Interface Ideas

[Ben Williams]

These are some ideas I had to change the interface of Civ3 in ways that wouldn't effect gameplay, but would make everything a lot easier. Comments and ideas welcome.

1. The ability to see all current trades, with details on remaining time etc.

2. Events such as bombardment that take place between turns actually staying on the area long enough to show you the result.

3. Unit pop-up lists that can subcatagorize and organize based on health, status, rank, and attack power.

4. The ability to organize groups of units into seperate stacks. Not like an army, more like a battle group. You could name it, move it all at once, split it up, add more units and the like.

5. The ability to keep the action on a certain part of the map and cycle through units there only (by holding a key or something). Meaning you wouldn't get pulled away from your big offensive to go tell a worker to build a road.

6. An in-game force quite command. Sometimes in the middle of a long A.I. turn, I'll need to get up or leave or something, and I don't want to have to come back to shut the game down.

7. Audio preferences that actually remember what you audio preferences are.

8. Workers that stay on pollution control after all the pollution is cleaned up.

9. Cities that automatically fill back in the space after pollution has been cleaned.

10. Information that goes in order. When a spy mission fails: first it tells you you've lost your supply of whatever, then it tells you you're at war, then it tells you the mission has failed. It should go entierly in the other direction.

11. Instead of an annoying head giving you advice, just a list of important information on the advisor screen (this could be an option if you want to keep the head).

12. Being able to look at the map and compare things during diplomacy.

13. A rundown of the total results of battles for a turn, for those times when there were a million units fighting.

14. Auto-recon.

15. Patrol key.

[piratebrun]

Comments:

#1. This already exists. Go to the foreign advisor, click the trades tab on the right, and then click a Civ you want info about.

#9. Would be very nice - though cities do this after they have starved and regrown... ie a city that can use that square grows and grabs it... though not necessarily the city that lost that square... most annoying.

#12. CivII's Diplomacy interface was better this way... you could move it off to the side of the screen during negotiations and actually do something else (fight, edit cities, look around, etc - anything you could normally do) while waiting for the other person or deciding what you wanted to do.
#12½. The Chat interface should do the same thing (a la CivII)

Good suggestions in general, but its late and I can't think too much more