One of the things that was supposed to improve in the current beta (0.86) was interface. The sovereign select screen was fixed and is now much better, a panel with a realm overview was added, and a line of dots was added to indicate movement paths. All well and good, right? Except none of this was really done that well.
The sovereign select screen, despite featuring a big cinematic image of the sovereign selected (which is very well done and has some good particle effects) still doesn't stretch to make use of non-tiny resolutions.
The kingdom overview panel is pretty good and conveys a lot of information, but it's still missing important stuff. The race isn't shown in the faction property area. Why not? That's sort of a big deal. It should be present, and the player should be able to access mechanical properties by mousing over, and hiergamenon lore by clicking. In fact, everything on this screen should link to the hiergamenon where viable, and the race information should be presented in the faction creation screen as well as here.
The drawing path is all well and good (although the dots, because of the heavy black lines around their edges, don't mesh well visually with the tile select elements). The real problem is that you can't see it at all when you're using the cloth map. I realize some people probably play primarily in the 3d-rendered world, but I don't, and I don't want to have to zoom all the way in there every time I want to move my units - and if I'm moving them any distance at all, then I can't see the whole path without having to scroll around the screen following the line, which is a tedious hassle and makes the big picture very hard to detect. There should also be some way of knowing how many turns the travel would take, but I know Stardock is aware of that already.
If you guys at Stardock already realize these things and just didn't get them out in time for this beta, that's great, and I'll be glad to see these elements when they're implemented. But so far it's looking like an overall shoddy job of interface design, and because interface has historically seemed like something of an afterthought in Stardock games, I worry that you guys are unaware of these problems or unaware that they matter.
