There are a number of issues with the UI that can make it harder to tell what is going on and what to do about it.
- Debt, its sources, consequences, and how to deal with it are very poorly communicated to the player.
- How much EXACTLY is this depressing stock price? How much will paying it down increase?
- Where EXACTLY is the debt coming from? Very often you can look at the left board and not see anything in the red, yet somehow your debt is still going up.
- Opponent status is very obtusely communicated. Aside from the percentage warnings concerning buyout potential, it is often not terribly clear what anyone is doing, short of performing a building by building survey on the map. And this still doesn't give you data about patent research, optimization, etc (which should require some kind of espionage).
- Show the sales to the colony and the income from it on the sidebar, so it is clear exactly how much you are losing to it and how much you are gaining, without having to constantly mouse over the colony building on the map.
- Transportation delays are not well communicated. If you have a positive income number on the sidebar but aren't receiving resources, there is no good way to look at how long you have until the next shipment, how much that shipment is, etc. This inhibits planning and makes teleportation excessively valuable just as a way to remove uncertainty in your supply chain, regardless of the other benefits. Costs due to transportation are also not well communicated. This is especially bad when you are constantly shifting from surplus to buying the resource. This should be communicated when selecting the build space as well as continuously.
- Auto-buy information is not clearly communicated to the player. It should be clear at all times exactly what the rate of autobuy is and what it costs. The UI used for life support resource deficits would be good for this, though it would need to able to handle partial fulfillment (ie you make some but not enough).
- Where the income from power is going at any given time is not well communicated.
- It is not always easy to tell why your money is going down instead of up.
- UI for automatically selling resources needs to be implemented, otherwise the AI can always out-efficiency a human and it adds a needless APM test. This is especially noticeable when you are racing to buyout an opponent before they buyout you or when you are running a net-negative ton income due to autobuy and have to click sell obsessively to keep from shutting down.
- Set minimum price at which to sell
- Set minimum stockpile to maintain
- Toggle for what to do during shortages and surpluses (hold for manual intervention, sell at X above previous rate, etc).
- Sell everything button needed (possibly with toggles to exclude specific items).
- UI should give players information on what demolishing a building will do to their income. It should be very clear what the income will look like after demolition.
- Temporary ownership details due to mutiny are not obvious to the player
- If you gain a building, there in no good way to see how long you have it short of finding and clicking on the building on the map. This should be clearly communicated inside the captured building UI, so you don't queue up things that won't have time to finish and so you know how long you will have extra or fewer resources.
- Extra resources from captured buildings are not clearly delineated, instead being dumped into with the general production number. This can cause misbuilding as you overestimate a resource. These should be cleanly stated, by having them as a separate number on the UI from your own production.
- Your lost resource production should similarly be clearly shown so you don't build too much due to underestimating the resources.
- Radius of effect for power surge needs to be more effectively displayed. It has an annoying tendency to not spread at all or spread in a way you didn't anticipate.
- When a tile or building is being auctioned, it is often hard to see which specific one it is, as there is just a very small bit of text on it that can easily get lost in a busy area. A better indicator is needed.
- Displaying stock price for a single stock, when you can only buy either 1000 or 5000, is annoying. It would be easier to track how much money you need without mousing over constantly if the ticker displayed the total price for the next available block (1k or 5k) instead of the single unit price you will never use. Especially annoying for a 5-block buyout if the stock price is an odd number that is hard to multiply by 5 in your head.
- There has to be a better way to handle selling 1 or 100 of an item than the shift and ctrl keys. You end up wearing out your pinky holding shift almost all the time. Perhaps use rightclick for 100?
- There should be a UI reminder for Scientific players that the deposit size doesn't effect how much the building outputs.