So after playing a few matches of the alpha I can already say that the resources at the top need to be enlarged and pronounced.  I've always found it to be much easier to have economy related information at the top of the screen like Sins of a Solar Empire and SupCom, the top center of the screen is empty and if you move the resources that are in the top right you can have much more room with a sleek display if you spread it along that top border.  I like the little blocks in the bars of the resources but they just need to be bigger and painted with a more neon color to make them pop and help the player quickly glance and get a feel for their economy.  The research button should also be moved up top because of how important it is to the progression of the player instead of having it in actions, same with global abilities.

That's my current opinion the the UI as of now just because I know you guys are gonna change this whole thing in the next few months and as I see more of what you guys are gearing the game towards I can give better feedback on what you need to see in the UI.

So far, I get the vibe that this game is going to be geared more toward planetary domination, and what I think with that is sprawling industry and resource excavation as far as an economy in that type of war game is concerned.  Since I'm a SupCom veteran I'm obviously biased on how to collect resources as opposed to Starcraft or Company of Heros players but I'll chip in my two cents regardless.  I think the time has passed where a single resource 'node' still has to be present in a modern RTS, you can build on it or you cant, there's not much tactical depth to that, what I was thinking given this games scope is actually a resource area much like in cities skylines, its a blob with high resources in the middle with less and less the farther you get away from the center.  I believe the scope of this game could really benefit from a type of resource extraction that isn't pick and place, its tedious to the player now a days and with the complexity of modern AI, why not designate the areas we want exploited with a paint brush tool much like in cities skylines so we as a a player can define how we want our industry.  This takes place in the far future and it seems like we now build using nanites and drones, well, instead of having an engineers that has to go to each individual structure to build it, why not have the generator path we currently have to secure be the key to expanding a 'self growing base', tons of structures that generate out from the base and generator nodes we capture, these general structures will automatically expand resource storage and a production multiplier, when you take over a node there will be these blob type resource densities that you can see and take a paintbrush tool to define how much of that area you want built up by your swarm of automated builders.  The more you designate to build however would slow down everything building at once, so you could define a whole resource area to exploit but your automated expansion of general building would slow down so you'd have to balance what all you want your economy focused on. Mainly this idea comes on because you have a lot of empty space on the map like grassland and hills and I think it would be cool to see this planetary domination game where is isn't two bases with a few structures fighting but entire economies and cities of production giving the feeling of an actual war, just seeing those dreadnoughts skirmishing across suburbs of factories would give a huge sense of awe and really set the game apart from others in its genre.

I am aware that you don't want us testers to try and demand that this game be like our other favorite games and that's not at all what I'm trying to do but I like to think I kind of know where you want to take this game and wanted to give an interesting idea.

Also, I am mainly just talking to the devs with this post but if anybody else wants to disagree/agree/give other suggestions go right on ahead.