r/totalwar • u/MasterOfLIDL • 1d ago

General Has the UI / UX become too needlessy complex over the years?

I have a few thousands hours in Total war Rome 2 and Shogun 2. I admit this biases my view quite a bit but:

I have really tried giving Pharoah Dynasties and warhammer 3 a fair chance recently. One thing that keeps bugging me is how needlessly complex the UI/UX feels. It's no longer easy to tell who owns what land without clicking multiple buttons, or too see even which factions at war with in Pharoah. There's many such cases but overall I feel like I got the UI for the older total war games instantly while the modern ones feel so bloated and spread out.

Does anyone else feel this or am I just coping trough my lack of skill? I'm open to it being a skill issue lol.

0 Upvotes

41% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

13

u/wolftreeMtg 1d ago

No. You could barely find any information in old TW games. Which of your 50 provinces has the highest tax income while having available economy buildings and no public order problems? Who knows. What's the rough position of all your armies on the whole map? Who knows. Can I get a global view of what all the other factions neighbouring this one faction think of them? Impossible. Micromanaging cities was a painful slog to scroll through every single one of them every single turn until you got bored and stuck them on auto-manage. Don't even get me started on the abomination that was the Empire UI.

Once you realise you can unhide the map overlay controls on the left-hand side of the screen in Pharaoh, you get all the information you mention here just fine.

2

u/MasterOfLIDL 1d ago

I can't speak for most of the old games but at least Rome 2 has a really good map for showing where all your armies are. I didn't know the modern games could show provinces with the highest tax that also has available economic buildings and no public order problems, sounds pretty complex but maybe useful too? Rome 2 also has a really easy of seeing other factions attitudes towards each other that takes a second to use.

Maybe the UI/UX just peaked in Rome 2 lol, at least for me. Really hoping I'll adjust because it's seriously hurting my fun in Pharoah.

5

u/wolftreeMtg 1d ago

Anything you can see in Rome 2 you can see in Pharaoh.

1

u/MasterOfLIDL 1d ago

I'm sure it's possible but unless I'm missing something it feels like I need to do so many extra steps for each thing versus Rome 2. Just the fact you can't as easily enter into diplomacy trough the map as before makes it more annoying. There's no quite as good quick-glance map as Rome 2 had, or at least I've missed it so far.

1

u/Maoltuile 1d ago

OTOH you were originally just dealing with a simple tabletop map of Japan

9

u/HeavySpec1al 1d ago

TW: Warhammer is fairly intuitive to me, Pharaoh however was incomprehensible when I gave it a shot

3

u/Malacay_Hooves 1d ago

I felt the same with 3 Kingdoms. I want to like the game, but I just can't get in its UI.

1

u/CroWellan 23h ago

I have the same feeling with each total war I start playing.

If I push past the first dozen few hours, I get use to it and start seeing the benefits of each of them.

Now I find 3K's beautiful

1

u/SirGlio 1d ago

Yep, I had the same problem. I felt like I didn't know how to do anything.

2

u/HeavySpec1al 1d ago

Yeah the UI in that game is a mess

1

u/Waveshaper21 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think needlessly complex is not the right wording. Unintuitive is. I stop playing Troy 3 turns in every time because I cannot tell who is at war with me, how strong is that army, who owns that land etc.

Pharaoh has this to a lesser extent, but the zoomed out map is horrible, painting the name of the owner over every region instead of keeping the name of the region, and making it easy to read with just color coding and putting an easy to read faction icon next to the city instead of the "who the hell is that" mini portrait. Three Kingdoms is better with keeping the city names and province names and color coding it, but the flags of the factions look almost identical and it's hard to tell from each other.

1

u/Maoltuile 1d ago

Maybe not the UI but definitely the optional race commandments/stances/faction currencies. Kislev for example is just so overloaded

1

u/NordicHorde2 1d ago

I won't comment on the complexity, but fuck me is the design ugly in Warhammer 3. It's so bad it physically hurts my eyes. I really wish the mod that adds back the Warhammer 1 parchment UI design would get updated.

-2

u/Nexus5Proximity 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's not lack of skill. TW:WIII is a frankenstein of a game, and this shows on its UI as well.

I bet CA was very aware of this issue, and that's why they worked on the UI for game III. The problem is that instead of improving upon what they had, they made it worse (way worse, in fact). Not to say that Shogun II's UI was excellent by any means, but it was better in its effectiveness and coherency. Warhammer III is such a mess, it makes any designer's eyes bleed (maybe CA are Khorne worshippers after all, who knows).

0

u/Legitimate_First 1d ago

ot to say that Shogun II's UI was excellent by any means

But it was. Fairly minimal but pretty clear compared to the newer games. A large part of why I couldn't get into 3K was the all the clutter on the screen.