Being able to group units and clearly see the groupings, note their capabilities, roles, and objectives and correlate that to their situation on map would be a big plus. Many games have some sort of formation highlight or list of units, but that’s not enough for a big game. Some sort of annotated treeview or graph that could be used while looking at the map (click a unit in the tree and all of its subordinates would be selected/highlighted on the map, and a status summary of those units would show somewhere, with a box for notes) would be great for getting the overall force picture.

Another thing I’ve wanted for years is an overlay layer above the map with some basic vector graphics tools – line, box, circle, arrow, text. That would allow you to draw out an annotated plan on the overlay. Again, especially useful if you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of units since it’s not easy to keep in your head what all of them should be doing.

The other part of the big picture is overall statistics and status reports with aggregate/summary/trend data. Almost all wargames have some kind of report or statistics, but usually not what would be really useful to the player as a commander. All too often they focus on individual unit details, leave out important events, and give walls of text and piles of numbers but no context, graph, or interpretation.

If you feel the need to have several other windows open with your notes, a drawing program, and a spreadsheet (as well as the game manual) when you play, and spend hours manually feeding data from the game into the other programs in order to understand the situation, then it seems pretty unplayable to me. How do you convince someone new to wargaming to try that?

Maybe I’m unusual and most players can do all of that in their head, or just play by gut feeling instead of trying to plan and understand.

“People able to code such games are invariably introvert loners, and blind testing (as something which sullies the purity of one’s private thought) is seldom on the table. The lack of tutorial relates to this, but also tutorials are the hardest game element to design bar none.”

Quite the opposite actually. You would be surprised by the overrepresentation of alternative lifestyles and extrovert, colorfull personalities among developers. Developers are often (not always) escapists. Dreamers open to … experiments.

… But some of them are extremely intelligent and talks to everybody as if they were on the same level.

I could add one more to your 3. I’m currently trying the AGEOD series for the umpteenth time. Gave up on Civil War, it is too huge. Birth of America is smaller and appears to have a good, elegent ruleset. But man, it is such a struggle to work with the interface. I could go on forever on the niggles eg differerent region types have the same graphic. Unbelievably, “clear terrain” can look exactly the same as “wooded” or “forest”. So you have to waggle the mouse over ALL 3,547 regions to find what type they really are! The AGEOD must have the most obscure “combat results” screen ever! (And it totally covers the battlefield, of coourse ) It is often commented on by the newbies in the forums, yet has never been altered in 5 or 6 games now. Eventually, those newbies mostly drift away for some reason….

AGEOD forum traffic shows a generally lessening interest with each game. Which is sad as I really do believe the underlying game mechanism is very good. But it is obscured by dodgy interface decsions. the on-screen clutter. The number of mouse clicks and hovers. The “too much detail” as units go down one level too many (they should dump the battalions). But mostly, it is the absolute refusal to display clearly the vital stats in a user-friendly form, instead opting to obfuscate. All of which turns a potentially good high level strategy wargame into a frustrating micro management RSI click fest.

In fact, most wargame interfaces suffer from “We got Tooltips and we’re gonna use them”. Instead of putting info up on the screen all the time, you are forces to mouse over “everything”, which brings up a list of numbers in a box that invariably obscures other key elements of the screen. I hate them.

True the real cause stems of way too much detail. Way, way too much detail! As you say, it only takes a handful of stats to make an elegant, interesting strategic challenge. Look at chess. And many Euro board games. Increasing PC power has led to wargames getting into more and more detail. Hence the tooltips as there isn’t a hope of displaying all this stuff. TOAW is a classic example of modelling all the way down to number of bootlaces in the stores. Is it really necessary?

Yet wargamers rarely complain of these insufferable interfaces. There will be more complaints that the uniform of the French Infantry has an incorrect number of buttons.

Ironically, the obssession with detail leads to the other main complaint of grognards: that despite the vast detailed low level modelling, the results are NOT REALISTIC!!!! Seems to be a fact of game design that the more there is, the more there is to go wrong. Reducing stats to a handful, reducing regions to the key ones, etc, removing the unnecessary chaff, would make the design more manageable. A good AI would be easier to program, the game wouldn’t take 5 minutes between turns (Advance Tactics is guilty of this and was a main reason I gave up on it), and the outcomes just might be more in liine with something approaching reality. Design from the top down, adding only the necessary detail. Rather than the TOAW et all approach of designing up from the tiniest detail and ending in a nightmare of unbeliabale results and unmanageable design.

So is there a market for the non-OCD gamers who want a high level strategy challenge with a war theme? I’ve just about given up on there being a high strategy PC challenge for non-grognards. PC versions of euro board games are as good as it gets right now. Isn’t Panzer General the best selling wargame of all time? Sometimes I wonder if the grognards like it the way it is and actually enjoy being part of some small elitest group.

Many wargame UIs are like a new symbolic language, a sort of high-level math, which you have to decode. No general fighting in a real war has to do that.

Apart from Civilization and Gettysburg, I think my own “best” UI experience has been the Close Combat series. Any of the games discussed in the thread and the post are about complex choices and issues. A player needs all the help he or she can get to make a choice. Which means less micro-managment if the game is on a strategic level. Options to do so is fine but in the end it’s you and the big scheme of things that matters.

Have someone set up a “dissect a wargame UI” university course, maybe? I bet there is something interesting to learn from it.

Thanks for an entertaining piece.

Introverted loner.

I don’t like the interface on many of today’s wargames, but I don’t like the interface of a lot of web sites or business apps either. There are a some excellent design guidelines out there, and once you start reading them, you start noticing problems. Edward Tufte’s books are excellent, but not very specific. Mark Miller of Developer Express has some good things to say in his blogs and videos. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=338

Wargames are inherently complex since they are modeling a complex subject. While you could reduce them to simply pushing a ‘GO’ button, the inherent complexity would still remain. You can hide a lot of this inherent complexity in various ways, and deciding how much to hide is part of the design process. I like the balance that TOAW strikes with a lot in inherent complexity, but the gameplay mechanics are pretty simple. One key metric I like is how many keypresses or mouse clicks it takes to do something. Another is how far your eye needs to travel to look at the information you need. Another is how much much the important information stands out.

The button design of TOAW wins by that standard of number of button presses(1), but loses because the important information (End turn for example) is the same size as the show hexagons button. One possible solution would be to change them to be more like the Office ribbon where you can resize the buttons and make the important ones larger.

One big issue I see with wargames is that there are few enough wargames that we don’t have common interfaces. I can pick up any RTS or FPS and I will know how to do the basics like move or shoot. I can’t do that with a wargame. Every time I pick up a new wargame, I’ll have to learn a new interface before I can start learning the new rules. Part of that is ‘just because.’ Part of it is that there are real differences in the gameplay of the games. Another part is that the different series picked different interfaces ‘back in the day’ and it is difficult to modify the interface for a new game and still keep your audience. If I modified TOAW to use the COTA interface, I’d lose most of my current audience. Because we don’t have common interfaces, the learning curve is higher than it needs to be. In most games, you can start small with a few units and gameplay mechanics to learn. Then it builds in complexity slowly as you add more gameplay. That isn’t as easy to do with a typical wargame. You’re kind of stuck with boring tutorial scenarios, or harder more interesting ones.

TOAW is a bit of a special case, it was first written 10 years ago. Because of that, I can’t radically change things. People are used to it, the top question on the forum is how do I go back to the old way of doing things.

The fonts look bad zoomed in because Windows 98 (still supported), or even XP/Vista don’t have a good small font. Windows 7 does have one, but I can’t limit my audience to that, especially for a patch. I still support 800×600, and I think it probably supported 640×480 at one time. Because of that, the font had to be an 8×8 grid, so that’s about as good as you can make it look, although the 3.4 patch with the latest font by Damezzi does look better. You can use windows fonts, but because the interface wasn’t written to expect them, it doesn’t always look great, you also lose the SS lightning bolts in the bitmapped fonts.

I already modified the combat results screen. The last several lines (the really important ones) are now shown in silver instead of gold so they stand out. I’ll think about hightlighting the words and left aligning, but with the other hightlighting, I’m afraid that it would obscure the really important information, which is the bottom lines. I may be able to put a small symbol on the left, I’ll look into that. There is an option for an Excel output for the true grognards.

I’ll continue on the Matrix forum, since the rest is specific to the 3.4 patch. I explain how I made the UI changes to bring a program into 2010, so it might be interesting to some people.

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2689643

Ralph Trickey

Its not software glitches, coding errors, or the overall GUI that is the problem. In other words, its nothing that would require much expense at all to fix.

Its the little things, like choosing a retarded font or making a moronic decision to centre text…etc.

Its the stupid little things that a 14 year old in freshman programming class could fix that are the most annoying, I would assume.

You can fanboi-rant all you want, but it doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to fix most of these problems, so money isn’t an issue. The developer must be deficient in some way *not* to realize how illogical these decisions are.

Yes, these studios could waste a ton of money on designer the perfect UI, testing the hell out of it, and iterating over and over and over again… But we’re not really talking about that. Some of these examples are so tragically far short of having any effort at all.

For example, looking at that awful text report:
1) Left-align the text so it’s easily scannable.
2) Darken the background so the text is easily legible.
3) Bold the bottom two lines so the percentages pop out.
4) Highlight or offset the “check” button (assuming that’s what the player will generally push next).

That’s 10 seconds of suggestions, and I’m no expert — I just recognize that I can read, but I can’t read that. Not putting at least that small level of consideration into your UI is just arrogant.

Related posts: Tobold says hardcore gamers shouldn’t develop games at all (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ToboldsBlog/~3/DDVPukUqMf4/dont-let-hardcore-gamers-develop-games.html), and I disagree with perhaps naive imagery of the “game design Jedi” who knows how to strike the balance. (http://gamingbyear.com/2011/01/13/easy-to-learn-hard-to-master/)

Certainly, the market can be left to the “elite” … and slowly die. But wouldn’t it be better if the not-quite-so-elite were invited to come play, too, and could find out about the good games buried behind bad UIs?

I should point out that nobody is suggesting changing the games — just changing how the information they generate is presented. When the accessibility of the game involves, not understanding the game mechanics and unit interactions, but winning a struggle with an unnecessarily arcane UI, the game isn’t fulfilling its potential. And that’s a big loss.