Legible prerequisites for techs and civics?

[iheartdaikaiju]

It is very difficult to see what prerequisite civics or technologies you need for some civics/techs. The game lacks the ability for you to click on a tech you'd like to path toward and have all the prereq techs selected, likely because they wanted players to be aware of the tier 2 techs/civics along the path but those are irrelevant or shift-clickable when you're beelining. Anyway if you want an accessible example look at the Imperialism civic in the exploration age, it is unclear whether you need both Bureaucracy and Colonialism or just Colonialism. In this case it is very important to know this ahead of time since Piety leads to Bureaucracy and is how you get your religion, knowing whether you can pick that up on the way or not when you are playing Mongolia and need Erdene Zu for the in-game achievement is the difference between being able to form an early religion or not, it impacts how you play the entire era from the first move forward because Piety is at the beginning of the tree.

I would really like to recommend to the devs that they add labels for each tech listing their immediate prerequisites but until that happens, has anyone here in the community actually drawn this out so we can actually tell what is required for what?

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by iheartdaikaiju:

Anyway if you want an accessible example look at the Imperialism civic in the exploration age, it is unclear whether you need both Bureaucracy and Colonialism or just Colonialism.

It's perfectly clear to me. Maybe there was an error in release version, since they apparently fixed some of those paths in 1.1.

I wouldn't say no to more labels, but I think I'd prefer it if they were only shown in a detailed tooltip and not every time I highlight one of the tech or civic options. Need to think of the usability on smaller screens too, like Switch and Deck.

The upcoming queuing will also help with this slight issue of readability.

It's been a while since I last played Mongols but Erdene Zuu is probably more easily accessed from Mongol unique civics instead of imperialism?

[iheartdaikaiju]

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

It's perfectly clear to me. Maybe there was an error in release version, since they apparently fixed some of those paths in 1.1.

The 1.1 update did help this a lot, previously I had learned not to trust lines connecting two techs but they do seem to have fixed these.

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

The upcoming queuing will also help with this slight issue of readability.

Did you happen to see where this was documented, that they were going to be for sure adding queuing? I agree this would mitigate the problem.

This has nothing to do with the problems at hand but, being QA in a former life my inner professional is screaming at your use of the word slight when we're talking about an accessibility concern. I am not going to go so far as to ask you to police tone when you are giving helpful and useful feedback, especially not over a video game, life is far too short. I am just saying something so you know it comes across as grating to the admittedly very rare industry professional who has gone to great lengths to make phone apps work for blind and deaf people.

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

It's been a while since I last played Mongols but Erdene Zuu is probably more easily accessed from Mongol unique civics instead of imperialism?

I picked it because it demonstrates the legibility concern. In that specific example you are correct. Typically the wonder is far fewer techs if you follow the age civics path instead of the nation's, and even when it isn't you do not want to miss important early techs like piety or national history anyway, it's often better if you have a high culture to avoid the nation's civic path if you are unlocking the national wonder reward.

At any rate TL;DR The 1.1 update helped a lot and queuing would resolve this completely, and I agree tooltips would be the best way to add labels.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by iheartdaikaiju:

Did you happen to see where this was documented, that they were going to be for sure adding queuing? I agree this would mitigate the problem.

Check the "Looking ahead" section of this news article: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1295660/view/498314610455086145?l=english

Originally posted by iheartdaikaiju:

being QA in a former life my inner professional is screaming at your use of the word slight when we're talking about an accessibility concern.

Yeah, I hear you lol. Of course, I meant the current version where I believe the issues with the "paths" were fixed, not the original one where they were outright wrong. All in all it was just a couple of "paths" that were wrong or illegible, though, not a major component of gameplay UI. And speaking of other devices, you can actually see how the "path" graphics are not perfectly aligned (at least on my 1440p screen), so to me it seems like they have actually worked to reach some kind of scalability. It's not perfect, but if they cannot improve it further, queuing tech and civics should help those who continue to struggle with the the "paths".

[JUMP'NSHOOTMAN]

XD I still make mistakes on knowing which is which at times. Though I'd agree 1.1 seems to have fixed things up a bit, even if the lines look terrible themselves... Still fun.