that just because you have a larger monitor is no reason to be wasteful; a UI that is laid out well is more functional for smaller monitors than not but looks more professional and better no matter what. Even the most decadent monitor should be able to appreciate a UI that conveys all of its information as efficiently as possible.
- Politics
- Overview
- There is so much...unused space here. There is a ton of room beneath the government IGs and opposition IGs. Right now, it's difficult to use because the IGs in and out of government grow and shrink in number, but we can circumvent that with some rearrangement. Right now, the government and opposition are two separate columns. We can move these instead to be aligned vertically, with a a clear barrier indicating who is government above and who is in opposition below. There is a lot of horizontal dead space between the name of the IG and its clout, which we can narrow down. Similarly, the width of the leader's summary is only to match what is below and there is a lot of unused space which we can free up by just narrowing everything. And then you're left with...over half the page that is absolutely uncommitted to any graphic. I'm not even going to tell Paradox what to put here, though I'll list a few ideas below. But put something here, at least. I'll give a mild pass to the information on the right (and the lack thereof on the bottom right) since it needs vertical space to grow and contract as your institutions and IG effects grow or contract in number.
- One idea for the unallocated space is to elaborate on political parties. Right now, recording what political parties have been unlocked but are not formed for your country is impossible. There is no reason it could not list these and explain why it is that no IG has gravitated to them. Another could be a lot of the last n IG opinion changes. I assume part of the plan is that politics will be given some overhaul in the future and this space can be recycled then but in the meantime, do something with it. It's silly not to give us more information.
- Government
- The first thing I want to tackle here are laws. You can observe the laws that do or do not have support at the bottom left, but it's not easy to see what compares with what right now - that is, what law changes fall under the same law type. It requires the player to actually read the name of the category (in yellow-on-green...) as opposed to having a clear visual indicator. To fix this, we can move the type to the left, and list laws under that type sequentially to the right. Support versus opposition can be listed above each law going vertically. Each row becomes all changes for one category of law rather than one specific law.
- Similar to the overview, there is so much dead space between the IG name, icon, approval, and bonuses on the left and their clout, ideologies, and leader on the right. This can be easily condensed. If we narrow these a lot to fit entirely in the space taken up by the current government IGs, we can move the laws to where the opposition IGs are...which means less scrolling through possible law changes! Together with the first change, we might eliminate scrolling through this menu entirely!
- As a bonus, give me a "pin all IGs button". There's no real reason not to have it (this will not be in the screenshot because I remembered to mention it after editing the image, but just look at the market screen to see what I mean).
- The first thing I want to tackle here are laws. You can observe the laws that do or do not have support at the bottom left, but it's not easy to see what compares with what right now - that is, what law changes fall under the same law type. It requires the player to actually read the name of the category (in yellow-on-green...) as opposed to having a clear visual indicator. To fix this, we can move the type to the left, and list laws under that type sequentially to the right. Support versus opposition can be listed above each law going vertically. Each row becomes all changes for one category of law rather than one specific law.
- Laws
- The only thing being told to you initially is the type, law in place, and options you have, but the button is extremely large. These can obviously be narrowed down. In addition, there is space below each law. I assume the goal of these is to leave space to have more categories and laws later on, and similar to the overview, I'm not entirely sure what you'd put here with the gained space if you leave it as only laws. But you do have the space then.
- Looking into a single, specific law, it is easier to make some changes. For starters, the size of these buttons gives us the ability to explicitly account for which IG would support which law. Giving us the total clout in support but the game should also list IGs in favor or against. The active law gets this treatment off to the left but this information is hidden behind a tooltip. This is unfortunate - if we want to see what IGs to boost to improve passage of a particular law, it's not just given to us. This can be fixed by arranging the support/opposition bars vertically and setting IG icons to either side, boxed in the same color as their bar, to indicate their support or opposition. Neutral IGs can be listed off to the side. These icons were actually very well crafted to be easily recognizable, color coded, and indicate not only who they are but if they are in government and how powerful they are You may not know what the ideology symbols are, but I'll bet you sure as hell know what the industrialists' symbol looks like. They should be used literally everywhere they are applicable.
- Institutions
- There's a lot of obvious dead space in width, but there is I think literally no more information that even can be conveyed right now. That being said it should be noted that the equation at the top to tell you how much bureaucracy you're using, which is a simple x * y = z, is the width of the entire screen. The institutions below are also needlessly wide, even taking into account the pictures. This may be a victim of simply not having enough information to really merit an entire screen.
- Overview
- Budget
- Overview
- It's not a ding against the overview tab specifically so much as against the budget menu as a whole, since it's in common with all three tabs. The space allocated to your income at the top is enormous. It's one number, and is given more space than any other piece of information on screen. Now, I acknowledge this is an important number, but this number is only so helpful on its own, takes up a lot of space, and...well, basically put a pin in this one. We're going to come back to it.
- This menu has two changes to make. The first change I'd make is to include a collapsible dropdown for income and expenses. What I mean by that is the type of gold menu button that the supported law changes used on the politics-government tab; if you want to hide revenue and look only at expenses, just click on revenue to hide that whole section (collapsible dropdowns are going to make a comeback in future menus, so just understand that's what I mean when I use the term). There's not much dead space to strip away, but my screen has just the slightest bit of scrolling for me, and so smaller monitors will also have some.
- The other change is to either not put consumption taxes on multiple levels, or to put them on levels distinguished by authority cost. If you apply enough consumption taxes, it will eventually wrap to a new line, hitting some invisible barrier. My initial guess was that there is a column element here, because it lines up with the start of the five tax level buttons, but it can also clearly not true because the "Goods for Government Buildings" expense line extends past it. At the very least, that proves that this can be fixed. So just list them all on one line. Or, if we want to convey more information, list on each line an authority cost and then put all tax icons of that authority cost extended out on one line to the right (this is what I will make my picture with, but I would accept either).
- States
- This is hard to improve easily imo. It's a vertical list of information by state. It can be sorted, it highlights where the state is when you hover over it, it's color coded. You could conceivably reduce the amount of space taken per button just looking at the space between each one and how big the button is in comparison to the text, but not nearly as glaring as the politics screen. Certain filters that might be nice might be strategic regions ( to see how valuable a strategic region is as a whole) and incorporation (to be able to hide states that are not core to your country).
- Assets
- This entire screen is of only questionable use, frankly. You can never have both principal and reserves, so listing both is not helpful. Your credit and principal are related to each other, but on opposite ends of this screen, with one on the very top and one on the very bottom. Credit is actually listed twice, once in small font below the bankruptcy button and once immediately below it in larger text. The one in larger text indicates both remaining credit and maximum credit, which is literally the same information as the principal expressed in the negative form. The declare bankruptcy button takes up way too much space. And this is the only place I have yet found that your interest rate is actually listed, buried in small font in the middle of the menu!
- So what can we do about this? Well...frankly, I'd take the relevant bits of this and stick it into the overview tab. There's just not enough here to merit its own page and what here is important, is really important and should be listed upfront. So grab the interest rate, current credit/reserves status, maximum credit and reserves, and investment pool. That's...really all the useful information on this page. There's just that and a bankruptcy button. Move it to the overview page, since all of this is relevant to a budgetary overview! I would stick all of this above the revenue and expenses groups (which, remember, are now collapsible). I'll go through these in order, to make sure they're all bunched as smartly as possible.
- Remember that pinned topic? Let's go back to that. Your weekly net income is currently above everything on all tabs. But we've just taken the reserves/principal bar and put it right below, because the assets tab isn't very useful. That bar actually lists the change as well, which means we're listing the same number twice in a small area. Given that one of those two takes up a lot of space on its own and a lot of that space is dead space specifically...yeah, you can see where I'm going with this. Scrap the number at the top. It's redundant on the overview tab, it's useless on the states tab, and the assets tab is gone. This bar can be just one bar, which is gold when you have reserves and red when you're borrowing. The name it says can change dynamically.
- Underneath that, put the bankruptcy button. We can shave off a lot of vertical space from it. It makes sense here because it's important (put it early on) and relates to your credit limit.
- Underneath that, the formula for your maximum reserves and credit. The assets page currently tells you that it is based on your GDP and buildings cash reserves. You can get this from a tooltip in the assets tab, but it's a little messy there. Split up the two pieces of information: show the part that comes from your GDP as one number, and all the buildings cash reserves in total in the other.. The tooltip for the latter should be exactly what the tooltip is for remaining credit now, less the GDP, but it takes away the part where you have to subtract maximum credit - GDP portion to get the sum of all your buildings' cash reserves.
- Underneath that, put the interest rate. It is specifically relevant to credit, so it should go next to it, but can otherwise be stuck at the bottom.
- Then put your investment pool. It's important but doesn't tie into anything else specifically, so we'll leave it at the bottom of this block.
- Overview
- Buildings
- Urban/Rural/Development (these tabs largely work similarly, so the complaints are generally in common, so I'm consolidating all three of these together)
- The first and foremost complaint is that building types are not sorted by...anything, as far as I can tell. The easiest and simplest change would be to order buildings alphabetically, because when the player wants to find a building, they want to find it by the name you've drilled into their head over however many hours of playing.
- Unbuilt buildings are listed only at the bottom. This requires some scrolling if you want to build a new building that you've not built before, especially later in the game. It would be easier to find what you are looking for if it slots an empty entry into the same style as a built building, but for which the productivity bar instead says that none are built. Monuments, canals and the like for which you do not qualify should not be displayed at all, they only take up space for no benefit.
- Unbuilt buildings list zero profits, and they should just be ignored. While this is not normally in the scope of what I want to cover here, it's misleading enough to cause players to open up that build tab and look for the unprofitable buildings. This post is entirely about information that causes unnecessary action. A building that isn't built isn't losing money or being unproductive, and currently causes a player to do a small investigation for nothing.
- The number of build points I have is not helpful on these pages. Remove that value from the top and free up and entire building to see on the same screen.
- Construction
- One change that carries in common from above is that, if you have no construction sectors you have to leave this menu altogether to build one. While this is really only an early game concern, there's no reason for it except that using the "unbuilt urban buildings" menu from the previous tabs would conflict with the construction menu. Given that we should scrap that anyway, we can make bring this menu in line with the other three. If you have no construction sectors, list the little gold dropdown and say you have none but if you want to build one to just click on the plus.
- The construction queue should list what state it's being built in. The arrow is helpful but if I have low market access in Île-de-France, Normandy, Provence, and Brittany, and I build two railways in each, it should not be so hard to rearrange the order if I change my mind as to which is most important.
- Each entry in the construction queue needs a way to move around the queue quickly without going to the top or bottom. While drag-and-drop would help easily rearrange the queue in the early game, when you have three or four pages of buildings in the queue, it's impractical to move several from the third page to the first but not the top. My proposal is to give each entry in the queue a number indicating where it slots in the queue. Clicking on the arrow to move a build order works as normal, as does alt-click. But now right clicking will let you type (or paste!) a number to send it right to that position. The reason I am opting for this is because we have at this point very limited horizontal space to work with (after adding the state name) and I am loathe to spend more vertical space on it (this would be easier if we remove the picture of the building graphic since that frees up a lot of horizontal space, but I have been trying not to make removals of this sort; my goal has been to only move information around but not change Paradox's actual display philosophy).
- The other three tabs would look largely as they are except of course alphabetically arranged, and with no unbuilt buildings menu at the bottom.
- Urban/Rural/Development (these tabs largely work similarly, so the complaints are generally in common, so I'm consolidating all three of these together)
- Market
- Details
- A good menu! This one is very clean. Orders are directly contrasted next to each other; the game directly shows you the balance so you don't have to do math; it tells you the price both absolutely and relative to the base price, it can be sorted on all groups, and it can be filtered by good category, and if you don't they're still color coded to give you an indication of what type the good is from. Stellar work.
- Trade Routes
- First off, this needs to be sorted alphabetically. This falls into the same trap as buildings, where they're not arranged in any meaningful way so there's no way for a player to know that if they want to find their tools trade route management, is it a bit down, or quite a ways?
- I would suggest at least a graphics option to make this more condensed by eliminating the picture alongside the entry and hiding all import and export routes as well as tariff policy behind the dropdown. This means a player can choose to have to expand this entry in order to manage their tariff policy in exchange for getting far more goods routes per screen (since each good is now only the height of that gold bar).
- Members
- While this can be sorted, it would really benefit from actual filters, or else the ability to sort sequentially. That is, you can't sort by country and then state name; sorting on any group then sorts everything within that group on the default sort (which is...what, exactly?)
- Being able to sort by name, when you can only see the flag, is not very efficient. It is possible to mouse over a flag you want to know the market contribution to, and then find the name, and then logic where it probably is in the list, and then mouse over the flags to see which one is the one you want. But you could also just...use the name? I think this falls into a problem we'll see under diplomacy where a country is always represented by their flag, which is great when there's no order to them or there's very few, but falls apart in a large market.
- Details
- Military
- Army
- The standout failure here is generals. Each general takes up far, far too much vertical space, so any reasonably large power has to scroll a long ways to get to a general that isn't high ranked. What's taking up so much vertical space for each general? In short: traits and portraits. In the politics tab, I avoided talking about the portraits of IG leaders or your head of state, but there they did not cause us gameplay issues (they weren't taking up space we were actually fighting for), so while I understand that if Paradox gives us these character models they want to showcase them...but it's not worth the space. Luxuries like character portraits cannot come at the expense of gameplay, and the general portraits simply don't affect your gameplay decisions. What they look like has no bearing on your decision making process. Additionally, we actually lack relevant information for each general; their IG is not listed anywhere. In order to see that we have to go to the general's page or see their tooltip. One final note is to see how some of Paradox's iconography fell off here; the symbol for each promotion level is very small and hard to read and the icons for traits require the word nearby because the traits don't actually look like anything otherwise. To clean up generals, I suggest first we remove leader portraits. This buys us a lot of space to work with. Second, we can improve the color coding of traits. There are three general groups these fall into: offensive, defensive, and neutral (terrain expertise, command limit modifiers, etc). Sorting the traits by these three types and color coding them will make it very clearly which generals are "defensive" or "offensive" even without the names of the traits, which vastly reduces how much space they take up (you can still mouseover for specifics, of course). Redo the icons of the general level to make the number (the most important thing on them) much bigger and more clear. Losing the portraits for horizontal space, we can probably put this all in one row alongside the pin, the general level, and the orders, which drops the space taken up vertically by the general by over half. We can also slot in the IG symbol next to their name or their rank/outliner pin.
- All of that lets us fit that many more generals per screen. Twice as many generals per screen is half as much scrolling (at least on my mockup; Paradox could probably get this even less by actually lining things up carefully), which adds up in the late game when you have a lot of generals spread across the whole world.
- Garrisons
- There's so much scrolling here. Two obvious gains we can make are using the same gold toggle dropdowns to hide strategic regions/headquarters, which means we can more easily get to any headquarters by hiding the entirety of big HQs, and apply the same functionality to generals as well so we can hide the each general in an HQ if we want to get to a lower one. The second thing we can do is hide the pictures. The art is nice, but it comes at an enormous space cost that can be used to reduce everything else greatly. The amount of vertical space taken up can be reduced by half easily.
- Navy
- Pretty much everything that applies to generals also applies to admirals. They use the same layout, they can benefit from the same changes.
- Army
- Diplomacy
- Overview
- Immediate crime: if you have too many declared interests, you have to scroll down to declare a new one. I'm genuinely not sure how this wasn't noticed, given that the UK, the foremost country of the era and the one which the person the game is named after led, starts with this issue. You don't have to do anything, just load up a new game as the UK and try to declare one of your six undeclared interests. It's such an easy fix, too, just move the button to declare a new interest to the top. I would also argue that if you're going to have to scroll anyway, there is no reason for these to take up so much space at maximum; reduce their total allocated height so that everything below can be seen more easily. Lastly, and I know I've said this but it's because it's stupidly helpful considering how easy it is to do, alphabetize these! The gain is marginal here, since these overwhelmingly get seen in the context of a map, but the cost is zero, so it seems a good deal to me.
- The Wars submenu isn't very offensive, but it isn't very informative, either. I'm not really sure what to do with this one. My first instinct is to list secondary powers (at least independent ones) involved in the war, splayed out to the side. That would reduce the unused space. That being said the information listed is basically the same as the top right of the UI when you're at war, just much wider, so at least it's consistent? I think the better approach would be to split this off into its own tab in diplomacy and provide more detail, such as independent participants, their war supports, and war goals. War is important enough to get its own tab.
- Diplomatic plays kind of falls into the same bucket as wars. It feels like someone realized that plays should have a spot in the diplomacy overview, but weren't sure what to put there since the play itself also contains a lot of the information. But Vic III is clearly going for information redundancy, so our motto should be: we don't care! Make a new tab for plays and add way more details.
- Why the hell is diplomatic status so far down? If I click on diplomatic overview, I expect to see a list of who are my rivals, allies, puppets, and market partners way earlier than...last on the list. This should be above the declared interests. This should be the first thing you see.
- Where is a summary of what my influence is being used on? That should also be given very directly in the diplomacy menu. The UK at game start (at least in the one I just loaded, I'm not sure if William's traits are randomized) has about 950 influence. 100 base, 1000 for being a GP, 400 from a rivalry with France, 5% from ruler trait being a diplomat, and 10% from empiricism. It is spending 762 on customs unions, defensive pacts, protectorates, dominions, puppets, trade agreements, and a PU. It has so many that you have to go three tooltips deep to list them all from mousing over your influence at the top. There is no excuse for this not being fully listed out on the diplomatic overview.
- Release Subject
- Acceptable overall, but a zoom to where that country would be released would be nice. If I don't already know where that country is, it doesn't tell me at all.
- Overview
- Technology
- First complaint is that the lines that connect the techs are the least clear of any tech tree I've ever seen. Take a page out of whoever designed the HoI4 focus trees, those lines are clear and easy to follow.
- There should be a search bar. If you don't know where a tech is, you should be able to find it very easily using a search bar.
- Otherwise, this was obviously left undersized to fit more techs in as the game grows. It's a tech tree, not rocket science. Gotta' wait a few more decades after the game ends for that.
- Culture: I'm going to be honest, I haven't even used this menu for very much, so it's hard for me to have much to share here. I would be interested to hear about people's gripes with it and how it might be improved. What information did you wish this menu also said that it currently does not?
- Population
- Overview
- So remember back in the budget menu when we scrapped the entire assets tab and consolidated information into one clean display, with regards to the reserves and credit? We can start right off by doing that again, with political activity. We list our total population and our politically active and inactive population as three numbers but make the player do a little bit of thinking to figure out the proportion that makes. This isn't the most complicated math, but videogames are a visual media. There's no reason not to take advantage of that. Make a bar and fill it up to the amount of the ratio.
- The standard of living icon isn't actually labeled. It just says "impoverished" or "middling" or whatever your SoL is and assumes you know that words refers to an SoL. Obviously, we're going to label that. We're also going to move it out of this block of four, which falsely implies it is related to the other three numbers, and not the division of SoL by strata you see immediately below.
- As mentioned before, I'd scrap these portraits which force us to scroll to see religious spread and population strength; this is almost entirely the fault of these pictures of the lower/middle/upper strata. People are not opening up this menu to see what a random citizen is wearing. It is purely getting in the way of accessing the information we want. What we do care about is the SoL number, which we will obviously keep bound to the strata marker. One further bit of information we should add here is the percentage of pops in each strata that are not meeting their needs. Loading up France at game start, several percent of every strata is radicalizing from this. Despite being in the population overview menu, this information is not listed unless you mouseover for a tooltip, and someone who wants to know if their populace is radicalizing has to know to check. Tooltips are great for contextually related information but this is not contextually related information, this is just...the information. This page should be clearly displaying what percentage of people are radicalizing from unmet SoL, with a list of goods that are not being met ranked in order from biggest deficit in need to least.
- The block charts are great, but...why aren't all demographic markers listed underneath in a collapsible menu (collapsible menus are amazing). You can have the top three listed as now, just with a gold arrow to dropdown a full percentage. No reason to hide this.
- Detailed List: this is another where I haven't used it much so I am not 100% sure what it needs, and would be interested to hear back from people. It certainly looks like it could use some vertical condensing, which could be accomplished fairly easily by scrapping the portraits, moving the job name to the left, and moving the IG symbols and SoL rank into the gold bar.
- Overview
- Journal
- Little here is offensive to me (admittedly, quite tired at this point) save that you cannot pin decisions or inactive journal entries to your outliner. Pinned decisions in should list their criteria to be taken or that they are available if so. Pinned inactive journal entries should list their activation conditions.
- Map List
- Like all the previously sortable lists, this one is fine.
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