There is already a loadscreen and the clippy widget isn't good enough to enable at the moment. Perhaps a more direct loadscreen could be created for this situation in particular.
An icon is an interesting idea. I think the danger is in just adding another icon among the existing icons without teaching players what the icons means. Here is a bit of an extension of the idea:
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Say your total metal income is 35 and you have five caretakers assisting a factory (60 bp total).
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Currently the factories and caretakers will work at a bit over 50% speed, which is shown by less dense nano clouds.
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The new system could pause two of the caretakers completely and display an icon that looks like a "cancel" (like no ammo or no factory for a plate) over a metal i-beam. Then the remaining three caretakers and factory would work at near 100% speed (pulling 40 metal).
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The aim is to make it clear that the two extra caretakers are redundant on your current metal income, and that they would work if you had more metal income.
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I guess the system could even be expanded to work on energy income too, displaying a "no energy" cancel sign?
I think this would pretty effectively teach people when to stop building caretakers for a single factory, but it may not be a lesson that generalises to real situations. It isn't so simple once you have many factories or even just constructors in the field. Adding extra caretakers
does speed up production in my example above if you also have constructors, and everyone uses this as a basic priority system to some extent. I think it would be unintuitive to simply display an icon without also pausing the caretaker (making it stop constructing), but it is also nice to have all caretakers working. Experienced players would complain. Maybe someone can take the idea further and work out the issues.
