Overall it's good, though the UI is kinda hellish.
The notification is the worse of them all. I hope I don't need to explain this part.
There is a serious need of information details for each buildings. At this point I'm not even sure how much should I build each production buildings to make enough food. I mean since I don't know how much farm, mill, and bakery I'd need, it's impossible to make a well optimized town.
Another thing is, it seems to lack the serious impact when I'm constantly ran out of food and the overpopulated is indeed too far.
Many games in this genre would limited the refugees to some percentage + baseline over the current housing you have. So you'll essentially have some surplus refugees if you're tight on housing.
There shouldn't be the problem with excess refugees if we limited the numbers like this. Since in technical terms, they'd replacing each others. But in reality, you might need to have a serious rule if we want to dive into the rabbit holes which I'd hold the banner to welcome you :D
As for the food, it should be obvious. So I think it's more about the lack of development time than the negligence.
As of now, I don't even notice the impact for not mining the magic ore yet. Maybe it'd come later in the game. But since there is no obvious UI to show and the notification system seems to be rather bad. The is no emergence on this matter despite the emphasis about it.
I personally like the citybuilders. But after thousands of hours playing these games, I found it kinda lack the tangible objective.
Maybe adding some kind of goals similar to how Civ have. Maybe excluding world domination or have some kind of mechanics which allowed the world domination to happen. Well it's your choice to add whatever you need.
From what I learned so far. Tropico nearly got to the point that I think is great. There are various goals and unlimited play mode to choose from. Though the problem would be they're all just superficial goals.
So maybe you could make better game than Tropico one day?
:D