As a quick disclaimer, I've been a rather silent and infrequent Beta tester of Elemental and Fallen Enchantress, but a rabid fan of the Fall from Heaven mod for Civ IV.
Although I'm excited to see all of the changes that Fallen Enchantress has made since the first Beta, I wanted to point out some UI features that Warlock Master of the Arcane has implemented that simply make playing much more streamlined.
Warlock is a pretty good game which has been compared to a Fantasy game built around the Civ 5 engine (This is not the case, but I won't drag myself into that discussion). The game isn't very deep (the AI and tech trees are less than spectacular) and lacks the potential of Fallen Enchantress, but it does have several advantages in terms of UI (even if it lacks simple things like lists of cities / units that would make it much better):
- Event queue that covers both Building Construction AND Idle Units.
- Although it's great to have a way to cycle through units, the units that just completed their actions are usually the ones that I want to move again.
- At a glance clear view on what a city is working on and when it will increase pop (pie chart with a semitransparent section of what the pop will be next turn) or when it will finish a unit.
- Quest tracking at the top (I know I usually only have a handful of active quests, but it's nice to review what they are and where the objectives are [show me on the map the target]) - may be in the beta already.
- Action Icons that are there, but not in the way
- Context sensitive mouse pointer (When I want to cast a spell icon changes to a wand. Default pointer is normal looking [more of a vanilla Elemental thing because choosing between a weird default pointer vs context sensitive pointer was tough])
I have to admit that I'm not a UI guy, but I do know when a UI just *feels* right. Hopefully others who have played Warlock can give some other helpful examples and Frogboy, Derek, and Heavenfall can check out Warlock to see what I mean.
