Hehe, the reverse engineering was inevitable xD
I guess it's good to know that the progression is more or less in line with what was observed and predicted (and assumed in some cases, without further testing :P).
I do like the idea of the soft locks, and less favorable mapgen in general, which would start to force more resource use and clever tactics. As is it was mostly a case of brute forcing every map emphasizing the low-danger route to make decent enough progress every time. I kept expecting it to suddenly start to get noticeably harder, but... that challenge never seemed to materialize!
Good work though, enjoyable for a 7drl :)