This game's UI needs a lot of help

[WebBowser]

Hey guys, so I decided to give this game a shot because I have a lot of family who was really into the Axis and Allies board game, and I myself was a huge fan of Hasbro's Axis and Allies video game adaptation released when I was a little kid in 1998. Axis and Allies 1998 provided a very simple, easy to understand UI that made it obvious what you were supposed to do when and required very little guess work, even for a fairly stupid 6 year old. This game, coming out more then 20 years later, is somehow infinitely more confusing, to the point where even experienced players are left scratching their heads at how they are supposed to do basic actions like moving units. Yesterday I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out the game, and while I did eventually figure out basic actions and controls, I just wasn't having fun and stopped playing out of frustration. Because this game is still in early access, and because I really, really want this game to be a great experience and a worthy successor to the 1998 classic, I will do my best to detail my experience and offer suggestions on what can be improved.

1. First impression: Much like everywhere else, first impressions are very important to a video game. The game here throws you directly into a tutorial upon first load. The tutorial would be perfectly passable if the game underneath was intuitive (the voiceover was actually pretty solid, and the situations engineered for the tutorial make a lot of sense both thematically and from a gameplay standpoint), however I found myself struggling to do the most basic of actions such as moving a unit from one tile to another, look around the map, and so on. This is despite having arrows to prompt me where I'm supposed to click and a full explanation of what moves I'm supposed to make. The difficulty and complexity of movement turns what should be a simple and effective tutorial into a frustrating experience, and that's really really bad for first impressions. I will discuss issues with specific actions more specifically later in this post.

2. Creating a new game (offline): So assuming you made it through and/or skipped the tutorial, obviously the next thing you want to do is make a new game. Easy, right? Well, sadly even this manages to be overly complicated. You click on single player or hotseat depending on whether or not you want multiple players involved (frankly, these could be merged into a single menu, but that's minor). When you click on it, you are treated to a screen that says "You have no active campaigns, create a new game to continue." In order to advance past this screen, you need to click on this greyed out text on the side of the menu labeled "create game", which wasn't there before clicking on Single Player. This bit of misdirection is not helpful, and considering how often players will be starting new games, it is to the game's benefit to make this action as simple as possible. Once the player finds and clicks on "create game", the player is then asked to select between 1942 second edition and the gencon 3.0 variant. This screen is perfect. It explains the differences between the two options, makes it obvious what the player needs to do, and it even has a bright red "next" button at the bottom of the screen. This is good, keep it (though I question whether or not the average player cares about the specific ruleset they are playing with, and whether or not this belongs under some sort of "advanced rules" module). Once you click next, however, you are treated to an extremely blurry page that frankly hurts to look at. Oh yeah, and there's also a text box that you need to enter your game name for. Once you enter the game name, the rest of the page becomes unblurry and legible. That's not ok at all. When the player enters the page, his attention is drawn not to the text box that he needs to enter stuff into to continue, but instead to the blurry mess that is the rest of the page. If you need to decide on a filename before the game starts, that's fine, but consider having it be a popup module near the beginning of the process or even dedicating an entire page to making a name would be better then this solution. The rest of the page isn't much better. When you mouse over a faction, it shows "you", even though it's currently being controlled by a computer. And when you click on it, the text changes from "you" to "computer". This is very confusing, and will trip a lot of people up. Once you're done getting mixed up and finally figure out how to set your player character, you are finally allowed to start the game.

Compare this experience with Axis and Allies 1998: in that game, you hit new game, select who controls all the factions, and hit start. No complicated menuing, no confusing misdirection, pretty much the only issue with that experience is that setting your own player is also slightly non-intuitive (but only slightly). Not only that, but they even have a separate "options" module that allows you to customize your ruleset and enable special rules. This gives players who care about that kind of stuff a an easy way to set that up, while staying well out of the way of players who just want to play the game.

3. Buying stuff: This one is relatively minor, but it sticks out because this is literally the first thing you do on your turn. When your turn starts, the thing that sticks out to you the most is the world map. However, during the purchase phase, you can't really interact with the map at all. Where your attention should be is at the purchase UI on the right side of the screen, which you must interact with in order for the game to progress. Like I stated in the previous section, if something needs to be done in order for the game to progress, it needs to be the focus of the current screen. In Axis and Allies 1998, they have a module that appears right when your turn begins that allows you to purchase the units you want for the turn. Once you select the desired units, the entire module disappears and you get to continue your turn.

4. Basic Movement (ie moving ground units from one province to the next): So now that we start with combat movements, we can finally focus on the world map. The absolute first thing that jumps out is just how utterly tiny the pieces look. I legitimately have a difficult time telling the difference between an anti-aircraft turret and an artillery, let alone all the different ships. Then you have to try and move them. It starts out ok, you left click on a piece, it glows yellow to show that you have selected it, and all the legal moves are shown in either blue or red. I would like some audio cue for selecting a unit, or have the unit move around with my mouse to show that I have it selected and am preparing to move it, but otherwise, the act of selecting a unit is perfectly passable. Then, I try to move my unit by left clicking into an adjacent territory controlled by the enemy, a perfectly legal, standard move. Nothing happens. The unit is still glowing, telling me that it is still selected, but I see no indication that the unit has moved. An astute player may note that the window on the bottom left corner of the screen now displays the territory I just attempted to move into. It turns out that in order to move a unit, one must left click on the unit, and then right click into the target space. Why? Why right click? That makes zero intuitive sense and is not mentioned anywhere in the tutorial. Struggling to figure out how to do even the most basic of actions is one of the worst experiences you can give a player, especially in the first few minutes of booting up the game. Canceling moves is also very difficult. In order to do that, you need to select the unit you just moved, go to the window on the bottom left part of the screen, click a greyed out down arrow to display "queued moves", figure out which move to cancel and hit the cancel button.

Compare this experience with Axis and Allies 1998: In that game, moving units is a breeze. Unit pieces are large and easily distinguishable, using sprites that closely resemble the game pieces from the Axis and Allies boardgame. When you left click on a unit, it attaches itself to your mouse, giving you a clear indication that yes, you have picked up this unit. If also gives you the feeling of picking up a game piece and physically moving it, almost as if you were playing the actual boardgame. To actually move the piece, you merely need to left click on the space you want to move your unit to. If your stack has multiple units, you can just keep clicking to send more units. The piece will then physically move to that space, clearly indicating that yes, you have moved your piece from one space to the next. This sort of feedback is very important for creating an enjoyable experience. Canceling moves is also intuitive, just do the same thing, but in reverse. Left click on the piece you just moved, then move it back to the spot it was at before the turn started, and left click again. Simple, intuitive, and doesn't really even require a tutorial to figure out.

5. Combat: Combat is reasonably intuitive. I never was confused as to who was moving or what I needed to do to make the combat progress. There's a bit more fluff then I would like, and I generally prefer the much cleaner and faster combat interface provided by Axis and Allies 1998, but from a usability standpoint it gets a pass.

6. Transport movement: Hooo boy, transport movement is an utter nightmare in this game. It's such a nightmare that I'm probably going to botch my explanation on how to do it as I type this out. So, in order to use your transport, you first need to left click your transport ship, then right click up to two land units on an adjacent land tile to load them up. Then you left click on the water tile adjacent to the land tile you plan on attacking (assuming it's unoccupied). After that, you go to the bottom left corner window, click on a dropdown that shows the units inside of the transport. You select those units, and right click onto the province you are trying to attack. I sincerely hope I got this right, but to be blunt, the process shouldn't be complicated enough for me to get this wrong.

Compare this experience with Axis and Allies 1998: Transport movement is easy. All you have to do is left click the unit you want to load into the transport, then left click the boat. The units will move next to the boat. To move the boat, all you have to do is left click the boat, then left click the water tile you want to move to. Lastly to attack, you just left click the units (who are still next to your boat) and left click the province you want to attack. What is a nightmarishly complicated action in Axis and Allies online is exceedingly simple in Axis and Allies 1998. The key to this simplicity is simple: it uses the same movement mechanics that are used in basic ground troop movement: left click a guy, then left click where you want him to go. This mechanical consistency makes it very easy for players to accomplish even relatively complicated maneuvers like amphibious assaults. By removing this complexity, players are allowed to focus on the game, instead of how to play the game, increasing their enjoyment.

So in short, you guys need to take some time and really re-examine the basic functionality of the game. Without a solid foundation to build upon, any attempts to develop new game modes, rule options or otherwise add content to the game will invariably fail, simply because the game itself isn't enjoyable. If you haven't already, I highly recommend looking up some game footage of Axis and Allies 1998, as that's the bar most folks are going to measure you against. Here's some sample game footage if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-z6KtMso4

P.S. significantly less important then the above wall of text, but it would be really cool if all the factions had their own theme song. Helps give the game more character and distinguishes the different players.

*edit*

Update 02/28/2020: Over the past month, most of my concerns for the main menu have been addressed (still not a huge fan of the little side bar menu that pops up when you try to make a game). Combined with the AI improvements, the base that this game stands on is becoming more and more solid. The only thing I really want to see from this game now is click and drag movement for the units in game.

[Julius Borisov]

Thanks for a ton of useful feedback. We'll go through it.

[WebBowser]

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

Thanks for a ton of useful feedback. We'll go through it.

Not a problem, thanks for the quick response. Communication is also very important.

[Lozmoid]

Excellent post, really good points! And I love the idea of nation-themed music. I love the classical score and battle music in this game, but just wish there was more of it, and more artwork.

[nicewolf64]

one of the mistakes that I keep making is when i have multiple of the same unit, and i click to move them, and almost always i end up leaving someone behind. i play the game zoomed out so that I can see everything, so its not always easy to see that someone was left behind because of the ghost images left behind...hate..hate..HATE those ghost images

[WebBowser]

Originally posted by nicewolf64:

one of the mistakes that I keep making is when i have multiple of the same unit, and i click to move them, and almost always i end up leaving someone behind. i play the game zoomed out so that I can see everything, so its not always easy to see that someone was left behind because of the ghost images left behind...hate..hate..HATE those ghost images

You can zoom in?

[gbelle]

Scroll your mousewheel. I always play full zoomed. Well sometimes scroll back a bit figuring out plane movements then rezoom. I miss less stuff this way. Granted it is easier to do as axis than allies because they are usually fighting only in one theater and can get most of their units on the screen at once.

[nicewolf64]

dang it...AGAIN, i thought i moved 3 loaded transports into an area. NOPE, 2 of them are still sitting at drydock. pick a ship, load, move....why is that so hard? my problem is that you auto fill the transports then we have to go back and unload the wrong transport. it's just ridiculous that you click on a transport, load the 1st unit, but then the 2nd unit goes onto the next transport. the game should NEVER make decisions for us.

[Old Soldier]

Originally posted by Julius Borisov:

Thanks for a ton of useful feedback. We'll go through it.

Better yet, hire ScottDehart and put him on your team. He obviously understands what needs to be done to salvage this train wreck.

[jr_alamillo]

Did the transport issue and MAC issue ever get resolved? dont want to play game until it does.

[Krakhauer]

Very good points. I did not have as much trouble as you with transports. When dealing with 2 or more transports in the same tile, you can shift right click land units you want to pick up, and the transports will pick up as many as legally possible. Then shift right click where you want the transports to go, assuming they are all going to the same place.

IF dealing with individual transports, yes it can get cumbersome to make sure you have loaded each one correctly (I got screwed one game trying to invade France with USA after UK took the beachhead, and I left 2 full transports out in the ocean by accident. Ugh.

Like I posted a couple weeks ago, the foundation is here for a great Axis and Allies platform, where you can have multiple games and rulesets. The UI does need some work and I like the idea of being able to left click and drag units to where I want them to go. Would make it SOOOO much easier. Right clicking just does not feel great, and I agree that being able to drag the peices would make you feel like you are playing the actual board game.

Also, has any one ever had a sub NOT submerge when the defensive profile has that option selected, and not get attacked by a destroyer? Happened to me today as UK. While still my turn, I checked to confirm that submerge defending subs was selected. 100% confirmed it was selected. I finished my turn and then on Japans turn the guy attacked with a Battleship and Cruiser (maybe a plane too) and the sub was killed. No destroyer was present and I did not which profiles. 100% positive on that.

[WebBowser]

@Julius Borisov

Hey Julius, I just wanted to compliment you on the great improvements you've made concerning the game so far. Not only does it seem like you took my criticisms of the menu UI to heart and legitimately worked to improve it, but you've also improved the AI to the point where I don't really feel like any of the AI nations are blatant deadweight anymore. Pretty much the only thing I could possibly ask for at this point is the ability to click-and-drag units in order to move them. So yeah, great job man.

[muddyboots]

Originally posted by nicewolf64:

one of the mistakes that I keep making is when i have multiple of the same unit, and i click to move them, and almost always i end up leaving someone behind. i play the game zoomed out so that I can see everything, so its not always easy to see that someone was left behind because of the ghost images left behind...hate..hate..HATE those ghost images

Oh man, I do this ALL THE TIME! Especially with transports!

[Julius Borisov]

@WebBowser Cheers!

[-=kirito*48=-]

i still have this game at home and iron blitz edition by Hasbro Interactive.