I think Endless Legend, also made my the Humankind devs Amplitude, was the first to introduce districts. Granted, the bones of 4x games, in general, are based on Civilization 1, at the very least.

I wish they took the neolithic era from Humankind. That’s such a cool super early game element to the game rather than ‘settle your first city ASAP or you’re screwed’.

I can see it looking like that, but I’m pretty sure it’s because BD-1, the little mini droid you run around with, is up on his shoulder obscuring part of the arm/hand area.

Maybe I can help!

Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It’s a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn’t done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There’s going to be platform exclusive features that don’t have parity that wouldn’t be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.

I could be wrong but I think at one point the outside sources toggle was just a one time thing and affected all applications.

Well, there existed phones that were kind of what smartphones became. Blackberries and Palms get a lot of the attention as they were what executives used, but there were also PocketPC devices that were usually white label manufactured HTC devices that were branded after carriers or some other company like HP. They generally were much larger screened devices with a few buttons at the bottom. They were resistive touchscreens so using your fingers was pretty meh for responsiveness, and the UI was just not designed in a way that was pleasant to navigate. Picture a shrunk down desktop interface. I’d say the UI was the biggest shakeup that they did in the product category, followed by steadily raising the bar for hardware in a space that often would have cheap plastic components. Don’t get me wrong, I think too much glass and aluminum is actually poorer than something like kevlar especially for dents and dings, but it doesn’t look nearly as sexy.