Construction build rate limit mode

Here's the idea:

Have a toggable build-speed mode for construction units/factories (could apply to other units that expend resources as well, like powered guns).
This "Build Speed" option would have two modes.
Default mode is "Full" (full build rate).
Secondary mode is "Conserve when Needed". This would limit build rate if resource usage is negative to maintain a non-negative economy. This would cause all units with this mode active to build at a slower rate (if needed) such that the resource usage doesn't stay negative if possible (tries to maintain a flat-line and does nothing when resource is positive). This lowered rate would be shared between all units in this mode and units would lower by a proportional share such that units with a higher build rate would still be building comparatively faster. If there were enough units on Full mode still building to make a non-negative economy impossible, then the units conserving would just pause building until a higher resource rate was available and then ramp up build rate accordingly until they were at full speed again. I would also indicate on the resource usage UI when conservation is active (not just toggled) somehow (maybe tint color of resource reserves bar or slowly flash it).

This would enable at least two behaviors:
1) Easy way to prevent economic crash while you figure out what the problem is and adjust your build strategy. (select all construction units and toggle)
2) Allows for priority in certain build projects outside of assigning more/less/better/worse engineers to the project. Example: you want your front-line turrets to complete faster, but are currently negative on metal intake and other engineers are too far away or otherwise occupied, so you assign your other units to the secondary mode. This way you don't have to pause/unpause your other projects and turrets still get done as fast as they can. (select engineer, select inverse, and toggle or select all construction units, deselect engineer, and toggle)

TL;DR: Simple toggle mode for construction units that helps prevent economy crashes and prioritizes certain build projects during resource drain

I think it might be simpler to control as a global conservation, implemented manually, then individual projects can be prioritized. To make that final push to the experimental to that has been discovered or with incoming enemy experimental.

But I don't know if I would value it over a simpler UI.

There are some good ideas in the OP's post, but I think we could benefit more from a comprehensive production UI.

One idea is to have an interface that displays all buildings currently under construction, and factories with their corresponding projects. You could adjust a slider to change their "production rate" of each building or factory which would default to 100%. Reducing the production rate would reduce the amount of resources the project under construction would consume. This would automatically manage any assisting engineers such that if you reduced the production rate of a factory to 80%, the factory and all assisting engineers would together build at 80%, which means that 80% of the maximum resources would be consumed. It would do the analogous thing for buildings under constructions by limiting the production rate of the engineers.

For buildings under construction, the "production rate setting" would be deleted after the building was completed. For factories, the production rate setting would persist across units that were being built. This could be changed, but it would be rather tedious to have to reset the rate every time a unit was finished in a factory.

The interface would also show how many resources each factory or building is currently consuming, and how much they have been consuming over the last several time durations. Displaying stats over time will normalize the varying resource consumption of factories alternating between expensive and cheap units. Having histograms displaying this data would really help advanced players manage their economy.

Interesting ideas:

sacrificiallamb's idea of a global conservation toggle would be nice to avoid forgetting what setting individual units are on. I mainly put forward the option of individual unit control since that is what exists in TA/SupCom.
An inverse option would be nice like this (an extension of sacrificiallamb's idea): have a global conservation toggle and then have a per-unit option to ignore the global conservation setting. This would ideally be able to be set on structures/units that are under construction as well (that would disappear once the structure is complete) so that you don't have to manually set all future assisting engineers.

coldboot's idea of more controls would be neat but wouldn't have the ability to net-netural on resource income without some serious slider fiddling. It also doesn't account for projects in a queue of a mobile construction unit (say you have a set of engineers assisting one engineer who is slowly building defenses around the perimeter of your base). It also sounds very taxing on players to manage that much data (especially histogram histories) and get a net positive result. I usually think in terms "I want this done as fast as I can while still keeping other projects from dying". But I do like the idea of saying I want the group building my defenses with x% priority and the group building my resources with x% priority (and being able to shift those when defense becomes more important). As long as it wouldn't require too much of interface clicking rather than map clicking.

If this option were included, I would likely play the game with this enabled all the time.

It might even be a useful option for newer players that aren't as good at managing their economy. I personally see myself using it mostly in cases of impending economic stall, but I could also see myself using it for long-running lower priority build projects fairly regularly. Maybe even all the time...

I could especially see myself using it in conjunction with my other proposed idea: a Graphical Economic Overlay.

Just trying to take streaming economy management to the next level.

Sound like it'd require a lot of screen real-estate in big games, which means you're probably talking some sort of separate window or dialog, adding another layer of depth to the UI.
Not to mention the micro of managing those sliders.

Why not just distil it down the a single 'Give Priority' action?
Such that with a single click everything else automatically throttles back to let whatever you've highlighted build at full rate.
You could multi-select if you want a few things to be prioritised.

That's much more along the lines of what I was thinking. Get 90% of the efficiency with 5% of the work (or something like that). Obviously not optimal, but in many cases good enough.
This is basically what I meant with the "Ignore Conservation" toggle (very similar in effect to give priority action).

The idea is to have a global toggle option for Resource Conservation that would slow or even stop build rates everywhere to prevent a negative resource rate. The "Ignore Conservation" / "Give Priority" toggle on individual builds or units would allow those to continue at full speed, effectively giving them special priority.

Construction priority here: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34222

Look at that implementation of this idea, it is tested and works. The big difference is three states so you can make a single construction important without having to toggle something everywhere else.

I didn't see much discussion on it in there so I will continue on here.

So, how does the UI indicate what priority an Engineer/Factory is running at?

It's a state toggle with three options. On the map you can get a feel for how fast something is building by looking at the density/intensity of the nano beam.

This reminded me of a ZK feature that I'll have to add to the thread at some point. When a certain key the states of all your units are drawn as little icons above their head. It makes it easy to spot units with unusual state settings without checking every unit.