Hey!
Lovely little proof of concept. I like the idea of building a road network in a game about movement costs and exploration. It also looks lovely, and I find the little settlements versions of each tile very satisfying.
If and when you guys get back to this, I'd like to provide three points of focus.
1. A long-term objective beyond the little story going on. Do we want to link up all the towns in this region, then move on to the next and start again?
2. Since the road network seems to be your core novelty here, I think you should focus on connecting stuff up for different reasons.
"If we get some steel we can bridge this canyon separating the region and reach the other towns."
"x settlement has the Old World know-how to make steel but we need to find coal and connect it with a road."
3. I don't like random events. Randomly having stuff happen to you can be more annoying than interesting. Instead finding little Points Of Interest across the map that trigger certain kinds of events could be far more fun and encourage exploration. Because the player gets to say "oh what's that? Let me go see what happens". Like some people with a donkey, or a campfire, etc. Just gives the player control of when stuff happens, and lets them vaguely guess at what could happen while making the game about exploration encourage exploration.
Either way it's quite a neat foundation for something. I hope you guys fiddle with it more.
Luke