Not perfect, but a new thing coming in the 1.09 update. This right-click window now shows you if there are any other factors influencing an effect, so here the effect of car usage on CO2 Emissions is dependent on the electric car transition as well as current car usage.
The chart used to be a mouseover thing. now you right click to bring it up instead, and it will list any other variables included in the effect. I know it doesn’t explain the exact relationship, but I think this is better than the current system, which is that they are hidden and the player has no clue whether I took things into account or not 
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Maybe you could, in, like, a ghostly transparent version of the line, show what it would be without any scaling applied
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Awesome! Do you expect this to be your last pass on this? Just thinking about the balance changes improvements here makes practical.
Well this will definitely go in, im not 100% sure its enough though, although finding a way to show how the linked effect works without just showing people the equation (which frankly may be a biff confusing to many casual players) is something I have not managed to get my head around just yet.
I wish I knew the structure of the source code a bit better, I can think of how I’d do it given a couple of different ways but idk how it actually works.
If you’re the sort who prefers to solve these kinds of problems without help though, I won’t ask further 
its not a code thing, just UI. The variable could be anywhere, so I’m not sure how best to reflect it. For example (made up data)
CO2Emissions * (GDP^4)*BusinessConfidence
Thats a totally valid equation for a link between any two objects (although its a bit wacky). In that example, there would be 3 extra variables t list (GDP, CO2Emissions and BusinessConfidence), but whats the best way to reflect their relationship to the actual effect?
Thats why Im leaving it cryptic for now and just saying “these 3 things have an impact here”
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It would perhaps be quite involved to make that work in every case, and with more complicated relations it wouldn’t be that much of a gain, but you could basically sweep the parameters to show the possible region given all effects plus, on top, the current implementation.
You could either choose to shade the thus generated region flatly (so you actually only need the outline and fill in the middle) or you could do some sort of heat/density map showing off what values would be easier to reach. While it’d give you more information, that could potentially be visually quite confusing though.
My preference is just for a “X from Y” (e.g. CO2 from Car Usage), where the green/red bar displayed for the policy/sim value (let’s call it ‘Z’) effects is the actual change in X given the current value of Y (possibly accounting for direct changes to Y from the corresponding value of Z).
I think going via graphs and so on (if it isn’t actually necessary to skirt around refactoring) just confuses things. It’s best for accessibility to be consistent in the way you present the information, imo.
