Hello!  I love this game, here is some feedback on things I would like to see improved for a final product.

First I should mention I got here from Randomise User, on Youtube.  After seeing the first minute or so of gameplay I bought a copy for myself as to not ‘spoil’ the ending before playing it .  I will recommend this game to my friends.

Here is what I noticed in order of me noticing it.

1. You need a ‘controls’ or ‘how to play’ menu, because maybe I’m blind but I never found a way to pause the game.  I did learn about right-click canceling an action, but not until I’d done it a number of times and thought it was a glitch.
2. I never built a small house as I felt too constrained for space, even with the obvious resource reduction.  That may be me and my play style.
3. I also never built a wall because towers seemed more effective- I’m sure you where planning to do more with that.
4. I would like shift+hover to tell me about new tiles as well (do bigger rocks mine faster, or last longer?)
5. Once during a bad pirate attack I lost several houses(workers), but my buildings continued to work.  I don’t think they should have.
6. Also, I didn’t fully understand the barracks and ended up building lots of them all over the map and nowhere near towers for a while, I’d suggest a ‘must be connected to tower’ prompt to save stupid people like me.
7. I felt that I should have been able to assign more resources at a time to my ship building.
8. On my first (successful) play through I felt defeating pirates became too easy during late game.  On my second play-through I felt they got too easy as early as mid-game.

Lastly, a suggestion.  I suggest the building of the ship be broken up somewhat, say you only add one resource at time until you build up ten resources, after which you add ten resources at a time, after which you add something like twenty-five at a time, and in the last stretch you add something like a hundred.  I say this because I felt it was annoying to be only adding one resource at a time when I had a hundred stock-piled, which caused me to put off building my ship until I had all three hundred resources at once.

I also suggest that the pirates could ‘read’ how completed your ship was (or how much a player has stock piled) and use that as input for how difficult encounters should be (how many ships spawn at once).

Lastly, the very first time a mine was depleted and the block vanished I panicked a little.  It was great.