Ah, no, not unwelcome at all -- sorry about the slow response, but it's rly good to see your take on it!
The most important thing right now is that the system can be intuited roughly and interacted with in a sort of pleasant way, so keeping the number of abstractly different interactions to a minimum is pretty important to me. That is, I want someone to be able to enter a zone and figure out a couple important rules and not have to worry about all the rest!
These vectors sound really interesting to me but I'm concerned about visibility, about too much complexity. Without giving away too much right off the bat, this isn't a system that's meant to remain interesting across an entire game, but to provide a locally interesting puzzle that can be solved without a ton of trouble. So I'll be making more areas with different rules, some more complex than this.... and probably some simpler!
I'm going to think more about what kind of vectors will be interesting to work with, because ultimately I do want to have wild & varied rulesets, which means I'm gonna need a lot of wild & varied rules.
for organization's sake:
- alter HP of nearby tiles
- alter GOLD REWARD/COST of nearby tiles (vis: show a 'stack of gold' or something indicating the reward level? could be interesting to maximize the gold, if it increases exponentially or something)
- change tile-type of nearby tiles*
- revive nearby empty tiles, filling them w/ a tile again
- give player gold / take player gold
- other player-targeting effects. stun them for a bit, take away hp, return hp?
- any of the above but with broader reach, or temporarily - e.g. boost all tiles' gold rewards by x 2, but only for 1 minute. stacking effect.
* I did try this one already, actually, and it was very very disorienting... but, I did have it happening pretty randomly. 'Spreading' is a good metaphor. HP was my first attempt at 'changing tile-type' in an intuitive way. Rather than gold -> bones -> water, I was doing big tree -> mid tree -> li'l tree. But I never got to the point of treating each HP-level as a completely different tile.