Knowing when to hit 'end turn'

The little NPC and city icons turn dark when they can't move anymore. That's the only indication I could find.

But I agree that that just doesn't spell it out quite clearly enough, and while I admit that Civilization's continual reminder of events seemed tiring, I think it's necessary for a couple of reasons:

• Give the player a sense of progress -- When the game pops up modal messages, you realize something has happened, and that might be an accomplishment of some sort. It's good to let the player know they are making progress.
• Let the player know they need to do something -- If the game doesn't let you know what's going on, how do you get a handle on it? Let the game act as an adviser to you.
• Keep the game moving -- Instead of forcing the player to look to see if the turn has ended, pop up a message telling us it has and give us a button in the popup that lets us start a new turn. That would move things along much better than the current implementation.

I just discovered that if you enable Auto Turn in the game's preferences you don't have to end the turn at all. You can take one action after another and never have to pay attention to the state of the NPCs or towns. This doesn't fix the problem though, really, as you still need feedback from the game but it gives none.

this has to do with the timing of the auto-movement. in star dock games, units moving automatically, because you gave them a path that takes more than one turn, will move AFTER you click end turn. the reason is, that the developers think that you should have an opportunity to change the movement in THIS turn, and not in the turn before. this may sound logical but if you play civ often, where it is a movement IN the turn (automatically, after all non-"go to"-units have been moved manually), and not AFTER the turn (in civ, all units move before you press end turn), it is a bit confusing. GalCiv movement was therefore very confusing for me, and I would be very happy if there was an option to have civ-style movement or stardock-style movement. But since this IS a star dock game, and since this complaint goes back till GalCiv1 I'm quite sure they won't change this.    

Yes I have to admit, the game could better inform the player whether there are units to be moved, or if a city isn't producing.  Perhaps a "next idle unit/city" button?  I am aware that the city/unit display in the upper left indicates whether or not units can be moved, or if a city is doing anything, but it doesn't seem pronounced enough, because I'm always forgetting about it.

In Civ there was a small flashing message that said "Press Enter or click to end the turn" or something like that.  It is a great indication that there are no more movement left.  I'd like to see something like this in Elemental.  Or maybe the end turn button glows or something.  It's been a while but I don't remember what GalCiv 2 did to indicate it there were no more units to move and to click end of turn button. 

I personally don't like the auto-turn option because it makes me feel "out of control".

For an alternative approach, I really like the ticker tape system implemented in Sword of the Stars. Events of the previous turn are shown in a ticker tape in the bottom of the screen. You can freely browse the tape or double click on an event to zoom into it. Some events for Elemental could be "city has completed production" or "unit has reached destination".

When playing SotS, I never get the out of control feeling that comes with auto-turns and I'm not forced by modal windows to do stuff in a specific order. I really hate it in Civ when I want to check up on something immediately after the turn changes, but I have to go through several cities production statuses first. If I'm lucky, I'll remember what I was doing on the large scale after that.

I guess scale is the thing.. Civ throws the small scale "what to build next" decisions at your face and you can grow blind to the larger strategic picture. The game almost forces you to play a reactive game: "this has happened, what will you do about it?" Instead of a more strategic "I want to accomplish these things in the next 20 turns, how should I utilize my resources to make it happen?"

You're probably overthinking it - and it's not just you.  This happened to me when I first played GalCiv2 ("Ok is this guy out of moves?"  "how come he can only move once?  Asteroid field?  Is he gonna die?", and so on).  The thing is, you don't literally, at all times, have to be "doing" anything.  You can station a guy somewhere, have someone wander carefully past those hills, do a quick budget and figure out where you want your next town, whether you want it for caravans or food or whatever else.

At no point during that should you worry that you're not "doing it right" if the turns aren't all being 110% maximized.  Sometimes I slip too, (send out a scout and forget that I've only told him to go so far for a couple turns), but in the long run these things make little difference.

One thing to keep in mind?  Agenda.  After you've gathered information about how your cities get built, how your armies get raised, all that stuff, think about jotting down a list of things to remember.  Refer to it before clicking "End Turn".  It might look like this:

• Find natural borders, the limit of expansion.  This includes other national boundaries.
• Find a means to make money, including the expansion with another town for trading, as well as reaping from reward tiles.
• Acquire a production of (Materials).
• Get (Number) of troops to support (Character).

While your turn is still active and you have moves, move in the direction of a bullet agenda.  Might help you feel more organized.

Good luck

Somthing like this would probably do, have it lit or flashing or somthing untill everything has done somthing or been looked at.

I suppose one thing that makes it different from civ is that you dont always want your towns to be building anything, as building has an initial cost. I think id still like an option to cycle through all my towns that arent building somthing though, just so i can check. Maybe have some way of putting a town 'to sleep' if you arnt going to build there for a while, so it doesnt pop up on the idle list.

It's not such a matter of worrying about "doing it right" as me wanting to be making the most of my turns.  You're right, it's not 100% critical that you never "slip" but it sure would be nice, wouldn't it?  At the very least unproductive turns due to not realizing you had idle units/cities should be minimized.  The interface should help the player out as much as possible in this regard.

Absolutely, there is rarely any time in Civ4 that you want your cities to be inactive, whereas the same is not true for Elemental.  Maybe in each city you select "Idle" or "Sleep" or "Wait" etc. if you purposefully didn't want the city to be doing anything, and thus not notified about the fact that it is doing nothing  This would be similar to how in Civ4 you could put cities on "Wealth" production, if you didn't want them building anything, yet didn't want to be bugged to do something about it.  Similarly with units,  if you hadn't moved your units in Civ4 the game focus to them before the End Turn button lit up, however you could bypass this by putting the units on "Fortify" or "Sentry."

Of course for people who find this obtrusive they could just turn off the feature in the settings.

There is.

Go to Options then Keyboard.

There are 3 keys for Next city , Next Unit and Next City/Unit (which is Tab)

The problem with tab is that it goes through all the units/towns wether they're idle or not. So it isnt very useful.

I know what the tab key does.  It doesn't select the next _idle_ city/unit.

Exactly.

The actual end-turn button also changed colors and started flashing a soft red.  That worked really really well.

I like that idea too.  But I also want an easy way to focus on the unit/event/city that is holding up the end turn button!

yeah i wanted to open a similar thread too

what we need absolutely is a next unit *WITH action points left*

next town is pretty useless but ok, cant hurt, but the actual tab is only slowing the game and pretty boring

Or at the very minimum have a number next to each unit indicating how much movement it has left. As it stands it's all guesswork. And I can swear that sometimes my units don't get a single movement point even though I've pressed ENTER.

i think there is a number showing it somewhere

Main characters like Sovereign get an icon on the left that darkens when there are no more movement points but I've yet to find any indication for common units.

Yes this is very accurate. I found that to be a bit jarring especially when I'm sending caravans out into the world. And there wasn't an icon for them to remind me to go to them, to make sure they move.

It would be really nice to have something like that for units outside of cities.

Huh? How is a key to go to the next town that isn't doing anything anymore useless than next idle unit?  I'd like to know if I've finished a building queue in one of my cities and forgotten about it, much the same way you want to be reminded of your units.

well dunno, its my style of playing

maybe i wasnt clear b4

i dont use tab to scroll and actually move al my units

i want to "have a look" at my turn

so i scroll (in other games, in this i would like to) fast all the possible units to check what i can do in the turn

after i saw my possibilities i move them (and ofc if i could scroll between only the units who can move that would be easier too )

for cities dunno, i suppose there will be some Fn to press that will show a clear recap of every city and what is doing so to correct in case something is not like you love

I agree 100% with the OP.

I'm running at a high resolution so I might be missing something that's obvious when the UI is bigger but there really needs to be more feedback on turn ending and beginning.  As it is, there's barely a sound effect (is there a sound effect?) and the turn meter is tucked alllllllllllll the way in the corner of the screen.

I'd also appreciate it if the game would let me see a proposed route for a unit before committing to the move.  Preferably with icons showing where the unit will be at the end of turn X.

I figure this stuff is obvious for turn-based strategy games but it's been many betas and I'm still not seeing it.

I dont know if anyone has realized but everytime you move just one unit, the turn will end, doesn't matter if you have idle units or not. The turn will end if one unit is moved, that is something that needs to be fixed.

Simple have a popup ala Heroes 3 style.

Asking if your sure your done and listing if you have towns that are not building/doing anything that can or units that can move.

It doesn't have to tell you which just have a popup.

an OPTIONAL Popup and there problem solved.