Personally, I was not opposed to the new layout of the top bar. I clocked the time at switching from one city to the next and buying 12 scholarships as taking less than two seconds to complete. It is one extra click, but for me the extra time it took was negligible compared to what it saves me to sort through 200+ cities.
Some of these have been pointed out, but here are a couple reinforcements and maybe even new ideas from a player that specializes in UI design...
1.) While you say you don't stress The purchase of gold, so the real estate needs to stay, I disagree. Real estate is currently large enough to display a million hold in LONG form... 1,000,000. Who needs that? Every time my queue is full, I get an indirect advertisement for gold. I find myself on those pages all the time by accidentally clicking insta scout buttons as well. And in later worlds (75+), truce is so regularly used, your players undoubtedly know where to buy gold. Make the box smaller, use the real estate for something else, and use short hand if necessary: 500k, 1M, 2K, 300, etc.
2. Sidebar Functionality
a. Highlight the currently active city - a check mark, a highlight, a different color... Anything to designate where you currently are.
b. Quick scroll To the top would be a nice feature. I have 200 cities to scroll through, perhaps if you hit the VERY TOP of the list have it scroll to the beginning.
c. Pull down on the sidebar city list for an auto refresh once you're at the top, my recommendation would be to query for incoming attacks across all cities, and post the incoming attack red icon next to those under attack in the side bar. As it sits now, you must first visit the city or get lucky enough to manually refresh the correct page in My Portal for it to load the icon in your sidebar.
3.) Top bar functionality - this is a feature I would find personally useful, but I haven't seen it discussed before... Many players (most all of the competitive ones, or your serious and paying customers) use 3rd party chat programs in addition to the forum provided in game. I think it would help to provide a button for Quickly copying city coordinates.
Where I would implement this is on the City button at the top. If you are in the city view window, clicking the button again would make a button visible that reads "Copy Coords" - one click of that button copies the city coordinates (141,259) to your clipboard. This enables you to quickly and ACCURATELY relay information to guildmates you are requesting support from. Too many times in the heat of battle I've seen delays in communicating city coords and when they are communicated it is often incorrect. This feature would eliminate that. In any other window than city view, that button takes you to city view window.
In summation:
- Gold bar smaller
- Bring back scroll arrows
- Scroll to top and refresh features to sidebar
- highlighted city in sidebar list
- copy coord feature
- Query ALL cities for incoming attacks in sidebar FIRST
Good job last update, personally I liked it - here is how you make it better
Thanks for listening.