Hey man! I really appreciate that you took your time to give me such elaborate feedback. I agree with a lot of stuff you have suggested.
1. Mainly, the baracks and deployment definitely need to be reworked. I will probably make soldiers a general pool, and let you deploy soldiers when selecting a Fort for faster gameplay.
2. Like addressed earlier, waves will be more frequent and a bit smaller in size.
3. This is one of the more tough ones. From my experience playing the game, it is quite easy to get stuck like you said. However, if you play effectively, this is not really a problem. This just means that it requires a lot of skill to manage a large kingdom, which was the point. It surely needs a bit of tweaking, but i want the game to be pretty hard to complete and master. Try to avoid placing settlements next to industries unless you have to, and use Taverns effectively so they boost all eight adjacent settlements. Also: Try to pause as much as possible if you find it hard to manage everything. It helps a lot!
///UI Stuff
1. I will make the controls more simple to find. This is easy to fix, i just haven't done it properly in the very first version of the game.
2. This is a great idea, it's mainly lack of UI space that has stopped this from being implemented. It can be fixed rather easy and will look into it.
3. This is just a design choice, since i do not want the healthbar to cover the tile sprites. I will look into alternatives.
4. The repair hut is currently designed so that you only need one. This might not be ideal, and there are a few solutions i'm thinking off. Perhaps add a range, so that repair huts only can repair in a certain area. Another alternative is to add a cool down on each repair, making it useful to have multiple ones when repairing a lot of tiles.
5. This will be implemented. Pressing escape should close the barack and repair hut screen, but i might have missed it in the code.
6. See (1).
7. I think i will add a key command to show the UI on all Forts and courtyards so you can easily see how many soldiers are in each. Having some visual indication for an empty fort is also a good idea.
///Feature suggestions
1. I thought about adding stockpiles, but i like the progression system more. Perhaps there should be one more milestone to increase the storage further.
2. This is the point of the courtyard, but it might not be enough. I will look into upgrade-able buildings.
3. This is not prioritized at the moment, but more defensive buildings will be added.
4. There will be more game modes in the feature, right now i'm thinking of a "creative mode" and an endless mode. Map sizes might vary in these modes.
I wish you the best of luck with your own indie game adventures. It's super fun!