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[axiomsofdominion]

So anyone who plays menu heavy games and especially CK2 vs CK3 is aware of the "adaptive/recursive" tooltips in new generation Paradox games, which they absorbed from Jon Shafer during the time he worked there. He really developed and pushed the idea back in 2015-2016 as something new and innovative in At The Gates, his post Civilization personal game project.

I'm working on a game that is adjacent to, but not inspired by, various Paradox games in different ways, as well as stuff like Master Of Magic, Dominions 3-5, and some city builder games.

This game is very menu heavy although it uses some clever map features as well to make it more immersive and offload some of the information burden.

I'd like to hear your big, and small, complaints about strategy and simulation games as far as the UI. I know that the UI in Illwinter games is very basic and workmanlike. Distant Worlds 1-U-2 are games with lots of discussion over the menu and UI. Paradox has been mentioned. Tons of strategy adjacent games like Shadows Of Forbidden Gods, Star Dynasties, Waiting For The Raven, and so forth have negative reviews that are 80% UI complaints.

And of course Dwarf Fortress is a game with a famous UI saga and various mods and tools related to that.

A lot of times you'll think something like: "I wish I had a panel with [insert game data] on the Diplomacy or Befriend or Assassinate screen. Or for DW 1-U-2 maybe some more info about resource availability."

It sucks to click around different menus to get some piece of info before going back to the menu that lets you do the thing you wanted to do.

As many games advance to their second, third, or fourth iteration they grind away a little bit, at the UI complaints. So the remaining complaints can be more interesting and less obvious than basic stuff that everyone is aware.

People love to complain. Please complain about UI pet peeves here. Thanks.

[Frumple]

Inconsistency is the UI Devil. Remember that, live by it. Be better than Quickbooks.

E: Also, escape should always back you up a layer/function as a cancel button. If you're going really menu heavy, remember to make sure you can tab between fields and your tabbing works like it does basically every goddamn where else. I'm currently pestering our tech administration folks over a change in our working software that killed tab confirmation and tabbing between dropdown menus -- don't do that. If you're going to have tab navigation, have it work well. If you're not going to have it work well just don't bother

E2: But seriously, if you have access to quickbooks or similar software, fire that up and then do better than them (as far as I'm aware they haven't changed significantly since I was trained on them, so this isn't actually going to be a high bar). If you have that as a baseline you're going to be doing pretty decently.

[feelotraveller]

Please complain about UI pet peeves here. Thanks.

FFS expose the UI for easy modding.

[Robsoie]

Something i think is important and for more than strategy games is the ability for the user to scale the UI regardless of the screen resolution.

By example what you see with the game Frostpunk : lowering the screen resolution in order to increase performance will very badly impact the UI to the point it will become so ridiculously small that it will be completely unreadable regardless of playing in a window or fullscreen.

Would they have implemented some UI scaling option with tweakable font size there would have been no problem.

[Salmeuk]

Something i think is important and for more than strategy games is the ability for the user to scale the UI regardless of the screen resolution.

By example what you see with the game Frostpunk : lowering the screen resolution in order to increase performance will very badly impact the UI to the point it will become so ridiculously small that it will be completely unreadable regardless of playing in a window or fullscreen.

Would they have implemented some UI scaling option with tweakable font size there would have been no problem.

This is super important. Rimworld, for example, fails on this account when playing with super high resolutions. I have 20/20 vision and struggle to make out the text. . .

I dunno, after years of DF I am slightly frustrated at the "clicky-clicky" nature of most games. So much wasted time moving cursor to button, depress LMB, repeat. When DF teaches you that front-end memorization of hotkeys leads to an almost invisible U.I. presence. 

Now, I don't think hotkey-only would ever work anywhere else. But if the player is doing the same task over and over again, there needs to be some tool or in-game macro to assist this. I don't really see this in many games.

from your other posts, I am aware your game involves a large number of territories. Here is my advice: don't overwhelm the player with data. Try to make your graphs / tables / tabsheets automatically highlight the important information. Stray away from the bureaucratization of our game interactions. Echoing Frumple here, but I get enough of that at work lol

[AlStar]

Anything that the user needs to do often should be no more than 1 or 2 menus deep.

Any time a warning about something going wrong pops up, clicking on that problem will target the [unit/location/menu] in question.

Tooltips are good.

Related to the above, although probably not as relevant to a CKII-like game, but I greatly appreciate when mission texts allow me to get tooltips on locations mentioned. (So you'll have a mission to "take 100 units of X from [Planet A] to [Planet B]", and you can see at a glance who owns A and B, and maybe some other relevant details)

[MrRoboto75]

tbh From the Depths always had a questionable UI design.  Granted its by one guy, and he ain't a UI guy.