How I hate the colors

[Alexander I]

Originally posted by Jaybe
I suppose that some people are just less sensitive to color differences than others. I rarely have any problems with the civ colors except on the mini-map. On the F9 graphs I have to be careful, but I can tell the reds, yellows, etc. apart.

Yes, I can tell them apart, but a lot of them are close enough that it's annoying. I like how green looks -- the Arabs and Turks are easily distinguishable.

[SebP]

Originally posted by Dis
set colors.

used to it since civ1 and i like to identify civ and color. wouldn't want it any other way

[zeace]

I wish there was some dialog box where I could, during a game, assign a particular color to a civ. That way if I find that my neighbor's color is a subtle shade of my own, I can change him. I can make all the civs on my continent contrasting colors. If someone declares war on me I can make his color red. My vassals/best friends can get colors similar to mine. Any civ that I don't assign a color to can have whatever random color it started with.

Imagine looking at the map and seeing you and all your allies in green/blue/purple colors and all your enemies in red/orange/yellow. Neutrals would be white or black. Wouldn't that be cool?

[proviisori]

Originally posted by zeace
I wish there was some dialog box where I could, during a game, assign a particular color to a civ. That way if I find that my neighbor's color is a subtle shade of my own, I can change him. I can make all the civs on my continent contrasting colors. If someone declares war on me I can make his color red. My vassals/best friends can get colors similar to mine. Any civ that I don't assign a color to can have whatever random color it started with.

Imagine looking at the map and seeing you and all your allies in green/blue/purple colors and all your enemies in red/orange/yellow. Neutrals would be white or black. Wouldn't that be cool?

But then the flags would be of different colour than the borders.

[sjm]

Thanks for the link to changing colours in the XML file Brutus.

To be fair, Firaxis didn't do too bad a job of making most of the colours easy to distinguish. However, I bet the colours look slightly different on everybody's monitor, so I'd love to be able to tinker just slightly with the RGB values. For example, I have no trouble with Rome vs India; I assume it's because on my monitor they have much more contrast.

Set colours are obviously much better than random ones, but it's still a question of getting the colours right so you can tell them apart.

Btw, didn't the older civ versions also come with an option for colour blind civ players?

[Adagio]

Originally posted by sjm
Set colours are obviously much better than random ones

Why? Random colors makes the game more interesting and makes it easier to avoid the problem of a civ with one color start next to a civ with a slightly different color
Random colors are obviously much better than set colors

[Jaybe]

Oh yes, we could have Stalin-blue, Montezuma-red, Mao-white, all those colors that would have no associative value to their civs. You would never believe the howls of discontent from not being able to just see a color and know who it belongs to!

Random colors would be much worse than the way it is now.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Oh yes, we could have Stalin-blue, Montezuma-red, Mao-white, all those colors that would have no associative value to their civs. You would never believe the howls of discontent from not being able to just see a color and know who it belongs to!

Not being able to know which civ has which color until you actually meet that civ is a good thing, it makes the game more interesting. In Civ3 I manually randomly picked colors for civs from time to time, made it much more fun to play

And what negative side effects would it be to add this as optional? With it being optional all the people who prefer everything to be the same, while it also gives those who prefer random colors what we want (and as a bonus we get to avoid the problem with same color civs starting next to each other)
Sounds like a win-win situation, as there are no negative sides, only positive sides

[Perfection]

Why can't Civ 4 run in black and white? That would be so classy.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Brutus66
Snoopy was kind enough to help me with custom colors in a different thread

Indeed, it's trivial to edit the XML files for color

[VonSharma]

In civ3, I would keep restarting whenever I was the Persians so I wouldn't end up with that light green, but would get whatever shade of blue they were. My favorite colour by far.

But I feel by doing this, Sid was actually trying to get us to realize have Cartesian collapse of our belief systems and question what is perception and reality, and the illusion that follows in our interpretation of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Just playin

[sjm]

Originally posted by Adagio


Why? Random colors makes the game more interesting and makes it easier to avoid the problem of a civ with one color start next to a civ with a slightly different color
Random colors are obviously much better than set colors

Because you don't need to memorise the colours again each time you play. You just need to remember them once. If you play games with loads of civs, it's a godsend, because units, cities and territory is easily recognisable. You know which traits are associated with each colour, without needing to mouse-over all the time.

A set colour basically identifies a civilization in every game - much like sports teams tend to always play in the same colour, making them instantly recognisable whenever you watch them.

If randomising colours was an option, nobody would lose out of course.

That said, computers are sometimes very bad at determining whether two colours are similar. You can see this in a whole host of football (soccer) games. With some colour combinations, the computer will choose the second (or even third kit) to avoid teams playing in similar colours when the first kit is actually (visually) easier to distinguish.

[Harrier UK]

Originally posted by Virdrago
Agreed on the graph. I always get the Russians and Japanese confused.

If they could change the graph screen, so that the Civs listed on the bottom left were in order with the graph. i.e. The highest civ first, the lowest last. That would help a great deal.

I can never find the correct colour (civ), when trying to plot a rival civs progress on the graphs. Especially if you have the full 24 playing.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by sjm
Because you don't need to memorise the colours again each time you play. You just need to remember them once. If you play games with loads of civs, it's a godsend, because units, cities and territory is easily recognisable. You know which traits are associated with each colour, without needing to mouse-over all the time.

I just don't see it as something positive to know everything about a civ based on it's color

But then I'd also love to see traits being associated to the civs over time (based on what the civ has done), not being handed to them at the beginning of the game

[QUOTE] Originally posted by sjm
That said, computers are sometimes very bad at determining whether two colours are similar

That can easily be fixed, you just have an array with all the colors, then for each color there can be some ID's to colors that reminds of the color. This way when the computer has to randomize the colors, all it has to do is to see if a color is on the list of "looks-like color list" of the civs already on the island
This way the computer doesn't have to automatically try to see if a color is too close to another color, as it's already predefined