What do the colored bars on the money and army displays on the upper right represent? Blue for the army and yellowish for the money display. Does anything interesting happen when the bars fill up?

nope. It is a useless graphical feature

Some people have put meaning to this ... think the size of the bar relates to the ratio of armies available relative to the largest territory that's visible? And money available relative to largest available purchase? Something like that...?

in other words: useless

@Krinid

From what I've seen, I don't think that's what the bars represent, or at least intended to represent. They don't line up with those theories.

I think Fizzer had an idea of applying limits to the amount of money and armies you can hold, expandable via buildings, like banks for the money and barracks for the armies. I think he started to make some progress towards this, but either scrapped it or put it in his backlog, and left the bars as what we're seeing.

I'm not sure, whether I would like this "feature" or not. It's definitely a nice twist, but isn't the max idle time a decent limiter already? Though, they would work slightly differently.

Regardless of what they represent either actually or intended, I ignore the bars so completely that I forgot that were there until you mentioned them again. I look at the text/numbers and that's it.

I thought they were just to highlight and disguise between money and armies. I didn't even realize that they changed in size.

They help visualize movement. For example when you buy an upgrade, the distance they shoot lets you get a feeling for what percentage you spent without having to stop and analyze the numbers.

@Fizzer

That seems to make sense, but I think some of the confusion as to what the bars represent is also when they fill up, then instantly drop back down to like the 2/3 point or thereabouts. If the points where the bars fill up then drop are suppose to represent some sort of milestones, I could see that.

Maybe these could have more meaning with some form of reward system, unlockable via an advancement in phase 2 or 3 for about 2500AP. Some of the milestone rewards could be things like: reach 500k armies held at any time in your current level, and your cheapest army camp gets upgraded for free, but it's a timed upgrade, similar to hospitals, with the amount of upgrade time dictated by the cost and your monetary income at that time, cost/monetary income; or reach 10B total money collected in your current level, and your strongest source of money income on the board, territory or bonus, earns double for 2 in-game mins. If more than one are the strongest, one gets picked at random. One could also be: reach 50B total armies collected and 100B total money collected in your current level, and 1 random army camp and 1 random mine each get supercharged x3, meaning both earn triple, for 5 in-game mins.

Of course if you want to implement this, how it's implemented is entirely up to you, whether you want it to be an advancement or just a feature, and what the rewards would be at certain milestones.

The problem with using the bars for any means of visualization is that most of the time the bars are too short to even be properly visible. because they are obstructed by the text they visualize. If they only span the area of my income per second for example, even the yellow bar on black background (more so the blue bar on black) is hard to see at all. Only if they extend beyond the text, you can really see them, but the text is almost as wide as the area the bar can grow into, so unless you are very early in a level, you only really see the bar at all, if it is almost full. And then, only a short period of time because, as Splat said, the bars "wrap around" and start from small again.