I just played a long-ish session a few nights ago.
It seems to me that the tower that purifies a whole 'layer' further than what your survivors have done so far is immensely powerful and important. I can't imagine doing well in the game without it (and I'm on default difficulty). The town hall is also very powerful, but because it needs to be constantly activated to be useful, it has a much better chance of being destroyed before you get too many survivors out of it.
Compare these two to the pyramid. I'd love for it to stun Demonaica, but all it does it prevent spell casting for 3 turns (IIRC), which is not nearly enough to compete with the other structures.
Also, I can't figure out what Demonaica's range is (3 or 4?) and that makes him very unpredictable. I'd like to be able to see how far he can go in a turn.
I'm also not sure what use shelters (of different varieties) are. A survivor can be
a) powering an artifact of some sort (town hall, tower)
b) tending to a clinic
c) farming
d) clearing out impasses
e) building a factory or a clinic
so why would I want the survivor in a shelter? It's a waste of a resource. Is the shelter only there to improve the safety of survivors as they cross the continent from one useful thing to another?
What does it mean that forest shelters are ignored by Demonaica? Do most things attract Demonaica? How does that work?
Demonaica's range is exactly three. I'm pretty sure this was in the patch notes at some point relatively recently, and if I recall correctly it's three on every single difficulty? He was WAY too unpredictable before in terms of how far he could move, is what I think the reasoning was with that change. It's muuuuuuch better now. He's still quite unpredictable in terms of not knowing where he's going to target next, or what spell he'll use and just where he'll cast it on, and THAT is fine, but unpredictable move range was a nasty thing.
As for stuff for the strategic game, hmmm.....
Some things that were already mentioned, particularly the tutorial skip.... this though needs to include the bits that happen sometimes after wind-generator destruction. I've seen them a bazillion times already, dont need to see them with every restart. The tutorial skip option NEEDS to happen, that one just drives me crazy.
And also as mentioned already, a display of what areas have perks and what areas have been cleared of them. Particularly with all of the monsters in place, it's not uncommon that I will enter a cave, only to find that it's unusually risky with the things I have currently available, so I often figure "Ok, I'll come back to this cave when I have more perks or the next spell tier", but then it's very hard to remember just which one it was. Not to mention it would be a good idea to show which non-cave tiles have perks.... it originally took me forever to find out that farm tiles have perks in them as well, for example, so that could be very helpful for new players to see that at a glance.
Another one I just thought of: When Demonaica moves, his move is represented by glowing red squares so you can see exactly what he did. The monsters he summons though, use the same red color.... give them a different color, as it makes it easier to look at that way when they're close to each other. Not a very important thing, but it'd be nice to have.
Hmm..... what else.....
I do think the problems I'd been rambling about lately related to food and scrap balance pretty much were the only real issues I had with the strategy side.... I cant think of any other complaints. All of the different mechanics work well, there's LOTS of different types of tiles, and their locations in relation to other tiles really matters, and overall, pretty much every single decision has a real effect.... and alot of the time, it seems like there's no super-obvious answer. It's really coming along excellently.
