- people who played Civilization before
- people who start with a game by reading the manual
Both are minorities, particularly the latter. I think it's worth trying to attract more people than those few. Of course, there will always be details which can hardly be understood before seeing the explanation in the manual. But that's no excuse for every interface stupidity. Things should be as clear as possible on the screen. Ideally, an intelligent player is able to recognize the basic concepts only by playing, without the manual. Then (and only then, often) he might be curious about the details and try the manual. (Probably, a clearer interface will also increase the fun for those who already know how the whole thing works.)
So, in this regard, the most interesting C-evo experiences are those of players who did not know Civilization before. Tell about it! What's making the game unnecessarily hard to understand? What simple modifications could have spared you irritation? Some examples that I am aware of:
- Overall, there are too few message boxes, e.g. when there is simply no reaction to something the player attempts. And too few warnings when he's doing something obviously stupid.
- The city radius is not prominent enough (optically), so some players might not take note of it. The same counts for ressource conflicts of overlapping cities.
- City happiness is nothing less but a total mystery on the screen. Even if one recognizes the meaning and effect of the yellow and red heads (congratulations!), it's still unclear where the yellow ones come from.
- Some of the city event messages are not telling much to the novice, e.g. "Improvement sold". (Ok, he got a warning before...)
- I don't think many people learn (only be playing) how to manage the tiles used by a city or even recognize that's possible.
- Without ever being displayed in detail, the combat calculation is too complicated to be recognized. Battles are probably a constant source of surprise and frustration for some players.
- There's no visual difference between an enemy unit doing an attack and one bombarding a city. Some players might even not recognize a battle as a battle due to the simple, unexpressive optical representation.
- The "defense behavior" of unit stacks in case of defeat (complete stack lost!) seems to be completely different from most similar games and incomprehensible for people who don't know the Civ series from the beginning. This seems to be another case where a message box ("Two units destroyed!") could help.
Please don't focus on details which the player was able to understand after some thought and a minute of testing. Please also don't demand a lot of special information to automatically appear on the screen (e.g. about a wonder) when it's easy to find in the reference part of the manual. State what's virtually not comprehensible without the manual - and maybe which better solution you suggest.
Steffen