Thanks for the kind words
And thanks for the earlier mantis feedback on the macrogame, etc. I was reaching a level of frustration with the sheer number of times I was being told over and over and over about the same problem (i.e. granite) but I'm certainly glad for any actual new concern, and that people care enough in general to tell us about this stuff.
By charging shards for all settlement building operations, you're ensuring that us OCD town managers get on our feet and exploring again. At the moment I ran out of "money" and realized I needed to swap hats and become an explorer again, the game suddenly really felt very "balanced."
Nowhere near balanced yet, but I think it is proceeding in the right direction.
Interesting that you should mention everything costing shards, as I'm currently redoing the intra-turn "time" resource (which is currently implemented in that each npc can do one action and work one building per turn) and I think that as a result it will make more sense to take the shard cost off of everything except end-turn, and bump that up accordingly (with other ways than exploration to "pay for" shards in the near future). We'll see.
One thing about the current situation that is heavily placeholder is that every settlement starts with nearly 1000 of each basic resource (including shards). That was really just something I had in for testing purposes to save time building stuff up to test other things, etc. I think having a relatively generous initial stockpile is a good idea to give people a bit of a cushion against inevitable early mistakes, but giving you 100 turns worth of shards isn't really what I'm intending overall
But will need to implement those other ways of getting shards (or saving on shard costs, anyhow) before cranking down those initial stockpiles.
