Yep, right now the game is basically having the base set of buildings stripped back to kind of the bare essentials of core citybuilding. Most of the more extended concepts are being transitioned to a new data structure type that is more integrated with events, and more flexible in general.
The change could best be summed up as:
Prior: lots of things were shoving a few different numbers around.
Current: fewer things are shoving pretty much the same numbers around.
Upcoming: those same numbers will get shoved around, but then things also get extended to where there's a lot of thematic repercussions to choices you make, and more interesting choices, and more interesting buildings for dealing with those choices.
One good example is with, for instance, the old "let's make commerce and industry feel more different" suggestion. That can't really be done if they're just separate number systems. They'll feel basically the same, just two separate and complex things to learn that may as well be one. See metal and crystal in AI War.
Instead, making them feel different in this case means "let's make the knock-on effects of long term farming or fishing, and the opportunities that do or don't appear from that, different." That way it's going a lot further than just different loops of numbers.
Don't get me wrong, the number-moving stuff doesn't go away -- it's critical for a simulation of any depth. But there are more junction points coming up where a textual decision from you is inserted into the process. And that opens the door for more nuanced buildings without having to build entirely new feedback number loop systems to support each one (which isn't hard, but it is tedious to build and to play).
Anyhow, so yeah -- definitely feeling empty at the moment, but I'm actually kind of enjoying that because I'm stripping out everything I didn't already think was extremely good. And most of what has been stripped out is stuff that will make a reapperance in the next couple of weeks, just in a newer and more interesting fashion. Or some variant of the idea will show back up, anyhow.
With teleporters, there was some confusion with those based on some mantis reports. I could see where the confusion was coming from, and it was one of those things that I could not see a clean way to resolve. I left that alone for a while, just kind of marinating on the idea for well over a month IIRC, and then it hit me that the teleporters are really pretty pointless at this point. The scouting limitations are a lot more relevant and interesting (and the new version of scouting coming up is even better), and they accomplish the same goal as teleporters used to without the problems that teleporters had in terms of causing some awkwardness.
