Gameplay & Interface Issues

[hammerquill]

Gameplay issues:

1. Civ-specific starting locations preference seems not to work. I try to start a game on the Huge Earth map (which I'd been looking forward to), and it puts me, Babylon, in Nevada or France or wherever. Also, on the "new game" map-generator page, why not just have a button for "load map"?

2. Combat: units attacking from a fortress or a city should NOT advance after combat - it's often disastrous when they do, and makes a mockery of the whole concept of the fortress. Civ 2 got this right. As an alternative, there could be a Ctrl-move or something that could mean attack but hold position under any circumstances.

3. Resistors: Units in a city retaken by resistors should not be automatically taken over or killed. I had about 7 units in a city I'd conquered. We'd quelled two of the four resistors, and the city had grown a notch. Three of these units were elite, none conscripts, and it was a larger army than I'd ever seen in one place in that game. The two remaining resistors suddenly overthrew their governor and took back the city. Now, that's reasonable, since their culture was about half again mine. But it's not reasonable that I should instantly loose an entire army which would have had no trouble taking the city in the first place, and which was only kept there (rather than sacking two more cities it could easily have reached in the time it waited) in order to put down resistance. They should be expelled from the city: either into the hills (possibly with significant damage), or maybe home. Or there could be a chance of their being taken over, killed, or expelled with more or less damage. These are the sorts of things that might really happen in such a circumstance: armies might be horribly mangled when a city rises against them, but if they want to, they can make an ordered retreat, and not be wiped out. Though maybe there should be a choice for the conqueror when the people rise up: fight them, and thus suffer nasty casualties (and probably diminish the population, and maybe destroy improvements in the bargain), or be allowed to leave peacefully., with some sort of restrictions.

Minor interface issues which would be easy to fix:

1. When a unit is produced, the popup asking you if you now want to create unit X in that city should be improved: first (and easiest) the dropdown menu of other possibilities should go away again if you click off of it (like a normal dropdown menu) , rather than requiring you to scroll back up and find the suggested unit if you decide to keep it. Also, it should have an option that makes the window not pop up IF you've set up a queue - and in any case should tell you if the suggestion it's making is from the queue you set up.

2. From the city window, you should be able to skip from city to city, either by clicking on another one visible, or by scrolling through a list, so policy wonks can make a habit of checking up on their whole empires.

You should also be able to HURRY PRODUCTION from the city window, and get the civilopeda entry for any of the units (and, basically, for anything you can see) direct from there.

3. During Diplomacy, you should be able to look at your own @!#*&! map!

4. I must be missing something, but surely you should be able to initiate diplomacy from the Foreign Affairs Advisor page. And found an embassy or initiate espionage, for that matter. Once again, there simply aren't enough ways of getting to a given command.

Okay, those'll do for the moment.

Lots more to be said - I wish they'd actually made it more functional and a bit less pretty, much though I enjoy the new look.

RCB

[OneInTen]

There's no such thing as civ specific starting positions. It's a preference for culturally linked starting positions, which controls whether you start near other civs of your culture groups, not where that start will be.

You can certainly loop through the cities from the city window - that's what the big arrows at the top next to the name are for.

As for hurrying production, I'm fairly sure you can do that from the city view too, although not having the game infront of me Ican't check.

[Willem]

Originally posted by hammerquill
Gameplay issues:

Minor interface issues which would be easy to fix:

1. When a unit is produced, the popup asking you if you now want to create unit X in that city should be improved: first (and easiest) the dropdown menu of other possibilities should go away again if you click off of it (like a normal dropdown menu) , rather than requiring you to scroll back up and find the suggested unit if you decide to keep it. Also, it should have an option that makes the window not pop up IF you've set up a queue - and in any case should tell you if the suggestion it's making is from the queue you set up.

2. From the city window, you should be able to skip from city to city, either by clicking on another one visible, or by scrolling through a list, so policy wonks can make a habit of checking up on their whole empires.

You should also be able to HURRY PRODUCTION from the city window, and get the civilopeda entry for any of the units (and, basically, for anything you can see) direct from there.

First of all, there's a checkbox in the preferences that will prevent the production pop up screen from..well, popping up if you have a build queue. It will only come up after you build an improvement, or you reach the end of your queue.

Secondly, as pointed out, that's what those arrows at the top of the screen are for.

Finally, yes you can Hurry Production from the city window. It's that little square button right beside your production window, at the end of the blue shields bar. And there is another preference, provided you're using version 1.16f, that shows a book cursor that will take you to the Civilopedia. However it doesn't do it for units for some reason.

[hammerquill]

Oops, Somehow I missed the great big arrows on top of the city screen. If I'd had it up to check while I was writing, I'd probably have noticed... Thanks for mentioning it.

As for the little winged shoe icon, it did nothing when I tried it before. I'm quite certain; I was sure that was what it was supposed to do. Now it works. Sigh... It wasn't just a question of my government type either, since I could go out and hurry production via right-click on the map.

As for the civilopedia book cursor, yes, it's very nice to have that, so you can find out all the places you should be able to click for the civilopedia, and can't... Like on the terrain popups, for instance: they, and any individual datum on them, should be a link to the civilopedia, so you can instantly find out about the terrain, the benefits of improvements, the meaning of resources & luxuries, etc.

RCB

[Willem]

Originally posted by hammerquill
Oops, Somehow I missed the great big arrows on top of the city screen. If I'd had it up to check while I was writing, I'd probably have noticed... Thanks for mentioning it.

As for the little winged shoe icon, it did nothing when I tried it before. I'm quite certain; I was sure that was what it was supposed to do. Now it works. Sigh... It wasn't just a question of my government type either, since I could go out and hurry production via right-click on the map.

As for the civilopedia book cursor, yes, it's very nice to have that, so you can find out all the places you should be able to click for the civilopedia, and can't... Like on the terrain popups, for instance: they, and any individual datum on them, should be a link to the civilopedia, so you can instantly find out about the terrain, the benefits of improvements, the meaning of resources & luxuries, etc.

RCB

You have to right click.

[hammerquill]

Originally posted by Willem


You have to right click.

Er, what?

If you mean for the terrain thing, I'm talking about after you've right-clicked on the map: it brings up a nice little frame around the square with basic terrain info. You should be able to click on the things on that frame to go to the civilopedia entries for the terrain type, resources, etc, and find out more about them quickly, that's all.

The civilopedia cursor is great to have; I don't mean to belittle it. I use it a lot. But it should work more places, that's all.

RCB