Firaxis Slowly Losing Ability to Make Small 2D Images

[SevenSpirits]

A few examples from Civ 4/5/6:

Improvement Yield Bonuses
Civ 4: Distinct icons
Civ 5: Single generic icon for all kinds of effects
Civ 6: No icon - you have to open the tech tree and mouse over the empty space of the tech



Civics/Policies
Civ 4: Distinct icons
Civ 5: Distinct icons, but monochrome
Civ 6: One of four generic icons



Happiness/Amenities and Health/Housing
Civ 4: Icons!
Civ 5: Icon
Civ 6: Let's fill up the screen by writing out the word "Amenities" a dozen times



Oh hey, Civ 6 actually does have an icon for amenities despite not using it on that screen. It's cleverly designed to have the same color and shape as the Housing icon.

[Sareln]

Also, they stuffed the icons into an atlas instead of having them be stand-alone, so looking at the XML for Icons you just see a bunch of x/y coordinates...

[Gaspar]

The UI for this game is absolutely a trainwreck. I cannot get over how much worse it is than 5s.

[Ventessel]

Also, they stuffed the icons into an atlas instead of having them be stand-alone, so looking at the XML for Icons you just see a bunch of x/y coordinates...

Ah, makes me nostalgic for the good old days of modding Civ 3.

Oh wait... those days were a nightmare, nevermind.

[Singaboy]

I sincerely hope some manipulation of the code can save this mess.

[sunrise089]

Great post Seven!

[Yazilliclick]

Seems a bit nitpicky and missing obvious.

Definitely agreed they should have some sort of indication that there are additional effects for a tech or civic that tells someone they should mouse over to see the information. Stupid that it's so hidden right now.

For civics though each one has a monochrome individual icon (look to the left for the actual civic). What you're looking at are the effect cards for policies which I don't think really need individual icons. What they have now works well enough I think.

Also not really worried about little emotes for happiness or whatever you'd use for amenities. Not to say they clearly show all info about amenities and housing and the like, far from it, but I don't think icons missing is the culprit.

Really icons are good only when they can clearly convey what they represent and when there aren't too many that they lose all meaning because you can't remember them all. I care more about clearly displaying the information and in that case a lot of time simple icons with proper color coding is a LOT more effective than individual distinct icons trying to represent what they are.

[yuris125]

Here's one screenshot I took yesterday but then decided not to post (a fragment of Adventure 1 map, a very minor spoiler)

Zoomed in and with arrows pointing out stone and coal, you can see the difference. But try telling them apart in-game and zoomed out... in general, finding newly revealed strategic resource is a nightmare (unless it's in your territory and you get a notification that it exists

I agree that some of the shortcoming Seven pointed out are not a big deal, but it's also a fact that the game can look unclear and cluttered at the moment. You have to stare at the map long and hard and hover mouse over some tiles for tooltips, you can't understand what you're looking at from a single glance, as you can in 4 and 5

[Yazilliclick]

Yeah finding strategic resources is a pain. Personally I don't know why we're in the 6th version of this series with so many major expansions and yet we don't have a search feature for the map yet. I mean if I could just do ctrl+f "iron" and it would grey everything except ironon the map then that'd be amazing! Then I could get to cursing why there's none close to me that much sooner!

[Gaspar]

Yeah, finding aluminum or coal in the fow is way too difficult. Also if you have a district over a resource you get credit for it but it never shows on the ui so you can't actually tell where it is.

Game is really just crying out for a ui mod. I think it will help a lot.