I know I’m a bit late, and of course I’m just some rando so my expectations are low, but this is what I want to see from the game.
I want to see a fantasy nation grow and confront challenges.
Start with a small farming community in the middle of a safe verdant plain. It grows, maybe faces a small goblin raid or two, but noting a bow and some wooden shields couldn’t solve. Then the player realizes (aka is nudged) that if they want a good supply of healing potions, they need a desert outpost and the rare herbs that grow there. A new town is formed, and traders go back and forth between the two towns. But there is a continuous and growing onlaught of lizards coming from the wastes. On to metal! A mining town high in the mountains with little in the way of places to grow. Trading moves from a ‘nice to have’ to a necessity for life. After a while the sleepy farming town has turned into a major hub and needs to be developed to form a capital. Should we use the limited metal and herbs to build a temple to train priests or a college that trains engineers? Perhaps this sequence ends with a newly discovered dungeon on the outskirts of your fledgling nation. Will you form an outpost and raise a team of adventurers to defeat the necromancer living beneath the haunted woods?
That’s a nice story, but to focus on the actual gameplay mechanisms that could bring it all together I think it would boil down to two central themes. Limits locally and interconnection globally. Right now all towns can do everything, which leads each town towards feeling generic after it progresses. Limiting a town based on the environment adds to that sense of uniqueness. To turn the downsides of those limits in to a sense of empowerment for the player, allow the towns to be connected in a real way. Need more food in your mountain mining village? Plant another field of corn in the farming town and see corn prices drop on the merchants that travel back and forth.
I’ve been wanting that game for a long time, and I think you guys really could deliver it.