I gave the new UI a few days before posting here. Reading through the already posted comments I dont think I will bring anything new. But anyways here goes my observations after really trying to work with the new UI:
- Please buy your development team new monitors. Scaling on a QHD display is terrible. Somewhere the graphics are cluttered so you dont see whats going on while in other spots there is a lot of unused space.
- This point ties to the previous one. Whats up with the resource rounding at the top? Resource in stock are rounded to thousands, per hour production is regular and gold stock is a completely different font on the right not rounded. Now I would get you want to make the gold more visible given its the source of your income, but why is it smaller?
- Zooming seems working only in half. The big unit icons get bigger, the resource icons get bigger but not quite as much, improvement graphics (harbors) get basically lost, unit numbers stay the same. Province font zooming is even more botched as when zooming out the outline makes the text look blurry and hard to read. Small details, such as flames from a province with low morale being barely recognizable and harbor icons sometimes floating in water do not show a level of refinement that I expected after many months of the new UIs (partly mandatory) deployment.
- The chat windows is extremely annoying. After first login I click on it and barely see it. I have to find the type window and click it to make it work. If I press the chat button, I expect the chat to appear, not to go into a "hide and seek" mode. When I click some province or unit, the chat goes away. If I resize the window and change its position, upon reloading the page it remembers the position but not the size. When I go away and login after some time its back in the default position. And why I cannot chat in the espionage window?
- When you put the chat just right of the buttons, the text of the menu buttons (such as Resources) is behind the chat window making it unreadable.
- When you go through the left menu buttons, they all open a middle screen window with two exceptions. The espionage button changes into the espionage screen and the province manager pops up from the right. This is very reminiscent of the old province manager, but given this is a completely new UI I dont see a reason for this inconsistency.
- Also why are the windows fixed? With the chat you showed the UI is capable to create a resizable movable window. Just make all of those options (except the espionage) a movable window. I dont see a reason why I cannot chat, have the province manager opened and also have the stock market opened and use all.
- When I click on a province, the left buttons dissapear. Why? I can click the provinces when they are blurred out while a window is open so why not the oposite?
- The "map control" window is just comical. I mean it works fine-ish, a bit over complicated for me. But the "+" and "-" symbols in the zooming are tiny while selection icons with black background look like they dont belong there.
- Performance is terrible. It runs fine on my main PC, but when I used it on my old laptop (3rd gen Core i7, 8GB RAM) it stutters, especially when zoomed and during zooming. I can play Kerbal Space Program smoothly on that laptop (low details of course) yet the new UI is too much demanding. Do I really need a six-core CPU to run this game fluently?
- The graphics style makes the map hard to read for me. I have to zoom in almost all the way in and then go through the map to understand whats going on.
And I could probably figure out some more points, but I did not keep a list and a lot has already been written here. I am struggling to find any improvement to the game and its playability from the new UI and so far only the espionage window seems better for me. But even it has issues with zooming. From a simple relaxing game it went to a frustrating and confusing mess.
The new UI looks rushed, cluttered, badly optimized and (most importantly) is confusing. Overall I think it would not be so bad if it was the first time it was rolled out and you wanted to show how the game will look in the future with a half-baked rushed demo system. But for a UI that has been available for months, its just dissapointing.
Comparing it to operating systems I would say the legacy UI was Windows 7. Old by now for sure, but proven and well known. While this is Windows 8 with the performance of Windows Vista. Im not saying you should abandon this new UI, but until the user comfort gets at least to a comparable level to the legacy UI, I think legacy should return as an option.
Addon: To be fair, the new UI did force me to register on the forums, so you can count that as a positive outcome...