I'm on the fence regarding the graphics engine of my current game and hope for some advice.

This is an UI heavy strategy/rpg. Although the game is played on a (simple) 2D map, it is largely turn based and only vrey rudimentary animations occur.

Interaction mostly occurs by selecting actions on secondary screens. The UI isn't very complex in itself but comprise a large number of screens.

Due to the largely static gameplay I hope to add a bit of animation an particle effects to updates and other changes.

It is common to add lots of decoration to the UI for this type of games, but I have avoided that for a cleaner look.

Previously my games have been smaller and fairly simple. In these cases, the standard UI lib - with a few tweaks - have been enough, and for this project I also know that it's quite possible to use the normal UI lib to implement the game.

However, my fear is that in choosing a standard UI lib the types and amounts of effects will be affected, so that the UI ends upp avoiding the more extravagant features that I would not think twice before adding had I used a 2D graphics engine for games.

On the other hand, sticking to the UI framework would minimize power consumtion, and provide a lot of nice text components.

On the other hand, the game is fairly power hungry for other reasons, and there is minimal text input.

For the first version here it's for iOS - so UIKit vs Cocos2D/SpriteKit.