Derek, you put a scroll bar on the right side...now put one of the left side please!

Wow, that's a big game you've got there.

Trojasmic, would you happen to know what the small red and blue rectangles next to the items on the left mean? I've never figured them out... in Sins I think they were ships, Capital and small ones. But here?

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Quoting Vallu751,

reply 1

Wow, that's a big game you've got there.

Just play on the largest map size, and you'll get there ...

Quoting Vallu751,

reply 1

Trojasmic, would you happen to know what the small red and blue rectangles next to the items on the left mean? I've never figured them out... in Sins I think they were ships, Capital and small ones. But here?

... and if you had done so, you might have noticed that one counts the units and the other the buildings in the city

+1

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Sweet! Thank you mmilleder, your advice is appreciated.

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Actually, I would like to see the Icons on the left side removed and replaced by a dropdown or popout list that would show either cities or heroes (all of them). The icons are clutter and quite frankly I find myself constantly referring to the Ledger that you have to get to by clicking on the Reports icon and then the Ledger Icon. As cities grow or armies get larger, the small squares take up too much of the screen and are distracting. A Icon representation is just NOT a good method for display of this information IMO.

If we continue with this system of icons on the left (did I mention how much I hate this BTW ), then YES we need something that shows ONLY the active icon. In the example above 3 of the icons are yellow, none indicate which is the current active icon. Also, why are they yellow? Never figured that one out although I knew what the blue/red squares mean.

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Quoting nitey47,

reply 4

Also, why are they yellow? Never figured that one out although I knew what the blue/red squares mean.

Idle.

The yellow border doesn't vanish immediately when you build something, it sometimes takes until next turn to notice the city isn't idle anymore.

Maybe this should be in the beginners FAQ under General? Please post it there if you think so.

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>> Maybe this should be in the beginners FAQ under General? <<

I think you might find that there are a lot of changes that were implemented through various beta stages that veteran gamers haven't taken the time to figure out. Like many here, I feel that a good GUI should be self-explanatory and the fact that others find aspects of the GUI confusing and unwieldy should make SD re-think there use.

I appreciate your help, but I think it's clear that the status icons on the left are not very intuitive.

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Quoting nitey47,

reply 6

I appreciate your help, but I think it's clear that the status icons on the left are not very intuitive.

They seemed quite obvious to me, but then I played on a large map with a lot of cities.

That makes the blue dots quite obvious - that capital has a lot, the next city half as many, that new village has none.

As I tend to keep all my cities building something all the time, the idle one really sticks out - which again makes the connection to the yellow border obvious.

For the red dots just notice how they change when you move your main stack into that new village threatened by monsters.

And finally there's the meta hint: the game programmers thought some info important enough to put it into the list - what could it be? Or, reversing the question, what would I want to know at a glance about my cities? Could one of the graphics tell me that?

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Then I guess the real test of whether it's intuitive or not is whether they keep this or similar format going forward.

I'm betting that it gets changed.

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I think it would be awesome if they would put 2 little buttons near the calendar, so that we could toggle on and off, each of the groups. Would be nice to remove the buildings and or cities when you want to lesson clutter. (More noticeable in a large game)

The scroll bar would still be handy, but I find that my mouse wheels does the job too, and I dont have to aim for a little arrow.

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