Currently, most buttons in the UI, especially the various action buttons for our soldiers do not have any mouseover popup tooltips, but instead only reveal their function when we LMB click on them.
This is a slight problem, as another LMB click doesn’t deactivate them, but instead confirms them, which is behaviour I wouldn’t expect from what is basically a toggle switch; this led to me, in my very first turn, trying to find out what each button did, to drop my gun right in front of a hostile, which no doubt caused the alien to tell CrabKing High Command that those puny humans can’t even hold their guns right… and we can’t have that, now can we? 
Seriously though, the current way the UI works seems counter-intuitive, and here are my suggestions for improving the player’s interaction with the game:
- All UI icons should have a helpful mouseover popup telling us their function, i.e. the “Drop” button should have a popup telling me: “Drops the currently held item” before I click on it.
- Clicking LMB once on a button to “activate” it is fine, but clicking LMB a second time on the button itself should rather deactivate it again instead of instantly causing the associated action – this becomes especially apparent with the Heavy’s Jumpjet ability; clicking twice on that, either by mistake or because one expected to de-select it this way, this immediately causes the Heavy to lose two Will Points with zero benefit, as it basically caused him to make a jump on the spot.
- The tooltips should contain the most important information for each action, for example that the Reload action will not (always?) take up all your time units, i.e. you will be able to reload and shoot in the same round.
These changes should, in my opinion, make using the UI and thereby playing the game entire feel much more intuitive, much more in tune with what a player is used to or would expect to happen.
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I agree, was going to post this myself. Will be especially important for newer players.
I completely agree that everything needs tooltips. Tooltips, and more tooltips. You can never have too many tooltips.
I haven’t downloaded the game yet. Of course it had to release at midnight, and now I’m at work, so I’ll have to wait until this afternoon to play.
As for the left-clicking issue, what currently deactivates a button you have left-clicked on? Right click, the Escape key, or, nothing? There must be a way in the current build to deactivate a command that you have clicked on, but don’t want to execute. If not, hopefully this will be fixed very soon.
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Currently, RMB clicking seems to disengage most things, but then again right clicking on the map within the movement area seems to issue a movement command – I only stumbled upon this because I tried, in old top down-I’m used to this-fashion, drag the camera around by holding down RMB, which didn’t work.
Escape definitely aborts/disengages however, so there is not a situation where you are stuck with something you didn’t know what it was or that you selected by accident, no worries.
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Currently it works as in XCOM2, clicking on the icon twice activates it. Right click cancels. I am not keen on using right click for movement, but we implemented that way for XCOM players. This might change. We will add tooltips though.
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I would very much prefer it if right click to move could be removed eventually, yeah… or at least toggled in the config menu, I guess.
Every item in the UI should provide info when hovered, and the option to change the response time (milliseconds) or disable completely.
Particularly in an Alpha build where nothing is set in stone and mechanics/systems will be changing constantly. And not just in game related context info but also your dev builds in general, providing info for the actual alpha build itself, it’ll reduce bug reporting when people know what to expect from options and whether mechanic are in a state ready for comment (include dev milestone stage for context element would be clever).
Generally speaking an important factor of hover info is that it prevents UI “accidents of curiosity”; when clicking something you can actually activate it’s context event on first click depending on the current depth of the UI state and context, this means in some cases if info isn’t displayed on hover a player may click something to see what information pops out, the result is a potentially unwanted action being executed.
@ChungoBeepis I have successfully merged your post with this existing thread. 
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