Sure, the game shows progress meters, but it's sometimes hard to see whether they quite reach the tick mark. And sure, the game tells me the number of turns it would take to finish the item *if* I left the queue unchanged, but often what I want to know is whether I can shuffle an item lower down, give it partial progress past a tick mark this turn, and then shuffle it up to complete it on schedule, or whether shuffling it down would instead not quite reach the tick mark and hence would make it impossible to complete it as fast as I'd like. I also know that the research queue tooltips tell you the amount of research that has been done, so I can work out the math to figure out whether I'll pass a tick, but that's a big pain, and it's even more of a pain trying to do this with the new percentage-based progress in the production queue.
This challenge always arose in deciding which item to put at the very bottom of the active queue to receive partial progress within each supply zone. It also arises more often now that the Stockpile system effectively places a second threshold where an item might receive partial progress, depending upon whether it is situated high enough to take advantage of the Stockpile, or low enough that other items will hog the available Stockpile this turn instead.
It would make my life much easier if more background-color shadings were added to these queues, rather than the mere two tones that are used now (grey = making some progress this turn, dark grey = no progress at all this turn). Here's what I would propose:
- Dark Grey: still means making no progress this turn.
- Reddish grey: means making progress this turn, but not enough to get past a tick mark.
- Yellowish grey: means making enough progress this turn to pass a tick mark
- Greenish grey: means completing this turn (also indicated by the white progress bar completing though that's hard to distinguish from near-completion, and by the "1 turn" display).
I'd make these shades fairly similiar to the current greys, so this shouldn't affect the overall aesthetic very much, but will make highly relevant information easily available to people who want it.