I have only one thing which really bothers me with the UI : I think that the tech research screen could use some improvements.

It's the three legendary deeds / buildings which are shown on the left of each tech era which are just slightly smaller in size than 1/4 of the era 'circle'. I'd love to see them stretched a bit so that they match the size of the 1/4 'circle'.

Then there's the research options themselves. I prefer the ones from Endless Space, but the ones in Endless Legend are nice too ... it's just that I find the colors a bit difficult to check (already researched vs. available - green vs. blue), and somehow I don't find these circles the best option. Perhaps switching everything to 'diamond' shapes ('rhombuses') would be an option ?



And yes, I'd love to be able to get a lot of more information by hovering with the mouse over various stuff ...



Anyway, I find the interface very clean and streamlined. Congrats !

stout wrote:
Targeting anything near a city can be frustrating when the name/info banner occludes things in the hexes "behind" the map.

This more than anything. Especially when there is a ruins underneath it, like wow.

Targeting anything near a city can be frustrating when the name/info banner occludes things in the hexes "behind" the map.

Let me begin by first saying that the UI is very good at a lot of things. I really love the display of FIDS when trying to place a settler. That said, there is some room for improvement that I can see.



For me, I have to say my biggest annoyances with the UI are:



1. Not having an option to queue up all luxury resources instead of 10 turns at a time. Ideally, we'd have a button (or perhaps a modifier key like SHIFT or CTRL or ALT click) to queue up as many turns as are available with the current resource count. The same applies to stockpiles as indicated in a previous post.



2. Compounding the annoyance with #1 is the confirmation dialogs on every queue of 10 turns of a luxury resource. It's painful. It'd be great to have an option in the Gameplay settings to disable confirmation dialogs. Also applies to stockpiles and holy resources.



3. Multiplayer game lost diplomacy (and influence). If you end turn and are waiting for others. Then someone sends a diplomacy proposal to you but also clicks end turn, that proposal is lost along with the influence. This can also occur if you accidentally dismiss a treaty (right clicking on the notifications). If you right click a notification it dismisses the proposal altogether with no way to recover. I get that this isn't a simple issue to solve but the workflow feels a bit clunky here. I feel a good solution here would be to take the player on the receiving end of the proposal out of his "ended turn" state so that they can now respond appropriately.



4. Better mousewheel support!!! Areas that could use more support:



- Scrolling through your owned hero list. By the end of most Huge games I have upwards of 25-30 heroes. Clicking the arrow is cumbersome.

- Scrolling through the building queue for a city. Currently have to click on the scroll bar to get to the bottom.



5. An option to disable all the popups on new turn. For simultaneous turn resolves with both AI and minor factions, sometimes you need to respond as quickly as possible to the world map and all these popups which sit nicely in the notification tray can be accessed there. This could be more of an advanced setting option, but it'd be nice to consider.



6. A way to reorder the current research queue (perhaps view it in a queue list). I often queue up research for the current era so 8-10 queue. Reordering that queue is painful in that I have to deselect everything in order to reorder something at the top of the queue.



7. Equipping units. This is a pet peeve of mine. If I'm wearing Tier 1 of an item and I unlock the Tier 2 version of that item. I would like to be able to see that in the available items without having to unequip the Tier 1 version first. When I select the T2 version of the item, it should simply replace the T1 version. This would save me so much time when I'm dealing with equipping/upgrading 10+ heroes.

Just new to the game, from civ v.

I must say this is a more complex game. The one thing i think that is better in civ V is that the interface feels smoother.

-I am missing some prompts that i can choose something: Another state policy, an unused hero, no research selected. Perhaps if they light up or something i will notice it sooner.

-i would like some color differences for the different district levels in city view.

-not sure if this is your responsibility but is it possible to change the attack arrow in combats from red to something blue or purple in color blind mode

-sometimes i miss a minimap

-the resource icons could use some more color saturation imo

-i dislike the research icon, could you make it more erlenmeyer like?

-Is there a place where i can see all the effects on a city due to building/hero/...

-Could there be some information when i hover or click on the winter summer info.

-a small note that i need a certain research and building to get trade routes in the empire overview.



tnx for reading,

@Ominous There's a shortcut to move between cities (and armies). I have both of them bound on my xbox controller ;P



Look in the keybinding/shortcuts sec

There should be a way to easily jump from city to city. Currently the only way is either move through the map clicking them or open the city tab and double click on them, the first is annoying as it loses time and depending on the size of the map and the number of cities it¿s easy to miss some of them, while the second is just annoying as you have to click the city manager, then double click the city, and (at least in my case) have to scroll up cause I have that when it transports you to the city the zoom is at it's top so I have to zoom out, repeat for every city and it becomes incredibly tedious, it's one of the reasons tall play is so much more attractive, it's just so much easier to manage. I want a button like the one for armies, that you can use to ump from one to the other, that would make it much easier to manage half a dozen and more cities and would in turn help speed the game itself.

I really, really wish there was a button to shift the entire army to hold (in case I forgot to set this at the start of battle), defensive, and attack (for cleaning up at the end of the battle) during the targeting phases. It's a lot of hassle to change unit behaviors unit by unit.

Sorry to bring back an old thread, but one UI thing I'm having an issue with is the UI being too small at 4K resolution, even with the "bigger UI" option on. The game looks absolutely amazing at 4K but the UI is too small to be playable for me. It would be awesome if there was an "Even Bigger UI" option, if not in Endless Legend, then in Endless Space 2!

It pleases me that a dev is asking for this kind of feedback! That alone is a positive thing.



I will give this some more thought next time I play, but offhand, two things offhand:

* I LOVE that you can R-Click to exit out of any screen. VERY easy.

* On that same note, there are situations where you can R-Click to remove a minified notification (lower-right of screen) and if you have a unit selected it will begin moving to the location under the icon you R-clicked to remove. This happens to me ALL the time. So, while I love the feature, just be careful implementing it =)

There's a lot of good to the UI, but some suggestions nonetheless:



1) Show effects of city/region improvements. When, for example, I hover on Fertilizer Plant in the build menu, show me how it will change my food production (e.g. 100-->130). Maybe even let me press a key to highlight hexes in this region that would be affected by this improvement. Bonus points if I can hold down another key to see the formula for food and see how it fits with other improvements and bonuses.



2) Show actual effects of passive bonuses, like empire-wide technologies and luxuries. E.g. Hover on 'Bread and Circuses' to see that expansion disapproval will go from -40 to -30 currently.



3) Clearer display of dust and influence income. I'm happy knowing I get +1.1k per turn, but showing +1k whether I make 1001 dust or 1999 dust doesn't make sense.



4) Related to earlier good points about order of operations and stacking, some clarity here in the espionage interface would be good too. For example, if I sabotage science in 4 cities, do the penalties stack? Do the durations? Am I wasting influence?



5) Minor suggestion: find a better term than 'Seniority' for espionage.



And some +1s: shortcuts for OK/cancel, easy display of resource production without hovering on each, easy location of invaders, better retrofit options (especially for new era and for troops in garrison) perhaps even just copying excellent options from ES, better way of finding out what troop/equipment abilities do, and better stockpile management.

I think that *in general* the interface is good on the action part, (that is, you can get things done reasonably quickly), and is weak in the information part (You can't get information easily to learn how to master the game).

• lack of a "endless-o-pedia", similar to a civilopedia. I won't repeat myself: /#/endless-legend/forum/5-general/thread/2145-i-miss-dearly-an-endless-legend-o-pedia-wiki-doesn-t-cut.
  
  
• the context-sensitive help is lacking... I've already placed a full description on why here: /#/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/3194-ui-more-helpful-interface-for-exploring-rules-sticky-popups
  
  
• Map information is lacking. Another thing I have a full description and solution suggestion here: /#/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/3509-map-highlight-mode
  
  
• Expose the interface for modders! Skyrim have SkyUI, CivilizationV have also their mods that change the way the UI looks... Many mod ideas stumble upon the lack of power to do the necessary interface changes. (This, for example: /#/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/3508-ground-zero-improve-moddability-best-modding-tools ). Mods can increase the survival of a game, and make people still buy it even years after the release date... Look at Skyrim: there are still people building mods for it even now, almost 4 years after it's initial release...
  
  
  
  

I like the UI but I miss some features:



Battle:

- Keybindings for offensive/defensive/hold-position strategies on units

- Ability to select multiple units and give them orders at once



Map:

- Rotatable camera (sometimes it's hard to see whether there is a cliff or not)

- Feature-highlighting (e.g. tiles with anomalies/forrest/production/... are hard to see in cities)



General:

- Mouse-wheel scrolling in the hero academy

- Unit regeneration value display

Stockpiles should be usable straight from the city window, without confirmation dialogues.

Queue-able boroughs.

Freshly created units should spawn on top of the city, so they will belong to the active units cycle.

Hello there!



First of all, I'm gonna present myself : I'm Thibault, Gameplay Programmer, and I'm focused on all that matter to GUI (Graphical User Interface) here in the EL team at Amplitude.



Knowing this, I would love to know what are your thoughts about the interface of Endless Legend, what do you like or hate about it, what would you improve to make it better, etc...



Keep in mind that no big UI modifications can be made on EL, since the game is already released and on his second expansion, but the feedback, if interesting, could be forwarded to Amplitude's next games (hi there ES2!).



Thanks for your attention and good game !



T.



PS : On a side note, even if I'm mainly programmer, I'm actively learning about UX Design by myself, so if you know good reads about it, you would made by day :3 (i'm currently on Designing for emotion by Aarron Walter which is very good!)

I agree with most of what has been said here, but I would like to stress one feature request:



A map overlay that highlights cliffs, rivers, roads, resources, and possibly watchtower foundations and villages. Maybe that can be integrated into the current "show grid" button. I honestly never use the show grid button, because the FIDSI overlay gives me a grid as well, even if it's a bit more cluttered.





The stockpile use has a pretty high priority as well, in my opinion.

- The interface has some beauty is clear and easy to use. Impressive work. The problem come from the frequents repetitive operations it needs. So I ask for more automation.



- For exemple : saving units template (for each civ, separeted, as in Galactic Civilization II) between games would be absolutely a must when you play, and save some times and annoying repetitive redesigning. It should include a pop-up of the game, which ask us if we want to replace all plannified unit by a saved design correspond to the new era (I am not sure to be clear here).



- I am fully agree with the Natev'suggestions, post number 5. It is a profund thinking about the problems of comfort due to U.I. opulation:



- Off course, there are some things which could be done, but the retrofit & design annoyance is really I think, the minium thing which should be done. Except that, if you want inspiration, I can help you, like the others persons in this topict tried to do ^^. Here are all the suggestions on U.I and comfort of playing, which I have put in my Suggestions topic (which you can find in my signature) :

[ProblemsolvedbythepatchbringedwiththecomingoftheShadowsexpansion!] Create some shortcuts and customizable shortcuts to have better and faster control of the game. Top priority problem.



- Auto-launch units when garrison is full : Auto-launch units in a new army when garrison is full. If not, it's time consuming and often stop units production when garrison is full.



- UI feedback customizablity : More feedback choice would be great. For exemple, Start/End of building a settler (in specific, not as a part of the big building sum up). Or

Enemy forces entering your territory in X region. From Rymdkejsaren. Link.



- Improve UI : pathfinding and battle board overlay : Brillant idea from an annoying problem. From Abmpicoli. Link. Improve UI: pathfinding and battle board overlay.



- Ideas to increase the interface comfort 1 : From Wallish. Link.



- Ideas to increase the interface comfort 2 : From Vicarious. Link. Best ideas are underlined.

Can we expect you guys to implement any of the following changes/options into the game in the near future?

a way to get rid of unwanted settlers other than exiling them to enemy regions

minimal number of military power required to lay siege to a city determined by the city's defenseretreat

waiting periods triggered by some diplomatic actions or any other changes that prevent players with huge Influence income from declaring war on a weaker AI faction next turn after agreeing on truce with that faction in exchange for a bunch of its resources or technologies

"Auto-upgrade units in queue" option

possibility to set the interval between autosaves manually

possibility to remove an unfinished building or unit from the build queue without losing the progress

- Automation into the update of the units : And saving of template of units design, for others uses into new games. From Savage. Link.



- Map highlight mode : Great idea with excellent screen exemples. It would largely increase the comfort of playing. From Abmpicoli. Link.



- Queue stuff even without pre-requisites met & Global queue : Elegant and simple idea from this ingenious guy. From Abmpicoli. Link.



- Facilitating work with a large queue of research. An obvious need. From Rustam. Link.



- Save game should have unit/city focus, window and notifications persisted : Excellent idea. From Abmpicoli. Link.



- Increase the character limit for army name : From SentientDawn. Link.



- Ability to calculate the needed influence for a desired empire plan : It would be nice if there was a way to see in game (perhaps in the simulate screen) how many points exactly you will need to have to pick whatever configuration of empire plans you have or wish to have. From Northwoods. Link.



- Notifications when new heroes appear in the mercenary market : Often, I check each turn the mercenary market to see if one ore more new hero appeared. It is annoying. Notification would be so simplier.



- Make the cliff easier to distingue : Cliffs can sometimes be hard to see. It is annoying and frustrating. They should be seen in all situations. From Arqane. Link.



- Gray-out city boundaries, focus on region : From Abmpicoli. Link.



- Center on city, center on unit : It miss a hot key or a hotspot for actually center at the unit or city. From Abmpicoli. Link.



- The stockpile annoyance : You can only use stockpiles one by one, which is pretty annoying when you got some of them, when you are Cultist and have razed a city for exemple. There should be an option in a pop up to inject all stockpiles in the same city.



- Inform the player when he select Salting the Earth : By accident, it is possible to select salting the Earth in the building list and then, see your city completely destroyed few turns after. In my opinion, salting the earth should just not been possible because it is absurd and anti game that a whole city and population accept to kill themself. But, if the devs decide to keep this option, there should be a pop up to inform the player of the consequence of his choice, one turn before the decision affect the city. From CH_Wolfe.



- Stockpiles easier to distingue from buildings : It would be preferable if stockpiles production units would be listed at the end of the build list.

I think there are a number of things that can be done to make the UI more user friendly.

natev wrote:
If I can glom onto this, one persistent problem is the order of operations. Sometimes 20% more damage means one thing, sometimes it means another, and those two things can be drastically different. A good way to see this is to compare the Order of Isivier accessory with Titanium Rings. In previous patches, the Order of Isivier accessory claimed to give a larger damage bonus than the ring, but equipping each showed that the ring actually gave more damage. Haven't tested under the new patch, but it's one of those situations where feedback is totally misleading and most players would be better off with no information than the information supplied.

Yep. Ive complained about this. It is very confusing when a 10% damage item adds more then a 20% damage one.





As far as the base UI from the main game screen i would like to see more information:

-Amount of strategics per turn

-Amount of science per turn

-Button to advance through ALL friendly armies (even ones that are sleeping/guarding/etc)

-Way to advance through ENEMY armies in your territory. Since the screen doesnt follow enemy units, and since there is no notification, it is difficult to follow on large empires without checking entire map every turn

-It would be nice if when i hold down the mouse to move a unit, that it shows the possible tiles that unit can move to.





More accessibility/ease of use for UI on other ingame screens:

-On city info screen (when clicking on city) use keyboard arrows to change cities

-During battle, be able to see what skills on units do. How am i supposed to avoid nasty abilities if i dont have each skill memorized?





BIGGEST COMPLAINT:

-On large maps there is NO WAY to view the entire map at once. You can only zoom out to view a portion of it. In my opinion this is ridiculous.

When I want to minmax one city I always find it a hassle to not easily see how many population I can move from food or industry before it takes 1 round longer. Instead I have to do try and error.

Gaoh wrote:
One small thing that peeves me is percentage-based bonuses, for city improvements or unit equipment

If I can glom onto this, one persistent problem is the order of operations. Sometimes 20% more damage means one thing, sometimes it means another, and those two things can be drastically different. A good way to see this is to compare the Order of Isivier accessory with Titanium Rings. In previous patches, the Order of Isivier accessory claimed to give a larger damage bonus than the ring, but equipping each showed that the ring actually gave more damage. Haven't tested under the new patch, but it's one of those situations where feedback is totally misleading and most players would be better off with no information than the information supplied.

I also love EL's sleek interface. Everything feels so fluid, it's a real pleasure to use.



One small thing that peeves me is percentage-based bonuses, for city improvements or unit equipment; as the UI doesn't say it, it's never clear what exactly the bonus is applied to. Some bonuses such as forests, high ground, and morale are, to the best of my knowledge, not explained in-game at all.



Whether the UI should be transparent or opaque about game mechanics sounds like a debatable topic for UI and game design, but since EL seems to favour disclosure, maybe this is a point for improvement.

When I'm updating a hero or a unit and I see that it will give me some ability - how do I get information and what that ability does????



And please please PLEASE... when you start building a 'can only build it once' item REMOVE IT FROM YOUR OTHER CITIES QUEUES.



Oh, and in general I'd say the GUI for EL is outstanding - maybe the best ever. I love the click to go back a page feature.

A really nice stretch goal would be a chat window that was continuous from the multiplayer lobby to the game-- ideally, even permitting chat during loading screens. Being able to chat goes a long way toward alleviating waiting periods.



It's also come to my attention that animations proceed at different speeds depending on the speed of the client's computer. One player's animations can be completed while another's are still in progress, leaving a long period of "Waiting for opponent." This is kind of a borderline UI issue, but there's no reason for this to occur. I recently played against someone who had a slow enough computer that it prevented any of us enjoying our multiplayer game, and he very graciously left the game. I feel bad that that was necessary.

Auto Pop-Up for Enemy/Other fraction Ivasion, pls.

Possibility wrote:
I would like a notification icon that appears on the right side of the screen for each army in your territory, click on it and it zooms to the army. It would be good each turn, then you can efficiently and easily find all enemy armies in your territory each turn.

Agreed. Moreover, such an icon can be only one, if it will be sequentially center the map on foreign armies. Or two - similar to the icons "Select the next/previus armies under your control" but in this case - for foreign armies.



I would even venture to suggest to use available icons + key on the keyboard for a review just foreign armies. For my armies, I would like to see on the screen a list of active icons in a horizontal or vertical hotbar. Now, when you have a large number of armies, is is not very convenient to switch between them. But I do not know, how the last suggestion fits into developer's concept of interface in Endless Legend.

Oh my, hello! Here's a long list of issues r/t UI, none of which are all that big of a deal, but all of which are ways in which Endless Legend could be better. In no particular order:

• The retrofit system is neither immersive nor very easy to use. There have been several threads about how to fix it. Ideally, it would allow templates to fork and rejoin.
• Displaying raw stats on unit cards is not very useful for most players. Displaying equipment instead of stats would be both more immersive and more descriptive for most players, who know what a Teslem Warlock is like, they just want to know what it's wearing.
• There are too many buttons inactivated during turn transitions. This is really only relevant in timed multiplayer games. As an example, being able to create new unit templates during turn transitions wouldn't break anything, but it would give players something to do during waiting periods.
• Battles are filled with too much non-interactive time. Even beyond the time issues, us video game players are hyperactive types and we need buttons to push Being able to examine units and set the next turn's orders while animations are being played out would be nice and would improve the speed of multiplayer games.
• Confirmation dialogs to leave a screen defeat the purpose of the smooth, right-click-to-leave interface that Amplitude had going with Endless Space. Consider carefully if these are really necessary. I would rather they didn't exist. If they do need to exist, consider ok/cancel keyboard shortcuts.
• Equipping a dual-wielding unit with an off-hand weapon has to be click-and-drag, unlike any other equipment, for which double click is a more comfortable process. I'm afraid I have no solutions to this problem though
• Cliffs that exist on the same line as a region border are particularly easy to miss. Another one where I have no solutions.
• When redirecting units currently in motion, it feels laggy, because the movement is officially made before the animation starts. Consider starting the animation before updating vision or decrementing movement points.
• Using the quest window to zoom on locations of interest acts a little funny-- particularly when the location is very near the northern or southern border of the world. Consider resetting the camera's zoom when focusing on these locations so that the relevant location is always centered in the camera's view.
• Players in multiplayer games that are not hosts do not get parley quest markers the way that hosts and SP players do, and cannot zoom to the village granting a parley quest.
• There is little reason to hide parley quest markers with the fog of war, it's only an irritation. Just show these markers regardless of active vision.
• The parley quest marker system could easily be expanded to quest targets, giving a more clear indication of which ruin to search for which quest.
• The larger city banners make it difficult to click on the tiles northeast of the city. Consider shortening these banners when possible, or centering them.
• The tabbed pane for hero equipment/skills makes it impossible to update both on the same hero at the same time. "Apply" doesn't need to close the window, you have "close"/rt-click for that.
• When creating a new template, it would be nice to allow double clicking the base unit, rather than requiring the base unit to be selected and then having the player hit "ok."
• There really ought to be keyboard shortcuts to ok/dismiss for pop-up dialogs.
• When equally short paths to a target tile exist, units sometimes take a different path than is shown on holding down rt-click
• When updated vision granted by movement reveals that the planned path is impossible, movement should stop immediately, rather than waiting until actually running into a wall/coast/enemy.
• When closing a window then rapidly escaping out of the parent via esc, an unncessary and sometimes inappropriate confirmation dialog for the child is shown. This is suggestive of a weird way of handling input and/or UI: why is the child creating a dialog after it's been killed?
• Beginning-of-turn pop-ups are very jarring when focusing on the game world. Consider placing these off-center in order to not block vision on what the player is focused, and consider not stealing UI focus from the main world with these popups.
• There's no way to unqueue planned movement from a unit. Once you have movement queued, it's queued until it occurs. Right click on the unit, with the unit selected, should unqueue all planned movement.
• A keyboard shortcut for "halt all movement by any unit I control" would be handy, considering how easy it is to somehow deselect a moving unit.
  
  

I'm sure there are more things that might come to mind Happy to give more detail regarding any of these if you want.



Edit:

BPrado wrote:
Maybe the only thing i could possibly suggest is to make people´s names on Lobby screen to be black, since there are many whitish backgrounds.

Oh, good point, let me second that one

Thanks for your feedback guys ! Just wanted to note that I'm quite new at Amplitude and all the interface was already done when I arrived, but I'll forward your compliments to its original makers !

I'm here to improve (and debug) it as much as I can, so your feedback is welcome !

To start i am a big fan of your work! i love the designs and fluidity in the game.



as for improvements, the only thing i can think of personally is the amount of colors which sometimes make it difficult to read thing. i love the colorfulness but it can be sometimes a little overwhelming the eyes of people unfamiliar with the amplitude games (them not capable of finding what they look for and stuff...).



other than that i can't really say much sins i haven't played in quite a while. but will play tonight and if i find other things to report then you will hear from me ^^

The UI was one of the things that pleased me the most about EL. Everything is beautiful and fast to be done, window screens and popups come and go smoothly, it´s not clogged, tooltips are actually helpful. Great work.



Maybe the only thing i could possibly suggest is to make people´s names on Lobby screen to be black, since there are many whitish backgrounds.