Good Game - Bad Design: Among the worst UI's I've ever seen

[👁]

The game starts out with so many overwhelming options that won't mean anything to the player until after they've already played the game and gotten a sense for things.

First you're asked to create a map which is fairly straight foward, BUT

Then you're asked to choose between Early Middle and Late ages and not enough is explained about how this affects the choices that follow.

THEN you're asked to choose a faction, BUT none of the factions are particularly graphically well represented at this stage, you only see the banners and a basic description until you choose one, and then once you choose one there's no back button. Faction selection has a poor interface and not much is explained about how factions work, you won't really know if you've picked a good faction until after you've already played.

Then once you choose a faction it's time to create a pretender god for it, not a whole lot is explained about this or how it works, or how blessings are going to work. If you haven't already played the game, this whole process is confusing to the point of being off putting.

Then you select basic rules and get in the game, and the game itself is fine but the first few turns are really confusing.

Just selecting what commanders you want is way more difficult and counter intuitive than it should be, then to make them build anything or do research or anything like that you press the space bar, WHY do you have to press the space bar and how is anyone supposed to know to do that on their first few turns?

Once you get the hang of moving your units where you want and learn to make them research and build things you need to figure out how to assign the units you recruited to your army and that's a whole thing, even once you roughly know how to do it the interface feels clunky and cumbersome.

Even something as simple as Recommended Settings would have helped get started, and maybe just a very short basic tutorial on the things absolutely essential to know about how to progress past the first turn.

You know Space Bar and Enter are normally the end turn keys in these games I'm still getting used to it being E, how are players supposed to even know what keys to press on the keyboard? You basically have to watch videos outside the game itself to learn to play it.

I had 3 commanders grouped together somehow, I still don't understand how, but I couldn't click on one and select it individually it would select all three at once. At first I thought I had to click them to make them build things or do research and it was making them all three do the same command so it was a bit of a problem, but then I learned just hovering the mouse over their portraits and pressing space opens their individual menus. How was I supposed to know to do that?

How do I ungroup them btw? I want to leave one behind to do research, but have the others conquer new territory. How am I supposed to know how to?

[Mormacil]

Hit the [?] key on any screen to get a context sensitive overview of hotkeys. This is explained in the manual I'm quite sure. The game does expect you to either watch the linked youtube videos or read the manual. There was a full step by step tutorial in Dom4 manual but essentially nobody ever used it so they dropped it. It's still accessible on their webpage for free but obviously doesn't match Dom5 one to one.

Now I'm not gonna pretend this is a well designed interface at all but quite a lot of the information is in the game. And most can be found looking just at the hotkeys. Ctrl + click creates a selection for multiple commanders. This is mentioned in the hotkey window.

It's not Dwarf Fortress levels of bad but it isn't great. Improved a ton since the older games though, now that's an inaccessible interface.

[dfnskjl]

Press "?" on most screens and in most menus for a list of shortcuts for that context. Also there is a manual.

Shift clicking and ctrl clicking behaves similarly to how it does when selecting files in most operating systems, ctrl click adds/removes one and shift clicking adds all between (and including) the last selected and what you just shift clicked. This also works for selecting troops.

If you want to check out nations more easily you should go to "Tools and Manuals" then "Create Pretender God" on the main menu. This has an actual back button that works, and if you want you can save pretenders you create while checking out nations for use when actually playing.

There is also the dom 5 mod inspector that allows you to easily inspect units, spells, items, events etc. here: https://larzm42.github.io/dom5inspector/ From the name you might guess it can also display these things even if your game is modded if you import the mod into it.

[👁]

Originally posted by dfnskjl:

Press "?" on most screens and in most menus for a list of shortcuts for that context. Also there is a manual.

Shift clicking and ctrl clicking behaves similarly to how it does when selecting files in most operating systems, ctrl click adds/removes one and shift clicking adds all between (and including) the last selected and what you just shift clicked. This also works for selecting troops.

If you want to check out nations more easily you should go to "Tools and Manuals" then "Create Pretender God" on the main menu. This has an actual back button that works, and if you want you can save pretenders you create while checking out nations for use when actually playing.

There is also the dom 5 mod inspector that allows you to easily inspect units, spells, items, events etc. here: https://larzm42.github.io/dom5inspector/ From the name you might guess it can also display these things even if your game is modded if you import the mod into it.

Tyvm for the tip on shift and ctrl clicking, and the advice for scoping out other nations. So far I've settled on Helheim for Early era games because of the Valkaries and blessed cavalry but there are some really cool factions

[vakapad777]

The UI is a bit ♥♥♥♥, but its because of a lack of easily tabulated information, and difficulty of batch orders, and lack of default orders, making micromanagement more prevalent than necesseary. All I can say to your problems, is RTFM. or if you dont have time for that,go with whatever sounds cool, abd learn by doing.