simple enough idea

resource buildings - metal extractors, solars - have any m/e income floating above them in small but visible (black outlined for visibility) green text, eg, +1/0 for a mex

factories have their usage above them in red text, eg -10/-17

this way, at a glance you can see what your economy is doing and where stuff is going

widget

+1

I have a bit of time to kill, how about a heatmap of resource generation and a heatmap of usage? (no promises, but I kinda want to do a heatmap class in lua)

I dont know if a heatmap will really be readable for resource use.

It would be nicer if we could visualize this stuff without needing numbers though. The old nano particles probably offered a better form of visualization than the lua beams, but even then.

I suppose it wouldnt be any worse than ETA, in fact, id suggest tagging it on the end of the ETA widget.

Hmm this gave me an idea for Blade. When you press shift, it shows all commands. Maybe I could add energy/metal production and usage to it as well.

If you do this for CA, you probably dont want those numbers showing up all the time, because that would be kind of annoying. would be better if you could see them only when you hold down a key or something. Or that and a heatmap :D

You could improve some effects for example on pylons to improve this.

If you want to visualise numbers, i think its better to use DPS style numbers.
(It pops up and flies high to disappear at regular intervals)

I speak english. Text, not colours. Did anybody here play Saurbraten? Sauer was the first FPS I ever saw that just straight-up dumped text on the screen in 3D position - your chat-text appears over your head, as does your name, and any damage dealt or picked up appears on the screen. You always know exactly what kind of numbers are being thrown around. No ambiguity.

CA already has a lot of info on the GUI, so dreams of a "clean UI" has already sailed, so adding more numerical info would definitely be a good thing. Offhand I still don't remember how much E a Geo or a Fus generates.

25 and 35 energy respectively.

Interesting idea but with CA's nice round numbers and equal e/m/bp drain it doesn't really seem needed, and you can get all the information you need in the tooltip. Atm the difficult part of the economy is optimizing your pylon usage.

It needs visual indication and more clear rules when its better to attach more mexes and when to attach energy.