Hi - lots of questions there but as you say important to get right.

I think one of the areas worth considering is accessibility, whilst the small font size may be suitable for myself other players may want the option for a larger font. In that regard it is difficult to cater for all eventualities in the UI so I'd suggest opting for small, medium and large font sizes.

You touched on a couple of areas that i think can be definitely improved.

a. Background transparency is generally too much in most of the menus making the text very hard to read against the background base graphics. Transparency in menus is good but it shouldn't be at the detriment to the content, less is more in this regard.

b. Menu consistency - something I picked up on a few times and noticed again with the new mission and trade UI screens. You may be better off putting a cross top right instead of a cancel button tbh, most menu driven UIs I've played recently including Banished use a simple X to close a window. Most users would be familiar with that from other applications and it keeps things consistent.

c. Menu positioning - I'm fine with the main left hand panel menu but I do find the right hand menu a pain sometimes, especially for repairs and construction placement. I suspect having right click act as a cancel would remove the need to click to cancel on that menu. I'll watch my playstyle some more on this to see if the other items are needed.

d. Context sensitive menus shouldn't be ruled out, I'd love a right click construction menu for activating/deactivating or perhaps a shortcut key when a building is selected.

e. I found the sliders difficult to master in the new Mission UI because initially it wasn't obvious. Perhaps leaving a slider bar part moved away from the edge would make it more visually obvious, maybe a different blue colour to make the drag part stand out. If it would make it easier I could probably mock up something to explain what I mean.

I haven't tried the tutorial yet so I'll give that a go tonight (my bad I missed that was now active in the patch notes)

Overall I think the UI is really good, love the top resource icons, very clear and easy to see what you have at a glance. I like that the left hand menu slides away when not in use, perhaps you could add a vertical visible / hide bar to that menu so it could be hidden at the players discretion.

I personally prefer the smaller thinner font but appreciate that not all players would agree.

I also think the button sizes are about right.

If I think of any more I'll let you know, things that compliment the menus would be good like shortcut keys as already mentioned.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

two things I would like to add is the context sensitive stuff and tool tips, tool tips will be easier but I do think the active/de-active stuff shouldnt be hard either, I will have to look into other uses for context sensitive stuff and see what time and skill permits here.

As tot eh font size, the way that unity works makes this damn well hard, however I have been considering using a generic UI scale (with the text scaling the UI would have to scale too to make sure it all still fits in areas etc) something I found that banished did and solves a lot of problems, the issue is I will have to make sure that you cant go too big menus overlap each other and this is then dependent on the actual resolution the game is run at.

I like the idea on the slider being a different colour, will take a look into that.

The cross should be simple enough and I have started experimenting with the standard icons in the tutorial text being able to minimize the menu at will (though a recent test of this feature didnt work) same with the hiding of the left menu at will, clearing up the screen for general gameplay is always good, this might be harder to do as every menu that brings it back out will have to be re-worked to have it dependent on the users set state so cant promise anything here.

Any chance you could go into "but I do find the right hand menu a pain sometimes, especially for repairs and construction placement." a little more? is it the position, the style. difficulty to read or just their use in general? I will be looking into this soon as well as the bar chart in the bottom left, it covers those side buttons on smaller resolution screens.

If you have any suggestions as usual I am more than happy to hear them out.

I think that most of the issues here are fixed, I have now added a darker background so that in full daylight the bright spots from the game no longer make it difficult to read the text