I actually like the art a lot. I don’t have any interest in playing the new official Civ games. The fancy graphics don’t do anything at all for me. They consume system resources and just end up being a distraction and a source of slowdown.

I’d much rather have a strategy game with a really nice, clean, polished UI and simple, legible graphics!

I think it's amazing how, despite not using AI for their art, so-called AAA games like Civilisation end up with that pasty cartoony look of a thousand cheap pay to win mobile games. I think the leader and advisor avatars in Civ 6 are ghastly.

More I think about this:

This is just a variation on "Why TF did it take so long to get dark mode on phones?"

Which is -- why not swappable assets, like in a lot of simpler games?

I like a game that respects my battery and my TDP goals.

Probably. But keeping in mind the mobile focus, a more judicious icon-style art design is important, and I'm not sure how good generative AI is at making stuff that's legible at small sizes. Also, the simplicity of the current art allowing the download to be only 21MB is an accomplishment.

Unless you’re talking about feature phones or Nokias before 2010, mobile games can have graphics just as stunning as AAA games and an effective canvas size of 720p or up — definitely not constrained to “icon-style art design”.

I'm not talking about technological restrictions; I'm well aware of the pixel counts and color depth of modern displays. They do not get rid of the design constraints of trying to make a usable interface with very high information density on a small screen.

A game like Unciv can't take the usual mobile UI cop-out of just hiding all the complexity behind a hamburger menu. It needs a large number of individually recognizable UI elements that are all significantly smaller than a thumbprint, because there are several pieces of information that need to be conveyed about each map tile the user can interact with. So a lot of the UI needs to be composed of icons or graphics designed under similar constraints. (And no, the fundamental design constraints and goals of icons are not the same as the file format limitations of early Windows .ICO files.)

Mobile games like Genshin Impact have comparatively little game state information and fewer discrete indicators that needs to be on-screen, so they can go all-out on the scenery and decorative visual effects. Unciv on a phone at its most zoomed-in has about as much physical screen area per map tile as Civ 5 on a laptop at its most zoomed-out; at normal playable zoom levels their respective UIs are working with very different amounts of screen real estate.

AI can make pixel art, too.

Pixel art as used today isn't quite the same thing as old-school icon design. Unciv doesn't need to operate with a restricted color palette and even on mobile has quite a few pixels to work with, but has to make UI elements easily recognizable and distinguishable at small physical sizes. I think the design constraints are probably most similar to early iOS and some early OS X icons, rather than the constraints of Win95 and 2d video game consoles (where all art—icons and otherwise—had very limited color and pixel counts).

Maybe, but honestly a big issue with a lot of art in projects like this is the lack of a coherent matching style between assets. I think you can get generative tools to get close to that, but at one point you get diminishing returns compared to just opening up Aseprite and doing the thing yourself.

I think the biggest cause of jank from the look of that project is also more due to UI stuff. Font choices, color pallettes, "1px solid white" borders. Maybe generative tools could provide a good way to investigate a better looking set of things though!