Thanks so much for this — genuinely one of the most useful pieces of feedback I've gotten on this prototype. You called it exactly: the economy and raids were tuned to be forgiving early on and never really tightened up, so once you had a small stack of buildings there was nothing left pushing back.
I just pushed an update that:
- Raises the cost curve on buildings, tech, and era advancement so scaling up gets meaningfully more expensive
- Ramps raid strength much more aggressively from wave 2 onward (wave 1 is untouched, so the early game still feels fair)
- Makes losing a raid hurt more (higher resource loss, especially later on)
The goal is for the food/wood/stone/gold vs. defense vs. expansion decision to actually feel like a real decision a few waves in, instead of something you can steamroll. Would love to hear whether it lands better for you — thanks again, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for!