Hey, fantastic feedback! I feel like you can see where I want to go with the game :) But I absolutely agree the game needs work. A big reason why I put the game out this early was to start getting feedback from players, smoothing the rough edges, and making sure the moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying. (When you design a game and already have perfect knowledge of how the systems work together, it's hard to see what is and what isn't obvious when someone only has partial or imperfect knowledge of those. New players, for example.)
I think I want the game to _eventually_ be difficult, but it doesn't need to be as hard at the beginning. There's a few knobs I can turn here - cheaper hero recruiting, more gold from lairs, cheaper trading, etc. I'll think on what I can do here.
Managing hero stress is definitely one of the core 'loops' of gameplay, and right now the player is a little short on ways to affect hero stress. (Building a teahouse or casting the "soothe" spell, I think, are mostly it. Heroes with a "Friends" relationship can also take a relaxing walk together, but that's not something that happens often.) There will be more ways to deal with this in the future, but I think this is one of the tricky design problems I'll have to solve. (The problem, briefly, is that the core loop of managing stress is both a long-term thing and only indirectly affected by player actions. Figuring out how to give good feedback on player actions is tough with those conditions.) I like your idea of a festival! One-time things that trade resources for a little breathing room are cool decisions to force the player to make :D
I'll think about ways to better highlight the default pay rates for different jobs. You can't throw too much text at a new player, or else it all blurs together and information retention plummets. Maybe adding a line to the bottom of the Build Screen could be a nice hint: "Build jobs pay 20 gold per job, set at the Guild Hall" or something like that.
The Explore job refers specifically to going to unexplored tiles, rather than trying to conquer new lairs or maintain already-conquered ones. When a hero goes Questing, they could take an Explore job, a Conquer job, or a Maintain Lair job (or a Kill Monster job, if you've created any of those). Unconquered lairs also have gold inside already, which acts as a sort of "base pay" for the job that can't be modified by the player. Heroes do have a "New Guild Optimism" mood modifier - I could see adding in something where their Wanderlust meter fills up more slowly when they are new. (Once Wanderlust is full, the hero wants to go out on a Quest next.) That would decrease the amount of questing and danger for the first couple of days.
Mana is used to cast spells, which must first be researched. There are three spells in place, but more planned for. Your comment has convinced me to make the Soothe spell available at the beginning. This gives all heroes a mood boost for a day.
I do plan to increase the total number of possible heroes (up to eight, ten, or twelve, not sure yet). I _currently_ have a restriction that you can only hire one hero of each type, though I've considered opening that up. If I do, I won't have to implement another class before increasing the max number of heroes. (Side note: heroes are cheaper if you have fewer employed.)
I plan to go pretty far with relationships. One of my long-term goals is to have crazy things like "necromancer / zombie" or "betrayer / betrayed" relationships. Shorter term, I'll be adding things like "dude, you just burned down my house" as negative relationship modifiers. If it burns to the ground, then that should be an automatic rivalry. (It's not all doom and gloom. Something like "neighbors" could provide a relationship bonus.)
One of three immediate problems that I'll be working on is what I'm calling the "coordination" problem. You might need three heroes to party up in order to take down a lair (like the Dark Tower). How should I try to get all these heroes to go questing at the same time? The spells Call Home and Call to Adventure can help with this party formation, but that's what I'd consider a "skilled" play (requiring knowledge of how the systems work). More automatically, I've tried to synchronize the sleep schedules for all heroes (even when a hero fills up their sleep need earlier). Then, all heroes are at least starting the day at the same time. More work to be done, though.
(The other big two problems are the "distance" problem, where heroes eventually spend most of the day wondering across the map as you expand outwards, and the "experience" problem, where heroes hired later don't have the benefit of easy early experience provided by exploring unknown tiles. I've got some ideas for these to try out, but I always love hearing more :)
Speed does reset to x1 when a hero is under attack. I could add some small effects to indicate this (maybe a small vignette effect when speed is increased?) and add a "zoom to combat" button to replace the "speed up" button when combat is occurring.
Really, this type of feedback is exactly what I was hoping for! Thanks for helping to make the game better :)
(On a small scheduling note, I've had to pivot focus to Neongarten in January to meet a publishing deadline. I hope to have a small update out by the end of the month (decreasing the difficulty), and a larger one in February.)