Many times in the game you get prompted with events/choices that have significant repercussions.   These are great, and key to the game!   However sometimes I don't know my current situation enough to make a proper decision, and you cannot click away from the Event UI to check.

Example:
   Choice 1:   Will give +3 relations with Civ for 25 turns
  Choice 2:  Will give -3 relations with Civ for 25 turns
  Choice 3:   etc

However when the screen pops up, sometimes I have no idea what my CURRENT relations are with that civ, so I have no idea if I can reasonably suffer the penalty vs reward.

Same goes for choices about ideology....sometimes it just says "Cooperation +1" as an outcome but you dont know your current cooperation level (or what item it could unlock)

There's a bunch of others too


Comments
on Aug 11, 2022

Not only do many of the popups lack the contextual information to make an informed decision, but some of the popups make no sense at all.  For example, the screen snapshot below shows the description of the Colonial Supplies Executive Order.  It says that it will cost 30 Control and the decay of each of our colonies will increase by 50% which I believe means that if a colony currently has a decay rate of 30% it will become 45%.  But what do we get in exchange for this?  The text says "a large shipment of supplies to our colonies", but what does that mean?  How can a player determine whether this is a good deal for them?

Whoever is managing the development of this product needs to assign a team of 2 or 3 people (I do not believe a single person working on their own will do a sufficient job) to review every popup requiring a decision or providing information for a decision to ensure that:

  1. the player can see the information needed to make an informed decision
  2. the description of what the decision options are is clear (what do I get and what does it cost me)

I wholeheartedly agree with JeremyG that asking players to make decisions when they cannot understand what the tradeoffs are and what their current situation is seriously detracts from the enjoyment of the game.

on Aug 11, 2022

One more thought about the wording of the popups.  Does the cost or benefit apply to:

  1. One colony or all colonies
  2. One Core World or all Core Worlds
  3. One Leader or all Leaders
  4. One ship or all ships
  5. One ship in a fleet or all ships in a fleet

If it just applies to one, is it clear which one.

on Aug 15, 2022

The importantce of being able to minimise pop ups has bee raised and unfortunately the response was that providing that feature was not possible (or extremely difficult and time consuming can't remember which) due to the way the game is built all ready.  However Brad Wordell published a road map (you can find it in the journal subforum) having minimising pop ups at release 1.1.