This game isn't great

[LookToWindward]

Hi,

I've been playing Tropico 6 for nearly 100 Hours now and although I like the game, I think the UI really lets it down badly. There is just so much lack of attention to detail from the developers. It could be so much better with just a bit on finesse. I could forgive the odd glitch but all of them put together is making me not want to play. I played Tropico 1 and 2 back in the day and really enjoyed them. I got Tropico 6 hoping for the same enjoyment, I initially enjoyed it and as I was new to the game I thought I'd get used to the UI, but it's so brain dead that I just can't!

Anyone else feel the same way?

Cheers

[Kunovega]

No, the UI is fine and pretty much the same as it's been for 3, 4 and 5

[LookToWindward]

I haven't played 3, 4 or 5.

An example of why I think the UI is bad:

I have loads of of Plantations (46) and a mixture of different crop types depending on the type of soil. As the Era's move on, different upgrade become available. Some upgrades apply to all Plantations and some to just one type of crop, e.g. corn, sugar. etc.

At the Start of a New Era, to upgrade, all my plantations, I have to click on every Plantation, then Click Upgrade Buttons then on the Upgrade Options. I can Command+Click, to Upgrade all Plantations, but if the option only Applies to (say) Corn, then I have to check the next Plantation and if Corn ignore it, and repeat until hit a different crop type.

Another way of doing it is in the list of All Plantations in the Building/Almanac, the problem with this in that is seems to display then at random (or perhaps creation order), so I get all the types mixed up in particular order, e.g. corn, sugar, corn, corn, rubber, etc. this way of easier/quicker than the first method, I have to Click Corn, Click Upgrade, then Command+Click the Option(s).

Also when you create new Plantations you have to wait around for it to be built and then Upgrade it or come back to it later, Quite often something else pulls me away and I forget about it, which just compounds the problem.

Same goes for Ranches.

If it just remembered the last tab selected (e.g. Upgrades) instead of defaulting back to the main tab each time it would help.

On its own this wouldn't be so bad, but there are a lot of silly UI choices that IMO really should have been better thought out.

But just remembering the last pane selected in a *lot* of places would make it a *lot* better. For example, each time I open the Almanac is selects the first tab, instead of leaving on the last tab selected, so to look up multiple building, you keep having to Click the building tab

Just a lack of attention to detail by the developer IMO

[LookToWindward]

Another example, I have a number of Apartment/Tenement buildings that have less than the maximum occupancy some have just 1 or 2 homes occupied. So I want to examine them and check each one and see if I can rearrange things. e.g. two apartment blocks next to each other have 6 vacant homes each (8 occupied homes in total), I can demolish one and no one is homeless and one buildings has 2 vacant homes.

In order to do this, I click Almanac, People tab, Vacant home, expand the relevant section, find a dwelling, click on it, click the spy glass, it jumps to spot on the map, but I can't see anything, so I have to hit escape to get rid of the almanac window, look around to see if I can demolish it (e.g. there is room in other dwelling nearby), Then repeat this all over again if there are more building to be checked! That's about 6 or 7 mouse/keyboard actions each time. It really sucks! I know, I just did about 20 of them and it drives me mad!

If the developer had had the sense/skill to make it remember the last screen selected it would help a lot,

I get the impression that it the same UI from Tropico 1 which had just been added to on 2,3,4,5 and now 6 and is well past its sell by date at this stage! As I say, it isn't this one thing there are many examples of this lack of care all over the UI and all put together it makes me not want to play the game.

I haven't played the game all the way to modern times yet, at the moment I have a huge map in the Cold War Era. I'll battle on to finish this game, but doubt I will play it much after that and I definitely won't pay for any DLC and I definitely won't be buying Tropico 7 unless they do something about the UI

Shame really if the UI were better I'd probably have got all the DLC.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

If it just remembered the last tab selected (e.g. Upgrades) instead of defaulting back to the main tab each time it would help.

There are a pair of arrow buttons to either side of the building name. Click one of them and it'll cycle to the next building of that general type while staying on the same tab.

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

In order to do this, I click Almanac, People tab, Vacant home, expand the relevant section, find a dwelling, click on it, click the spy glass, it jumps to spot on the map, but I can't see anything, so I have to hit escape to get rid of the almanac window, look around to see if I can demolish it (e.g. there is room in other dwelling nearby), Then repeat this all over again if there are more building to be checked! That's about 6 or 7 mouse/keyboard actions each time. It really sucks! I know, I just did about 20 of them and it drives me mad!

Open the Overlays panel from the bottom menu, select "Residential Occupancy" in the first tab, and look for clusters of residential buildings that aren't green.

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

If the developer had had the sense/skill to make it remember the last screen selected it would help a lot,

I do not agree that remembering the last open tab would be a strict improvement on the current UI, and I have to say that this is a bit of a rude way to phrase this opinion as you're basically calling the developers stupid or incompetent.

Originally posted by Kunovega:

No, the UI is fine and pretty much the same as it's been for 3, 4 and 5

That doesn't mean that it cannot be improved. For example:
- Building work modes cannot be set at placement or changed until construction is completed
- Building upgrades cannot be applied from the building itself until construction is completed
- The mass upgrade function cannot be used when the building selected already has the upgrade that you're trying to apply to other buildings of the same type
- Buildings cannot be 'locked' to prevent their work mode from changing when the mass set workmode function is used
- Several of the overlays duplicate information in or are inferior versions of other overlays and so could either be merged or eliminated
- "Where do I need more housing?" can be a bit of a guessing game, especially when running "No More Shacks" to prevent the destruction of trees around logging camps and coconut harvesters or when you have persistent shacks despite having available housing of appropriate types for the wealth levels of the homeless population
- Nominal production and consumption rates for various industries are not provided except through the Almanac's two-year figures
- Manure production and consumption rates are important for sustainable monoculture plantations and agricultural towers, but this information is not available
- The 'reach' of a given building's influence cannot be checked until it has been constructed when the reach that you want to check is for a non-default work mode or only exists after an upgrade has been applied
- The amount of exploitation that a fishery can sustain is unclear
- The extraction zone of a logging camp or coconut harvester is unclear until after it has been working for a while
- There are a number of things which can only be determined by spot-checks or by inference, for example input shortages, transportation issues not caused by obvious traffic problems, and the geographic distribution of wealth
- The buildings list in the Almanac could do with grouping subcategories of various buildings, for example having a single expandable entry for Plantation (Tobacco) under Plantations rather than listing all plantations individually

[longjr97]

I miss being able to evict specific individuals from their homes.

[LookToWindward]

I didn't mean to imply that the developers (e.g. programmers/coders) were incompetent, I mean that the Company as a whole didn't have enough foresight to address this issue. Whether remembering the last tab is an improvement or not is of course debatable but I think it would mitigate the other "features" of the UI quite well and should be relatively easy to do. I suppose some people may prefer to always reset the tab, so I suppose it would be better to make it an option/preference.

I checked out the Arrows Buttons, they looked like decorations to me, I didn't realise they were buttons. There are two problems with this, firstly you have the Almanac Window blocking you seeing where the building is located and secondly, clicking an arrow button takes you to a random dwelling (or maybe it's the order in the Almanac vacant homes list), not the apartment blocks around the one with vacant homes. Say I have a block with 6 vacant homes (4 occupied) and geographically near to it there are two apartment blocks with two vacant homes each. I know I can remove the one with 6 vacant homes and the four families that are booted out have somewhere close by to go to.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

I didn't mean to imply that the developers (e.g. programmers/coders) were incompetent, I mean that the Company as a whole didn't have enough foresight to address this issue. Whether remembering the last tab is an improvement or not is of course debatable but I think it would mitigate the other "features" of the UI quite well and should be relatively easy to do. I suppose some people may prefer to always reset the tab, so I suppose it would be better to make it an option/preference.

I checked out the Arrows Buttons, they looked like decorations to me, I didn't realise they were buttons. There are two problems with this, firstly you have the Almanac Window blocking you seeing where the building is located and secondly, clicking an arrow button takes you to a random dwelling (or maybe it's the order in the Almanac vacant homes list), not the apartment blocks around the one with vacant homes. Say I have a block with 6 vacant homes (4 occupied) and geographically near to it there are two apartment blocks with two vacant homes each. I know I can remove the one with 6 vacant homes and the four families that are booted out have somewhere close by to go to.

You don't have to keep the almanac open while you scroll with arrows and you jump through them in order, it's not random...

[LookToWindward]

In order of what?

Originally posted by Kunovega:

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

I didn't mean to imply that the developers (e.g. programmers/coders) were incompetent, I mean that the Company as a whole didn't have enough foresight to address this issue. Whether remembering the last tab is an improvement or not is of course debatable but I think it would mitigate the other "features" of the UI quite well and should be relatively easy to do. I suppose some people may prefer to always reset the tab, so I suppose it would be better to make it an option/preference.

I checked out the Arrows Buttons, they looked like decorations to me, I didn't realise they were buttons. There are two problems with this, firstly you have the Almanac Window blocking you seeing where the building is located and secondly, clicking an arrow button takes you to a random dwelling (or maybe it's the order in the Almanac vacant homes list), not the apartment blocks around the one with vacant homes. Say I have a block with 6 vacant homes (4 occupied) and geographically near to it there are two apartment blocks with two vacant homes each. I know I can remove the one with 6 vacant homes and the four families that are booted out have somewhere close by to go to.

You don't have to keep the almanac open while you scroll with arrows and you jump through them in order, it's not random...

In Order of what? I have a group of apartments in one place on the Map, I click Right Arrow and it jumps me to the other side of the map, right arrow again, it jumps to to another place far away from the group I was originally looking at. It might be the order in the Almanac list but it's not the physical location order, e.g. the block across the road from the one I'm looking at

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

In order of what?

Originally posted by Kunovega:

You don't have to keep the almanac open while you scroll with arrows and you jump through them in order, it's not random...

In Order of what? I have a group of apartments in one place on the Map, I click Right Arrow and it jumps me to the other side of the map, right arrow again, it jumps to to another place far away from the group I was originally looking at. It might be the order in the Almanac list but it's not the physical location order, e.g. the block across the road from the one I'm looking at

In order of the list, which is what you asked

[joeball123]

Originally posted by LookToWindward:

I checked out the Arrows Buttons, they looked like decorations to me, I didn't realise they were buttons. There are two problems with this, firstly you have the Almanac Window blocking you seeing where the building is located and secondly, clicking an arrow button takes you to a random dwelling (or maybe it's the order in the Almanac vacant homes list), not the apartment blocks around the one with vacant homes. Say I have a block with 6 vacant homes (4 occupied) and geographically near to it there are two apartment blocks with two vacant homes each. I know I can remove the one with 6 vacant homes and the four families that are booted out have somewhere close by to go to.

The comment about the arrow buttons was not meant as a response to your issue with housing but rather to your issue with building upgrades, specifically the post about ranches and plantations.

For your issue with consolidating residences, open the Overlays panel from the bottom menu, select "Residential Occupancy" from the first tab, and look for clusters of residential buildings that aren't green.

[LookToWindward]

Ahhhh, I see, yes I tried using the Overlay/Residential Occupancy and yes it's much better, but you still keep having to Click the "Residential Occupancy" each time you bring up the Overlay window. so not perfect but definitely better than the other method of doing it. If it just remembered the last tab then it would be almost perfect.

By the way, I'm running it with the Free Housing edict, which makes it much easier in some ways since you don't have to worry about wealth levels so much