Show Resource Income mod

[causative]

This mod shows current income per minute for each resource (food, wood, stone, metal) in the top bar, replacing the gatherer counts. Includes gathered resources, trickle income, and trade income.

I've attached the mod to this post as a .zip. I also put it on mod.io, but that's pending approval.

 

Why do you want to see current income per minute? Well, suppose you're doing some unusual builds with hunting or fishing. The food income will directly show you how your build compares to a more typical farming build. It can help you anticipate when you're going to have too much food or too much wood soon. A good rule of thumb in some parts of the game is to keep wood income around 30% higher than food income, so you can build houses/farms/storehouses as well as citizens.

You can also use this mod to see directly how researching different technologies or building closer storehouses affects net gather rates. Or to decide how many barracks you need, to produce soldiers at the same rate as your income.

 

This mod is compatible with either standard a26 or the Community Mod. However, if you want to use it with the Community Mod you'll need to make sure this mod appears below the Community Mod in your mod list - otherwise the Community Mod will clobber some files needed for this.

 

A smooth and responsive estimate of income is obtained by taking a rate for every income source - every citizen chopping a tree or picking berries, every fishing boat and trader. The rate is the amount of income from each gatherer divided by the time it took for the gatherer to get that much income.

You might wonder, why bother with that, why not just take a rolling average of total resources harvested? The answer is that if the average is taken over too long a period - say, 30 seconds - then it won't be very responsive to short-term changes in income. If the time average is too short - say, 10 seconds - then it won't be smooth, swinging wildly up and down because of random differences in when each worker returns to the dropsite.

By instead summing up rates from each income source, we get the best of both worlds. Each gatherer's average rate is nearly constant over time, providing smoothness, and we can responsively detect when a gatherer starts or stops gathering. The time for the income estimate to respond to a gatherer starting or stopping is roughly the length of one gathering cycle.

 

showresourceincome.zip

Edited April 11, 2023 by causative
Forgot to include trickle income

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Screenshots can sell the mod more. 

[causative]

Well, it's just where the gatherer counts would be, only the numbers are bigger. Here's a screenshot of a replay. You can see that 1337rtslegend here has a food income over 1000/min from farms and berries and a wood income of only around 500/min. Indeed, fast forwarding the replay a minute, he ends up with 900 food he can't spend. So that's an example of how it could be useful to compare food income to wood income to anticipate a problem ahead of time.

The second picture is myself in a similar situation, with too many on berries giving an income over 1000, and less than half that income of wood. Sure enough, a minute later I have way too much food.

Edited April 11, 2023 by causative