I have been reading the feedback, and I notice there is some question about the first person to lay down military getting an advantage, making retaliation more difficult as well as placing buildings.
I have some ideas, and I want to know if they fit into this kind of game.
1) make military building construction obvious and take a modifiable amount of time to build. If you notice your opponent is building military, you also have the option to place buildings and effect potential modifiers for each. Maybe you build hacking to slow down the construction of the building. Maybe you support hippie protests during the construction. Positive modifiers could be hiring engineer contractors. Or maybe modifiers that anticipate/counter enemy modifiers to your military.
1b) implement rock paper scissors military buildings, allowing you to place counter buildings, forcing your enemy to place counters to your counters. The rock paper scissors mechanic could actually be based on where you build it, such as land, underground, or air.
1c) create a military queue in a military building, where you can reorder and add attack types that act in sequence. For example, you could order airstrike, ground strike, underground counter or any combination thereof, and have those rolled against your enemy also creating their queue. This would create some depth options. Think along the lines of mixing phases from endless space with tactical games.
1d) create tactical priority queue along the lines of Final Fantasy 12/Dragon age origins.
1e) use high HP, low utility, low-cost junk buildings to attract fire while you build other military. Can you cheese in this game? has anyone tried?
======================
Second question, about the pollution/meals/population modifiers. Is a possible to bank any of the stats? Is there any way to make these modifiers carry over bank style? For example, building up meals and then tanking crop production in favor of skyrocketing another variable to hit the AI where it hurts.
========
Third question, how much of the statistics are RNG? Do all the buildings give you a deterministic amount of such and such? Where do you feel the dungeon master comes in?