There is a lot to like here. It's rough around the edges but with a little work I think it could polish up into quite a gem. However I worry that it's going to be a slog as by the middle of age two which already had taken me several hours to get to, researches were starting to take upwards of an hour to achieve with the wonder research taking almost an entire day at the point I'm at. Are later researches going to keep scaling up longer and longer or will I eventually get some research building or something that shortens them? I been considering resetting for prestige even though the game has said I shouldn't need to.
Thanks for your interest!
I've made the game initially for the android and was intending to play it in relatively short bursts, so for me research was a thing to happen passively between play sessions. It shouldn't go much above 1-2 hours per research.
To speed it up you could save your army configuration, throw all of them into research to quickly finish all of it, then reload army comp and do a quick 10 minute meditate to retrain them, this would probably be the most optimal way to do it.
Alternatively you could prestige now and throw everything into research speed. This should net you about 2.5x permanent research speed (if you are in the middle of age 2).
I've found a bug that you may wanna work out. If you save a template with 1 of any/all troop types and if you make a large amount of that type, let it train, and then load the template setting the troop(s) back down to 1 it actually saves all of the training onto the single troop making it incredibly strong. This can be abused to make an army of single troops that each have a power level that you could only achieve normally if you devoted your entire economy to that single type of troop. Combined it eliminates the need to actually think of what type of military units you should be training as well as makes the military need almost no pop or resource upkeep once you have performed the bug on each troop you have access to.