Empire: Total Blah

Ok, Ben, you've inspired me. Here it is: my first video game review!

(Ignore the careful discussion of human-computer interface issues. It's really just a game review. Keep reading...)

Anyhow, I've been sick lately with the stomach flu. That means two things: Jello and free time. I've been using at least some of that for the mindless enjoyment of Empire: Total War.

By my count, Empire is the sixth volume in the series of schizophrenic strategy games. The premise is pretty tried and true: the player manages his or her empire on a turn-based macro map and then dives into an RTS to manage individual battles. The first time I encountered the split strategy style was XCOM: UFO Defense and I've had mixed feelings. It's like trying to play two different games when sometimes I only want to play one.

Grand Strategy's first challenge is that it's, well, grand. There is an overflow of information thrown at the user and if it isn't carefully organized and presented, the player can get lost. Playing the game becomes about managing little details and suddenly it feel a whole lot like work.

Games like the Civilization series have nearly perfected this kind of UI. Empire makes me feel like I'm at the office.

Let's start with the macro portion of the game. The world map is beautifully detailed - and that's it's first problem. There's way too much clutter. To combat that, designers need to pay careful attention to the visual cues they provide. When a town or city or...other doodad...can build something, there is a gold symbol floating over it. Great!

Except that farms have a very similar looking gold crop symbol over them. It's not possible to quickly scan for what needs to be built.

Similarly, smoke rises from towns and...stuff...that have been damaged and need repair. Unfortunately, the same smoke starts wafting from just about everywhere as the industrial revolution begins. I appreciate the ambiance, but what I really want is the signal to repair my damn stuff.

You might have noticed that I'm pretty vague with the "things" on the world map. If there's a name for them, I haven't encountered it. Names help us crystallize concepts. I've often said that good naming is 90% of good programming. Extend that to UI design.

Colors and simple, distinct symbols help us do the same. I think schools and churches are two of those things on the world map, but they are pretty much the same white buildings until zooming in really close. Same for workshops and smiths, except orange. All three kinds of ports look pretty identical. The designers were obviously going for awesome super detailed. Instead, they need to be simple and distinct. At the bare minimum, can't we at least get different colors? Eventually, I just clicked the little box that let the AI manage all building and taxation on the grand strategy map - it just wasn't fun any more.

I was feeling pretty lost, anyway. You see, the tutorials really don't teach much about the big-picture game. (See? Still no name for it.) The "Road to Independence" campaign does a little bit more, but still not nearly enough. I finally resorted to reading the manual, only to find out that there isn't much more in there, either. In-game help would be a big plus. You can right-click on just about anything for a detailed description, but rather than tell you the in-game significance, we get a short historical essay.

As fascinating as the history behind the six-pound horse artillery may be, I really just want to know how to use it to crush my enemies, and why I should choose it over that other twelve-pound artillery or four-inch mortar. That's why Civilization has two different tabs: one for in-game details, another for history.

One of my biggest pet-peeves of games is waiting. Everyone knows that making the player wait is a big no-no. It takes the focus away from the fun. That's why there has been a crusade on loading times for a while now. So why do I have to sit through the animation of my arming walking across the map every single time I move one? I can chart a course for a ship so that I don't have to manually move it every turn, so why do I have to take eight seconds (yes, I timed it) to watch every single one of them move every turn? When two armies meet, their icons draw swords, cross them and then re-sheath them, before the Start Battle screen pops up. Every. Time. Why?

I could keep ripping on the problems with the macro game, but it's time to move on to what I feel is the real focus: the battles.

I know that I can click on that little 'X' to close a window in Windows. (Excuse the obvious awkwardness of that sentence.) I know that control-c copies, control-x cuts and control-v pastes. I know that I can click on the mini-map in the lower-left corner of the screen to jump to that portion of the map. Just like you can in the world war part of the game.

Except: no. The battle part has the same mini-map, but clicking on it does nada. You have to manually scroll the camera. Which makes perfect sense, since it's the real-time part of the game and you're always in a rush and there's no way to zoom out far enough.

I could keep going for a while. But there you go: symbolism, discoverability, focus and uniformity. Four key human-computer interaction and UI design issues. 'Nuf said.

- E