Yup. Seems like at least two possible causes: 1) Devs are mistaking 'immersiveness' for maximized 3D display area or 2) The real game (not the engine) is still so far from finished that there's no point in trying to polish the UI yet.

Might also be some vexing mixture of 1 and 2, but hopefully not.

Those SOASE/Demigod influences do not seem like a good thing to me, but then I've never loved a single 'RTS' game yet. The closest I come to being in that audience is my affection for games like SimEarth, SimCity, and a series of ancient Rome-Egypt games whose proper names I can't even remember because the fun was short-lived.

For Elemental, when I get serious about managing details of a 'large/old' faction, I want to be able to put my entire display to good use, not suffer subwindows crowded with info-free artwork (I like pretty, but as a garnish, not a full-on side dish). I also want to see the info frame for the main view have some awareness of the resolution I'm using and stretch to cover the entire bottom of my game window (why scroll for three more icons if you have room to just put them in view to start with?).

<-- monkey still working for a minimum of 800x600 

I agree that the current GUI is far from fantastic.

That's a mockup.

The UI in that concet image is fantastic. Especially the look and feel of the research panel is infinitely better than what we currently have. Hopefully the final UI will at least partially resemble that image.

Props for making the distinction between GUI and the full UI, which alas looks to be heading towards a heavy GUI/mouse bias.

I'm rather sad to see the Keyboard tab gone from the Options window in the latest builds and I'm getting seriously worried that there will be no 'proper' 8-direction keyboard navigation for selected units (the game still seems unable to distinguish between keys like 7/HOME on the number pad and the dedicated HOME key).

Nothing's stopping you from doing it now.

http://www.desktopx.net.