You're welcome, I'm one of those who finds these relaxing. I beg you to keep a short mode available, a ten minute bite is so, so nice for a sim.
There are enough gameplay branches just from this that it's entertaining. (I despise math but sometimes math is good to me, haha.)
I recommend looking into communities which were not driven by wealth accumulation, especially indigenous ones which managed entire environments to live *inside and alongside*, and well. Unless there was a war on, the city-states were abandoned because they just didn't work out in the long run. Kind of the antithesis of most sim games!
One really interesting feature is the fire in the center, which actually connects to a lot of ancient religions. Not the, ah, granola cottagecore set, but more that everything was a gift that was to be sacrificed first, and then partaken of. It's hard to describe? We tend not to have a frame-of-reference when we're so removed from food production. But it's pretty common in the old religions. And fire is a repeating theme there; I dunno if it was deliberate here, but I liked the echo! (Unfortunately, while there's many sources on those, do keep an eye out for the authoritarian types when digging through them. I mean, besides the personal harm, their injected 'philosophies' could also affect your gameplay criteria.
Another possible twist is are they nomadic? If they are, they're not building permanent structures. Now that would be ambitious, to have both available paths.
If you do want to up the ante on complexity, without making it an accumulation thing - I recommend trade. There was a lot more cooperation among different peoples than really expected. I still get excited when people find sea shells from thousands of miles away - the beads! I mean wow, the beads. Because that means extensive trade networks were totally normal, even among 'primitive' peoples. Cooperation was *normal*. (And besides, as I noted in some other sim games, without preservation methods, you couldn't hoard perishables. If we changed all the billionaires' legal tender to dried salmon and pemmican, they would not be keeping it that long.)
I'm no expert, btw just enthused.