Usability Suggestion: move economy configuration button to a more obvious location / clarify its location in documentation and tips.

+1 to moving it to the bottom bar.

It is were it is because it is per economy. That is, if you have two distinct and not connecting road networks, you have two economy options. Therefore it would not be logical to move it to the bottom - everything there only exists once.

Ahh this makes sense now! Maybe the real fix is to update the documentation to mention this fact.

Does an economy require a warehouse or HQ to be part of its network? If so, perhaps these buildings could be an alternative/additional location for the button.

Alternatively, I'm satisfied with updating any references to the 'configure economy menu' (such as general game tip 8) to say where it is.

No, an economy does not strictly require a warehouse - however the target quantities are looking at ware in warehouses IIRC to determine if another item should be produced or not - I am not sure if this is true though.

Still, the warehouse window is also not the most intuitive position for something that is generally true for the whole economy. How about moving this into the menu (the one currently called statistics or so) and infer from the current viewpoint which economy should be configured? I could imagine other options which are generally bound to an area - like military options or trade. Would people find this an intuitive position?

Forum discussion:

http://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/1121/

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Any news on this?

fixed in bzr rev. 6534 through two new game tips.
Maybe we could add a part to the tutorial to explain the functionality as well, but that would be worth a new bug report, so we can discuss, what should be included.

Nasenbaer: nice, though currently the tips won't be translatable since they haven't been added to the translation templates, would you mind doing so. Also I guess the title of this bug report should be updated to reflect the change, but I don't have a lot of good ideas.

I agree this should be better explained in a tutorial and I also remember someone talking about it at some point. Doesn't seem to be a bug report on it, though. (This might be where I shamelessly plug bug 1106132...)

Oh... I actually even thought about it - "don't forget to update the catalogues!" - there I am :-D
Thanks for pointing me to it Hans Joachim :).
The updated catalogues are in revision 6537

Released in build-18 rc1.