Labor benefits from planetary specialization is a central game concept, but recent conversations on the forums suggest that even advanced players may not intuit that labor is being lost by dividing labor between structures on a planet.

The separate concept of "efficiency" complicates things since efficiency below 100% also reduces planetary labor output, but "efficiency" is actually a metric of total labor pool reduction due to social order effects and recent redesignation.

For planets, the UI needs to communicate:

  • the current total labor output
  • the maximum possible labor output at current TL with 100% efficiency and all labor going to one structure
  • the portions of labor that are being "lost" to division between structures and to inefficiency.

Optionally:

  • the concept of "efficiency" should be renamed to something that better describes what it represents
  • rather than presenting the concept currently called "efficiency" as a percentage (of what, exactly?), present it as the amount of labor reduction that it incurs.