From time to time I see messages from new players in these forums wondering why they got a negative score for the month or why nothing is going on for weeks at a time in the game. Usually this is early in the game before they have built radars everywhere. Generally it boils down to the player not utilizing the graphs or not realizing they update at least every 30 minutes game time.
My suggestion is to highlight the country name or region name on the buttons on the left side of the ufo activity graph screens in some fashion such as underline, bold, or color change if the score for that country or region has changed in the last 30 minutes of geoscape time. The purpose of this is to indicate to the player that the aliens are doing something over there right now, maybe the player should send a craft over to investigate.
This doesn't provide any new information that the game didn't provide before. It just makes it easier for the player to recognize and use the information already provided.
Currently, it is entirely possible for the player to do this by hand by manually recording the the graph values for the current month and continually checking the graphs every 30 minutes to see if any changed. But actually doing this is quite tedious and detracts from the fun of the game.
I've seen similar requests from years ago in the suggestions thread for highlights to the geoscape globe, news ticker feeds, pop ups, etc for indicating alien activity, but evidently they were rejected or at least never implemented.
I'm proposing a less drastic change that keeps truer to the original game. If the player chooses not to use the graphs at all, he won't see any effect of this proposed change.
PS I know that zoom keys have been added to the graph screens at least in the extended version which makes it easier to see the actual score. But generally the player doesn't need the exact numbers; they can already see which regions have high activity from the graph. What is hard to see and is more useful is which graphs are currently changing.
