Sorry for being unclear, should have said "overlap" not "overlay".
What I meant is that this:
is easier to read than this:
For western readers it feels natural to look to the left for the beginning of a semiotic construct ("icon sentence"). But here looking to the left doesn't clarify the icon, you have to look right to see in in full. It's a minor thing, but why not choose the better option?
Ah, gotcha - thought that's what you meant, but the "overlay" bit threw me off.
Gave it a quick try - looking at an icon group, my eye naturally wants to move to the right. It does not want to stop and look at the left-most icon, there's almost a compulsion to keep the gaze moving to the right. The right side of a group feels like a much more comfortable stopping point. Further, overlapping icons like this, there's a "flow" to it, and it goes right-to-left if the first icon is on top. It feels quite uncomfortable moving my eye to the right over a group that's displayed like this.
I'm sure this is subjective even within western readers, to some degree, but having tried it... let's just say I've developed a lot more empathy for a right-to-left reader trying to adapt to left-to-write text and layouts. It actually felt nauseating and disorienting to look at the screen
Really weird how strong of a sensation that was - not super apparent looking at one group, but when you start to look at many groups laid out like that, yikes.
"Outgoing" strongly implies exports, which doesn't fit with "Demands".
Hmm. Does it?
Yes! It's almost a synonym in this context. Just google "outgoing commodities", you could replace most of the results with "exports".
In German the correct word instead of "Incoming" would clearly be "Zuwachs", which translates to "increment" (or "accretion"). Then the opposite would of course be "decrement" (or "diminution").
Thought about this for a while - funny how stuff like that can take up a bunch of time. Tried "Imports & Production" / "Exports & Consumption", but that feels awfully wordy and redundant, given that there are subtitles that say that anyway. I do see what you're saying though. It's more not liking any of the alternatives - they all have some downsides/undesirable connotations/etc. Going to keep this in mind in case something better comes along!
I fear that I'm being overly dense to even ask this question...alas. 
But all of these cool market supply/demand issues will be resolved by REAL fleets moving throughout the Sector right?
Fleets which will be carrying the desired supplies from the location with the surplus to the location with the demand?
Then if these fleets are assailed, the cargo recovered would naturally be the cargo which was being shipped due to this market system.
Anyways, sorry if that is old hat, but I didn't notice it being clearly laid out just now, maybe I overlooked it, or maybe I'm way off and this supply/demand chain will happen automagically.
It's a good question. The answer is both yes and no.
On the "no" side, the simulation doesn't require real fleets in order to work. If it did, it basically wouldn't work. Consider how fragile it would be if, say, something like a buff or nerf to Emergency Burn had the potential to wreck the economy, by making it so that pirates intercepted a lot more shipping.
It would also take an unreasonably high number of fleets to even send one fleet a month for every market pair that has some trades between them - and unless you have lots and lots of fleets for every such connection, the outcomes would be extremely volatile.
That's not necessarily bad by itself, but it'd be volatile in ways that are essentially random from the player's point of view. That one Tartessus-Sindria food fleet died halfway across the Sector? The food supply in Sindria takes a nosedive, but it's not something you could predict or even really figure out why it happened.
On the "yes" side, trade fleets that do spawn carry the right cargo, and their destruction may feed back into the simulation, just not to the point where the simulation requires them to do their thing.
