Graphical Economic Overlay

I like it. I like the idea in general. Numbers were definitely not good enough in SC. It was nice, but it was impossible to make heads or tails of your entire situation at a glance.

Potential improvement in lieu of (one-of) exterminans's points: Only show production or consumption at a time, not both. This allows the positives and negatives to not cancel each other out where it would be important to see. This applies to both designs (heatmap and scaled, grouped numbers).

For the heatmap, you could click the overlay button and toggle through four options: Show metal consumption, show energy consumption, show metal production, show metal consumption.

For the numerical overlay, you could show both metal and energy at the same time and therefore would only have two options: show production, show consumption.

This obviously has the disadvantage that you have to use multiple modes on the overlay, so if anyone has ideas on how to combine and avoid the positive-negative cancellation issue (while still maintaining simplicity), let's hear them.

I still contend that showing the relative production/consumption is more important that showing all 6 stats (absolute production, consumption, and rate for metal and energy) with consumption being even more important than production. Particularly so in an overlay largely designed to give an overview and ferret out choke-points.

Just a summary of some quick considerations for this feature:
- we care about resource consumption, production, and their relative balance
- we care about this information for enemy units also
- do we want to visualize all this information simultaneously? always, sometimes, or seldom?
- do we care about the actual geographic relationships of this data, or just what units the data refers to? always, sometimes, or seldom?
- do we care as much about where production is? what with no transport time or cost.. local areas don't need to be self-sufficient, etc

- it should adapt to the location you are looking at and the zoom level
- what is the relationship between zoom level and the amount of aggregation in the data, ie. if i want summarized information about a local area, what zoom levels am i forced to use to get that info; if i want detailed info, what zoom levels....
- viewports let us customize the data to be simultaneously-visualized and its detail level

- as an overlay, it should not obscure the view of the world too much
- toggleablility, customizablility
- even if there are no numbers shown by default, the numbers can be discovered somehow?

Instead of just a heat map, why not a height map (or both) empty space will generate a given height/be green, consumption is red valley and production is blue peak. This does require a not vertical camera though...

I more care about consumption, as that is where problems tend to be in analyzing your economy, although there is definite strategic value in showing where your production is so you know where to defend. Relative balance isn't as important because you have a global relative balance meter on the main UI already and local balance doesn't particularly matter since the economy is global.

We care, but we probably shouldn't be shown this information (at least by default without special intel units) since it would be a huge tactical advantage. (strike the hot places with high production and consumption, avoid the defenses, and you're done, more or less...)

I think we want to view the least amount of information that will get us what we are looking for fast. And I think a toggable overlay (like what was done in SupCom) would suffice.

I believe we do care about geographic relationships, since that's how people track what's going on in the world (this will get even more important with spherical maps and different planets). Admittedly, a list of top 5 resource hogs would be nice, but wouldn't usually get you nearly as far as fast - and you'd have a harder time reconnecting to what the unit was doing if you jumped to their position (say by clicking in a list). Since you have a larger bandwidth visually than picking things through a list, I favor a graphical overlay instead of a list. Eventually you'll deal with individual units, but the spatial sense shouldn't be disrupted for cohesiveness and ability to absorb an overview.

Certainly not as important as consumption, but still important to know how much of your production is located where in order to adequately defend if from attacks/rogue asteroids.

Much more important for consumption (because you're trying to find particular build projects) than production, but I think view-based adaptation would be nice as long as it wasn't too jarring when you zoom.

Using dynamic view viewports (like the minimap in SupCom), would help on these fronts if data was displayed based on zoom level (I can view a planet at a time or a continent at a time if I want). For a heatmap, this aggregation would only happen at extremely far zoom levels as compared to numerical/bar graph overlays due to the higher resolution.

Definitely want it toggleable. I'm not sure what all you would customize, but that's up for discussion as long as the default option is a simpler one. Might even consider doing a combo of the two proposed ideas here (heatmap and numerical/bar graph overlay) as options. Obviously implementation time is important, so I'd favor the heatmap option (for now) if it was one or the other. Of course the whole idea here is to spark ideas for the Uber game designers and programmers so they will even consider including such a feature regardless of implementation.

In regards to menchfrest's idea:

This would require you to zoom out and spin the planet a lot to see what is how high or pan a lot with at a lower zoom at a non-vertical angle , not to mention it would mess with your current understanding of the terrain (where there is terrain - not on gas giants).

This picture isn't colored, but try mapping this onto an already weird-shaped asteroid and you can see why I'm not sure this is a good idea:



There is a height map-heat map combo I've seen that has some height associated in a less obtrusive way, but still would have the issue of having to pan/spin the world a lot. It might help more in the case of a low -angle camera relative to the ground, though:



I still can't say I prefer this over a simple flat heatmap, but discussion is welcome.

Maybe there's a solution in radial bars?

By default, planets have two graphical rings around them. Mouse over one and it expands in thickness and shows the specific numbers. The blue bar representing your total amount of that resource. Green and red are what percentage of that resource you are gaining and losing per minute. (pls excuse the horrible photoshopping)



To find out what is spending resources, click on the red bar and a radial list of your buildings and engineers comes up, each with a small bar next to it representing a percentage of the total.

Interesting idea, something like this might work on a multi-planet view. An inter-planetary overview that is somewhat different than the other more planet-localized overviews that I and others here have been proposing could be useful. I believe the specifics could be improved, though.

I think the disparity between resources per minute and per second (the normal) would be slightly weird, not to mention the percentages not being obvious from a glance.

I'm not so sure about the list of top offenders by clicking on the ring would help too much, since it would be hard to identify them by very small pictures. But having an easy way to access such a list might come in handy, as long as selecting something from the list would allow the camera to pan and zoom quickly and nicely to the right area with the unit. Also, this method would need to count totals of resources being pumped into a unit from multiple units in the case of 20 engineers building a fusion reactor or repairing your commander (since each engineer only contributes a fraction of the total to the cost of repairing the commander, which is the activity that is taking the large percentage of the resources).

I'm not sure this would help over having a heatmap on the planet, but it could be a method that shows you at a glance what you are doing on a planet, particularly without spinning it. I would probably try and brainstorm better interactions than the tiny ring (small mouse target). Not to mention that this particular ring has its backside obscured by the planet itself.

I really like where this is going. Nice photoshop there cosmoray

It may be useful to organise the overlay into something like: Units(zoomed in), bases (orbital zoom) and planets (solar system zoom). Each one would have a very similar overlay and the context of the circular graph would be individual, base, or planet.

Ok, hello everyone and i have two images representing two sides of my idea.

On the first image you can see the general idea of coloring: in this "Economic overlay" mode buildings will be colored (and have a halo) depending on their consumption/production. Consumption goes from red to gray (depending on building's consumption percentage in the area) and production goes from green to gray. Gray buildings produce/consume nothing. And storages are blue. Numbers are optional, i think it will be nice to have this option in game settings.

On the second [very bad] image you can see what happens when you zoom out and the halos overlay. Red + green = yellow, so deep light yellow means that there is plenty of resources and they are balanced. And dim yellow means you have a small amount of balanced resources.

And maybe it's a good idea to draw the entire planet and trees/water in gray in this mode, because as you can see green buildings looks very much like trees.

And i don't think you'll need to see metal AND energy balances together, one type of resource at a time is totally ok for me. There may be two different keys for viewing an overlay of different resources. For example, hold F5 to see metal and F6 to see energy.

P.S. I'm sorry for these images, i'm not an artist or designer

First image:



Second image:

@tossha, The ideas sound interesting. One point that was brought up earlier was that combining resource production and consumption to "balance out" at higher zoom levels kind of kills the information you are looking for since the global economy means localized stability is pointless (what you want to know is where you are producing a lot and where you are consuming a lot so you can manage those, not a mix of the two).

I second your idea of "graying" out the main render when the overlay is active. Both your variation and a standard heatmap would greatly benefit (since they both rely on color).

But you WILL know it! If you see a bright red spot - there is a lot of consumption. Bright green spot - a lot of production. And a bright yellow spot - a lot of consumption AND a lot of production.

A reddish yellow spot means much of consumption and less production and so on.

So if you are looking for consumption then look at red and yellow spots, and for production look at green and yellow.

If we really must have a heatmap for this (and I think there are more effective ways to represent it) then you would need two pairs of colors- one for presence/absence of income, and one for presence/absence of production.

i.e.
Green: lots of income. Red: Low income.

Blue: lots of production. Orange: low production.

@tossha, I misunderstood you there on the color combining. It makes much more sense now. The colors combine instead of replace based on combined value. I assume that would lead to any weird color combinations if you do both metal and energy at once (hence the option to do them separately)?

@ledarsi, I'd love to hear your ideas about more effective ways of showing the information. Please share!

When zoomed out to view planets, a radial bar is an excellent solution, giving a rough idea of resourcing and production on a per-planet basis.

If indeed metal/energy/build time are bound together, then we don't necessarily need to represent them distinctly from a strategic view. A single composite number can represent the current effective production. If the player wants to get more information they can zoom in, and get details about metal, energy, and build power, and learn which one is presently the bottleneck.

If we wanted to get really fancy, and assuming the economy is sufficiently exponential that this makes sense, we could even represent production as a logarithmic scale. With a base of, say, 1 metal, and increasing by 1 for every factor of 2. (Could also be done with base 10 if desired, but production numbers would have to be LARGE to make that useful)

So, a planet with an effective production of 128 (meaning +128 metal/sec, +128 energy/sec, and 128 BP actively building) would have a "economy scale" of 7, because 2 to the 7th power is 128. Each time the planet's economy doubles, this economy number goes up by one.

This could also be done with separate values for resourcing and production, or even separated by resource. This is more complicated, but might be necessary if resources and industry are not correlated directly. I strongly support making them directly related, as it is much simpler, and there are only marginal gameplay gains from having them be differentiated.

Zooming into a particular planet, where the player is going to want to be able to locate and differentiate resourcing and production, a simple numerical display on each complex would be best. So from a high-altitude view, an entire base might have its production sum displayed as a single number, or an entire complex of energy producing structures give an aggregate number for how much energy they produce together, rather than having each structure display its own independently. If the player really wants to know how much each one produces individually, they can click on it (but ideally they should know based on its type).

Having an overlay to highlight uncapped resource spots makes a lot more sense to me than having an overlay to see spots you own, and is much simpler. A single color would represent uncapped metal, and a single other color representing uncapped energy spots. Could also highlight spots you own, but the player is normally less interested in those. If desired, different colors might be used for allies' capped spots, and maybe even one last distinct color for spots confirmed to be capped by the enemy.

Good ideas there ledarsi!

I have my doubts as to whether you could effectively link metal and energy in one concise number that people could easily relate back to what is happening in the game. I'm also not sure about the direct link between the two because usually Energy is much more plentiful than metal and is required in larger quantities in general except for certain units (at least in TA/SupCom). I can't see an effective way to boil that down to one number per planet. And the logarithmic scale only makes sense if we don't like looking at big numbers.

That said, there may be a way to numerically rate a planet's economy (potentially with a fancy ring bar). I think it would make sense to have a per-planet view show the total percent consumption and production deficit that that planet contains. For example, you have a current burn rate of metal at -100 split across 3 planets. Planet X using -80, and Planets Y & Z are using -10 each. Thus you would show an 80% consumption rate on planet X's overview (and do the same for energy as well as production). Showing an absolute scale gives me an idea of where my economy is along in game progress (e.g. at level 7, I probably should be building nukes), but doesn't help assess redistribution in the current economy very well.

The big problem I have with showing grouped numbers as opposed to a heat map is their relative visual importance. This has to do with quick scanning. It is going to take me longer to read a list of numbers than it would to identify things of a brighter color. And I have to read the entire sets of numbers each time they split when I zoom to find ones of interest. Using a heat map would make it trivial to identify these important points. This is why I suggested that if numbers were to be used, they have larger absolute numbers called out visually (either by size or color and brightness intensity). Physiologically, it takes more saccades (eye movements) to track down and read numbers than bright spots because to read the number it basically has to be in your fovea (center of the eye), whereas light intensity changes can be sensed by the periphery and thus focused on faster.

As for an overlay for uncapped resource spots (If I understand what you mean correctly): they already exists by default in SupCom's strategic zoom view (although somewhat limited in that spots that are claimed aren't listed anymore) and although incredibly helpful, doesn't address the problem I'm trying to address - which is to figure out what is going on in your own current economy quickly so you can reallocate resources appropriately (redistribute, stop or slow resource drain, etc.).