note to self; yes, got that.
less-is-more .. may be a useful inner counter to the notion that more options are better .. especially so if you invest some time into factoring out the many numeric factors to also give then hint and help text and make them set/load/nameable 'configs' one can play with. from there you can't just check your own work, the configs will become a foundation for settings, scenarios, flavors and all of that. i mostly mean 'get rid of the hardcoded bool/num values and let players alter/save/export/share settings in plain text so you can get some balancing help from outside.
as for building generation .. idc. what maters to me is discoverability and if that in part means auto-generated help and hints and way to many things to look at, cool. as long as they wind up having good names and filters (like tabs as filterselectors for buildings) that are easy to operate so one never has more than a full screen of choices, then sur, go .. but _that is an aspect of the game that's going to hinge on 'genes' that make up the existing buildings .. and there will be a core set with aggregates and params bound to your 'buildings'. so, it really doesn't seem to give you anything to autogen buildings atm imo. i'd not even consider 'evolving them' until they become issues, and they work fine, no? at least fine from my perspective -- of not having had more than 300 residents.
military.. no.. i got tired of turning thing on and off to juggle workers .. and without a 'save' _and a _save-as that one can use to game the game a little bit by branching experiments from some working base-game, i can't say that it worked for me, but i never upgraded more than 6 or 8 or so aspects of it either - and was so outgunned that i could barely ever use combat options
as for my tastes havng .. save/save-as (gamestate), save-settings(-as) (doctrines), save-parameters(-as) (now hardcoded) .. with loaders that show 'new, removed fields, outof bounds-values' generically so that one can know on-load what's new and changed in the game - could free you from having to write too many change-notes while keeping players informed and potentiate what you can do so the complexity wont crash down around you.
if you supported just [tab when there are buttons] [arrows when there are sequences] [space to dismiss/close] [enter to confirm] most practical kb concerns would 'go away'. but i can dream :-)
nice round, catch you maybe next week, looking forward to it.
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oh, just to be clear I only abstain from keyboard controls being 'required', which means any/all ideas for QoL keyboard shortcuts are still on the table as viable (and in theory could show up in settings eventually), I just want to avoid a scenario where certain functionality is gated behind keyboard and mandates tutorial instructions for what keys to press or w/e.
also the toggle workers on/off I consider a minor 'expoit', not really the intended mechanic (need to be able to salvage existing buildings at some point, but before you could permanently brick your own city by building too much of something so the disable toggle was added to prevent that). Disable is also somewhat placeholder, which shows from events disabling a building and you can just enable it again immediately. The actual disable mechanic is supposed to have a little cooldown wheel with dynamic duration, which would mitigate some of the awkward toggle behaviors, make various events more impactful, and allow traits/tech for recovery speeds.
anyway I have a backlog of things to sort through and some other projects starting to divide my attention, but I'll keep these things in mind along the way. At the very least, I would like to add favorites/hidden toggles/filters to the building list at some point, which I did not plan on adding before. I'll probably try to squeeze in a little heart outline and [x] to the building info cards somewhere and use something like the ruins filter to show/hide them (have to be able to show hidden in-case of misclick or mistake).