Hum, good idea, instead of saying "survive", tell the player to build more military units and fight.
Yes, I think this is important.
To clarify, yes, one of the reasons why you need to make sure units are fighting is because of the necessary-score goal, but that's not the ONLY reason. And I apologize for the wall of text here, but I like to provide detailed info when I'm trying to be helpful, heh.
Even if you are playing with the score-gating OFF, you're still going to need to keep up a constant output of units. Why is this? Simple.... because sooner or later, probably sooner.... the game is going to start throwing things at you. The most common one of these, and the one you'll be dealing with throughout the game, is bandits. Bandit keeps.... sort of an evil tower.... will appear in random spots on the map. How often this happens depends on the difficulty level, and somewhat on the map itself. But they'll be rather frequent. These guys are pretty dangerous; a bandit keep will just keep farting out new bandit units each turn (so long as nothing is standing on the keep, and bandits will always try to move off of it right away). In the Age of Man, bandit units will start at level 2, and they tend to have a bit higher stats than normal units of the same type.
Bandits can get out of control very quickly.... you really want to have a decent military production going BEFORE the first one shows up, because it can take some concentrated effort to knock them out, and you want enough units to do that. Not just because you want a high damage level VS the building, but if you have more units in the area, it's more likely that some of them will attack the building itself rather than attacking each other. If you've only got a couple of units over there, they may randomly decide to ignore the bandit and go after each other.
Also, bandit keeps are very much like defense towers.... they have TONS of HP. 30,000, to be precise. Normal military units? They can handle the bandits... but not the keep itself. This is one reason why you want siege units around, because they can do real damage to the building itself, and it's generally best to take out bandit keeps ASAP. If the bandits get out of control, it wont be long before they start wrecking your cities. Now, granted, in a normal game you're GOING to have lots of building destruction happen, and you'll WANT to have some of it happen... but the bandits will be smashing things you dont want smashed, and attacking cities that you dont want attacked yet, and generally making your job much, much harder, particularly considering how fast new bandits spawn. And bandits can and will produce siege units of their own for building destruction.... not a good thing for you.
So, you have to be strong enough to take these guys out, and that generally means getting military stuffs up and going ASAP when starting a new game. But it's not just the bandits... Woes, of which there are many types, can create entirely new threats that you might need a strong military to fight. For example, you might get one that, oh, I dont know, drops a pile of Ice Giants into the world on one side or other. Ice Giants are very powerful, and if the opposing side is not strong enough to handle them.... you're in trouble. There's alot of woes like this, and the woes get nastier as you go into each new Age.
So, that's some of the "motivation" for putting out more and more new units of all 3 types.... it is something you definitely need to do, regardless of the score thing. On lower difficulties, you can be much more passive about it, but yeah.... you get the idea.
I do think the tutorial needs to explain more of these concepts in detail. Telling the player, ok, you need to keep making units and keep both sides fighting.... and here's some examples of WHY you want to do this.
Anyway, it's good to see that you're liking the game! I had a look at some of your suggestions there, and alot of them do indeed make sense and seem like good ideas.
Here is a link:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/main_page.phpThat takes you to the bugtracker site, Mantis. Mantis is used to make it easy for the devs.... and the players/testers.... to keep of various issues with the game, which includes both bug reporting, or just writing up suggestions and ideas. If you have time, make an account here, and use the "report issue" button at the top to write up some of your suggestions and submit them to the developers! They'll read over those and take them into consideration, and one of the things that makes Arcen one of my favorite developers is that they'll read and respond to these QUICKLY. But yeah, Mantis is the best way to give them your ideas. Though they'll probably read through the topic here as well, but submitting the ideas into Mantis is always a good idea regardless.
Now, as far as your confusion with the buildings tabs, I'll try to explain a bit. For the resource and whatever tab, there's 2 rows. The top row is all buildings that directly produce resources. This includes very basic resources, such as wood and rock, all the way to advanced resources such as diamond or moonstone. The second row is buildings that provide the "finished" goods, the on-demand ones. None of these produce anything by themselves, they always rely on the resources produced by the things in the upper row. Hovering the mouse over any of these will give you info on which resources they can use. Some, such as the Butcher, can use multiple types. A little confusing to learn, I know, but that's the basic logic behind the menu there. For the OTHER building menu, the bottom row is just stuff that's locked at first.... that's really all there is to the logic there. Though some locked things are also in that top row.... that should perhaps be changed.
I agree completely with the bit you mention about Anno 2070.... that game also has rather complicated resource trees, but it does an amazing job of making it nice and clear as to what things connect to what other things.
One tip I can give you is related to resource importance. It took me awhile to figure out just WHAT I should be focusing on, and WHEN I should focus on it. Wood, rock, pigs, these three are the absolute basics. Almost everything is going to want these 3. Units looooooove bacon, and so need alot of pigs, while buildings.... and some other special things.... want tons and tons of wood and rock. These 3 resources are very important throughout the entire game. Next up, is Sheep, horses, wheat, and iron. Many units are dependant on these, but it differs from one unit to the next. Decide on which units you're going to want to be using, and then decide on how much of each you want to focus on. For example, if you're going to be using alot of siege units, well, those tend to want alot of bread.... so you'll want lots of wheat for them. Stuff like that. Next up: Clay, incense (Seers), and Diamond. Incense and diamond are required for most mythologicals, both units and tokens. You're going to need these. You might need LOTS of these. But these are harder to get than the other resources. The clay you'll need to create the Seer buildings.... and chances are you'll want a good number of Seers, so once you've gotten some of the basics down, and are producing military units, you'll wanna get some clay production going ASAP, so that you can get started on the Seers. Diamond is the same way.... get to it as soon as you can, once you've got the basics in place. The diamond mine building requires a small amount of steel to make, so you need at least a bit of iron to build these. And finally, last up is the Moonstone and Sunstone. Worry about these last.... get everything else in place before getting started on these. These are used only to power god tokens, so you wont actually use up any of these resources until the second age. The moonstone building needs a bit of steel to be built, while the sunstone one needs Jewelery (made from diamonds). These come last, but still, make sure you get a couple up before the second age hits, so you have some of each to work with once you have access to the gods and their tokens. These two are unusual; Moonstone is simply produced by it's building, but the Sunstone building takes some of the moonstone, and directly CONVERTS it into Sunstone.
It takes some experimentation to get a feel for how many of each building you really need at any given time, but one thing I can say is: Excess resources are NOT a bad thing. It's good to have extra resources stored away, as you never know when you suddenly might need lots of a particular one, to deal with situations that appear. Once you've unlocked the Trade building, you can have excess normal resources converted into the harder to get ones (diamond, moonstone, sunstone), so that's useful too.
Oh, and as for your question about how to know what building is going to produce what unit, it's all in the tooltip for the building. It should have the words "Next in queue" next to the unit that it is going to put out next. Generally, the build order goes from top to bottom; when one unit is done, the next one in the queue will be the one listed right below it, if that one can be built.
So, there, some advice, which hopefully will actually be somewhat potentially helpful maybe, as opposed to just being nonsensical and confusing. The resource-importance info is probably the most important thing I can think of, as that one is REALLY helpful to know, and very important particularly on higher difficulties, and the game doesnt really explain to you which are the most important and when/why.
