We had some specific, and significant, goals for the User Interface of Fallen Enchantress. First we wanted a beautiful world to explore. Second we wanted a UI that got out of the way and allowed you focus on that world.
It's always hard to decide what you want on the Main UI. There are a lot of moving pieces in a 4x game, a lot of things we could show. But every piece has a cost. Do we put the minimap on the main UI, do we expect players to use it (ie: is it really helpful, or should we do work to make it more helpful)? What stats are displayed when you have a unit or city selected? How cool looking should decorations be? How cool looking should locations be? How much visual variety should exist in the world?
Checking out the screenshot above you can see the answer to most of those questions. Yes, we want players to use the minimap, and yes we had to do some work to make it more helpful. There is a lot of visual variety in the world, rivers and chasms, blooming green lands, ruined purples, barren browns. Even within those variations you can see lots of color and depth.
Its also important that the terrain plays a key role in the game, that it is more than just a pretty face. Different land types host different sorts of resources, and different type of monsters. In general fertile land has a lot of the city resources while forests and swamps host more monsters and might be dangerous to settle next to. Rivers allow you to build special improvements that help you cities take off, especially for kingdom players (empire players have improvements that don't have the river requirement and are better at surviving in less hospital terrain).
In the above screenshot you can see a bandit camp on the edge of the southern forest. A band of river skath sitting just out of my borders (they will become a problem if I don't do anything about them). An air shard up the river and a fire shard on the other side of the river. Around the air shard there is an Inn, a great place to pickup quests and some horses. And by the fire shard there is another monster lair and a champion I may be able to recruit. It's a fairly good starting location with lots to explore.
You may also notice that the city bar has been replaced and now shows what is being built in the city. Cities have production based on their population, improvements and some player decisions we will go into later. We got rid of the system where everything had a flat cost (a Command Post always took 12 turns to build no matter what size city it was built in) and now, in general, larger cities are better at producing units than smaller cities.
Despite the greater variety in the starting environments, we still want to maintain the players ability to transform the world as your empire grows. Empire lands aren't as dark as they were in War of Magic for practical reasons (it was hard to see units on them).
The map has also gone through considerable rework. Notice the amount of inland bodies of water. With those, mountains and chasms forming natural choke points specific pieces of land become more valuable and allow players to focus their armies at key locations. Owning a pass of an extensive mountain range means more, as does wiping out a Bone Ogre that is keeping you from getting through to valuable resources.
Also notice the large Spellbook button on the bottom right of the screen. Any strategic spell your casters have access to can be cast from here. You don't have to find the caster. If you want to raise a mountain and you have all the requirements, go into your spellbook and cast it. If you want to enchant a city or unit, open a Shadow Gate or drop a Falling Star on an enemy army, it can all be done from here. This was hotly debated. There is a psychological effect as the player doesn't feel like his champion or sovereign is casting the spell. Your fire archmage champion didn't seem to cast that spell (even though we show who is able to cast it in the spellbook, so you know who is enabling these spells) which removes a little of your feeling of connection and attachment to them. But we gain the fact that magic feels very global and player based. If you have mana and powerful casters you can start unleashing spells. And of course it's fatser and easier than hunting for casters.
There is some cheating going on in the above picture. You can probably tell that I've given myself a bunch of free resources (including horses which isn't normally possible for Empire players). And there are a lot more monsters and quests around my starting location than you would expect for someone marching around with a Guardian Statue. I've also been using a cheat to remove the fog of war in all these screenshots so you could see the maps on the minimap.
But there are good things to show here as well. first you may notice that the Empire tree on the left hand side of the screen has changed. It is now broken into 3 sections, Units, Cities and Quests. Each section is collapsible so you can minimize the cities list if you aren't interested in it (or the whole thing if you don't use it). The quests tree is new, and clicking on any of those entries takes you to the location you are supposed to go to next. In general quest distances are shorter than they were in War of Magic, but we don't want players to have to spend any time manually looking around for quest locations, click the button and it will show you where you are supposed to go.
You can also see the attribute icons for my Guardian Statue. He is large, so he can't be knocked prone, and immune to both poison (as all un-living things are) and critical hits (as all golems are). You can also see the mouse over for the cave bear which reports on his moves, attack, defense and hit points. If the player wants more information then that you can click on the bear and see more detail.
It has been 1 year since War of Magic released and about 9 months since I started at Stardock. It has been an amazing job for me and I'm very lucky to be able to work with all the great folks at Stardock. I hope the above screenshots give some indication of how hard we have been working, and the world Fallen Enchantress will allow you to explore and conquer.
