Tutorials rock! In my oppionion, they are just as good as any college class you take, but at your own pace.
Stormy, keep in mind that the tutorials that I have pointed you toward are good ones not to mention that various things that I have explained to you myself. I've seen a thousand and one tutorials and I'd say that most of the ones on the 'net are crap and end up leading you in a completely different direction than was originally intended.
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That said, as far as ration points are concerend, that's something that could be added in a MOD of sorts for the game. Micromanagement on the level of 'The Sims' as ZZJ stated takes away from what a Real Time Strategy game is.
The list of colonists names as Levi had pointed out would also be awesome for a MOD to the game (to change it into something else) but otherwise it would become very bulky very fast and can cause numerous problems for people on slower machines (e.g., if you have 6 players all with a human population of let's say 500 you'd have 3000 colonists to keep track of: Their health, their RP, their current state (dead/alive), weather they're a scientest, worker, child, teacher, etc., their lifespan, their current age, hunger levels, etc. and that's not to mention the names of all of them). a list of 3000 colonists with ALL of those stats takes a LONG time to calculate considering the real-time nature of Outpost 3. It's truelly not feasible at this time for most home computers, especially if the global population reaches 10000 or more. Plus, it's not as simple as just running through the list of the colonists. Each player has his own population with various conditions in the colony (food production, morale, etc.). All of these things would need to be considered while determining the new state of each colonist per tick/count/turn/whatever.
Long story-short: Unless a MOD for OP3 is turn-based like OP1 or Civilization, individual stats for a population doesn't work.
Continuing on, I think that the Economy mode for OP3's Colony Games would be pretty neat but I believe whole-heartedly that unless a mission specifically centers around a commercial theme (colony or campaign alike), the user should have FULL control over wether or not an Economy is even looked at in-game. I personally would LOVE to have an economic center for my colony if I'm playing a long Colony Game (picture it, SimCity 5000) while at the same time having to deal with Morale, Disasters and Enemies.
I think this covers all that I was thinking about...