Europa Universalis IV Windows, Mac game

Blog #3 - The New User-interface - by Nicrlaitheking/ Macbeth

Hello and welcome to blog 3 about the new UI for the Lord of Universalis mod.First off I would like to quickly introduce myself for those that don't know me. I have been working on the mod with DKStranger for around 2 years now and before that I simply gave some advice concerning the lore of middle-earth. I joined this project after playing the mod for a little while with my friend. I wasn't really satisfied with the geography and provinces of the mod, especially not the far east. So I offered to help DKStranger and redo the entire map, provinces, heightmap etc. So that's what I have been working on for some time now.
I have spend a lot of this summer working on the mod to try and reach a state where it's beginning to look playable so we can test it out and hopefully fix any bugs we might encounter. We might offer some people to try out an alpha, but I doubt that will be anytime soon.
Anyway one of the many things I have worked on this summer is the new UI for the mod, which is today's topic. First off I would like to remind people that this is all WIP, so it's likely to get changed and updated before you can get your hands on it. For those of you that don't know what User-interface is; It's all the icons, buttons, images, flags etc. you see ingame. Pretty much everything you can see that is not the map or 3D models on the map.

Evil & Good UI:

As some of you would have noticed the part 2 of the mod contains all of the UI. I have suggested that it might be possible to have a good & evil UI so that people that want to play as Mordor wouldn’t have to encounter gondorian UI and alike. This is however still in early stages and we would have to do some testing to make sure that players with good and evil UI still can play multiplayer together. We will talk further about this if it will be possible, but for now the UI will have a focus on the good side.

Top-bar:

The top-bar of the game is important as it can be seen all the time, so having the vanilla unit with guns being a symbol of manpower felt very wrong. As can be seen on the image below, we got new icons for: manpower, sailors, build interface, great powers, prestige & legitimacy.

You will also notice that we have changed the icons for diplomats, merchants, explorers and priests.

Another thing is the alert messages that have been changed into coloured rings. As the veteran players would have noticed is that in the vanilla game the red flag has a golden edge that keeps highlighting the message. It works like a GIF that keeps repeating, so we have used this function so that the inscription of the one ring will rotate.

Subjects:

As seen below there are new icons for marches, vassals, junior partners, granting and giving acces to allies and more. There is also a new fort icon and fort level icon. This is represented with a gondorian tower with a shield.

Map-modes:

New icons for many of the mapmodes; dynasties (Elendil), government types (crown of Gondor), great powers (the one ring), manpower, race, culture, accepted culture, regions, areas and the imperial map-icon is now used for Rhûn that will work as a confederation of nations.

Unit icons:

The gondorian soldier have been updated, and the cavalry unit and artillery unit have been updated as well. The fire & morale icons have been changed as well. As can be seen to the right the tab-icons have been changed as well.

Buildings:

I updated the background for each of the races’ buildings (humans, dwarves, elves and orcs/uruks). I have tried to make the background for the humans more generic, as it will be used by many factions. The type of building also got it’s own icon now, as can be seen.

Dwarven buildings – As can be seen the banner have been changed to something more dwarven, which is repeated with the elves and orcs.

Court:

There are plenty of new tab icons at the top, for almost all the categories. As can be seen the background have been changed and we are working on making new ruler personality icons that are more related LOTR. We are also working on updating the advisor images, but this might take some time.

Missions:

We are currently working on adding missions for a lot of the factions, hopefully all by the end. For now we can simply show the new background.

Decisions & policies:

New icon for decisions and policies (likely to change)

Race (religion):

Plenty of new icons as can be seen.

Military:

New icons for recruiting generals, admirals and making the ruler & heir generals. We have been talking about using the conquistador for something new, but more about that another time. There are plenty of other new icons as well as you can see on the left. A minor thing to notice is that we changed the siege icon from a cannon to a trebuchet.

Province view:

New icons for hiring mercenaries, fort level, locked building slots and more as can been seen.

The icon for increasing manpower will change, don’t worry.

War:

Crossed swords have been changed to gondorian swords (though it might be hard to spot).

New icon for calling allies (Horn of Boromir).

War overview:

Event pictures:

We are still working on adding many new events, but also simply updating the existing ones that are encountered in the vanilla game. If you have tried the mod before you know that the first event that pops-up is what race you play as. We want each race to have their own image, below can be seen examples.

Next time we post an article about the UI it will focus on some of the more unique stuff. Like the Haradrim having their own tab in the bottom that’s based on the papacy. Or the coptic religion being used by the dwarves. Or how the rohirrim can choose an ancestor to follow (requires a dlc).

Thanks for now and keep an eye out for future updates

Kind regards – The team behind Lord of Universalis