Hi, as someone who has thoroughly enjoyed strategy games/series from Dawn of War, to Civ, to Anno, to Endless Space, one thing I find of utmost importance to the feel of these games is the user interface. Each of these games has a very distinct user interface design, even if they have structural elements in common, through aesthetic choices. These may seem at first to be of lesser importance compared to structural design choices, and in some sense they are. Amplitude proved with the Endless Space games they could get structural design choices right, and on this note I trust the devs completely in getting it right - early feedback from those with access to builds is positive on this note.

I wanted to talk instead about the aesthetic choices in more detail. My feeling is that perhaps on this note the design isn't going in a thematically consistent direction: after all, the quality of the UI aesthetics in the aforementioned games arose not just from the artistic quality but also the connection to the themes of those games. So what do I think isn't thematically consistent? Well HUMANKIND is a historical strategy game, it may approach or pass the present-day but most of the eras are historical, and with this in mind I would argue its UI should exemplify this.

From the footage out so far, and this could of course be simply the nature of pre-alpha and something like what I will propose could be planned, the UI is very modern in a lot of places. The use of translucent backgrounds, non-bordered widgets, non-physical animations (or lack of any animation), and so on make the UI feel more at home in a modern-to-sci-fi themed strategy game as opposed to a historical one. I would argue something of a skeumorphic design (in the degree of games like Anno, Civ, and so on) would make for a better aesthetic; a motto I would propose is: "less clinical, more physical".

I'll give my proposal as four example-alternatives (which vary in scale of detail):

1.  Many (all?) of the panels are non-physical in their design, with no border, translucent background, and somewhat arbitrary corner rounding and so on. I would propose that panels should be given more physical form, this would mean no translucency, arbitrary corner rounding, and so on - on the note of translucency and fades, an easy mechanism to hide the panel (e.g. on unit selection clicking elsewhere on the map to deselect and hide the unit panel), I would argue, is sufficient for the experience of the screen feeling free (as experienced in plenty of other games). An example of where this is already good is the header of panels such as the unit panel, the society panel and so on, where the corners feel physical, and the solid colouring while non-physical already going a long way to feeling theme-appropriate.
2. The culture selection panel has a too-modern design in terms of the way cultures reveal their details. A great opportunity here is to have each culture a physical card, with an animation that flips over the card to reveal details of the culture. This as opposed to the sliding animation would again feel more tactile and rudimentary, less clinical and modern - linear sliding animations of this kind being associated quite strongly with sci-fi.
3. The fog of war is another example: it is very flat and the hex grid on top gives a very clinical form once more to the UI. Anno 1404, Civ V and VI stand out to me, for their designs on this front. It would be no bad thing to use something like the fog of war as uncharted map design in my opinion. I have, however, a more ambitious idea which I would love in a strategy game: still have the uncharted map design, but upon it have monsters around the border that are animated and as the map is revealed retreat further into the fog. This would really connect with the idea of monsters in the unknown that is an age-old part of the aesthetic of exploration, at the cost of some extra work.
4. The FIDS FIMS icons used to display resources gained from tiles are again unphysical. I would love to see something of a token style design more physical than even Civ, with them piled in an organic way, two token designs for each resource of value 1 and 5 would suffice, with the same piling shape for each value of that resource on a given tile (so e.g. 2 food would be two 1-value food tokens one leaning upon the other).

I honestly think, the guys have done an absolutely wonderful job with the UI so far. I understand your need to see everything corresponding to the historical side of the game, like use some sort of papyrus texture for some menus for example, but I honestly prefer it more the way the guys are developing it, to me it seems clean, simple and artistically beautiful and neat, and I think it helps the game by bringing contrast, in an historical based game you would expect some historical inspired menus and UI, but instead in HK, you find a more sober but appealing style.

Who knows though, in the future it might change.

If one is truly authentic to history, one should not even play video games, computer was only invented ~80 years ago. People read ancient scripts on internet, libraries are moving online, morden technology only makes history more accessible. UI is what makes the game accessible, it wouldn't make sense to deny mordern UI design to make the game authentic historically, there wasn't UI at all historically.

Waykot wrote:
I actually like the UI a lot, it looks really aesthetic to me, and a good "neutral compromise" to any culture inspired aesthetic.

It works quite well for me too. Looking back Amplitude has always been going for a more "modern" look on their UI (of course with a bunch of Space games, but EL as well)

That said in a video by one of the creators that went to the Testevent, he mentioned that the Devs themselves aren't quite happy with the UI yet and there are likely going to be some changes till launch.