As per comment since steam is blocked for you as I understand it;

Okay, so after I've had a moment to sleep I've got a more in depth review of the new update mechanics compared to what I had previously written under guardian1368's post.

Prior to the update, how I interacted with the kingdom builder at least, was that is was a fun little minigame that I did every now and then when I wanted to try and progress it. Because it was turn based and gold based, As long as you had the resources, you could force through quite a bit of 'progress' with the kingdom building, especially if you are someone who uses the cheat system to skip through time grinding (realistically, it's either grind mobs for gold or auto give gold, and personally I don't enjoy grinding too much)

I'm not going to say the kingdom building in the old system was perfect, but I will say it was a cool little sub game within the context of the overall game; players could engage with it when they wanted to, and that's cool.

New system:
Now this is based on first impressions, so maybe there's a bit of knee jerk reactions as it were but from the ~1 hr I had of the new system, I have the following feedback;

Unlike previously where you could engage with the kingdom building at your whim, and quickly progress through it, now you have to sit through and wait for items to finish. As I understand it, the intended goal is to make the kingdom building more organic and slowly progress over time instead of quickly completing large chunks of it at a time, but now you HAVE TO SIT ON THE KINGDOM SCREEN FOR EXTENDED PERIODS OF TIME TO GET ANYTHING DONE.

There's a couple reasons for this, in my opinion, and I'll go through them one by one.
1) Timers are too short. When the intended timer is sub 1 minute, there's not really enough time to go do something else and come back.
2) Timer's are for one instance of a resource at a time only.
This, when combined with (1), means that if you want to do any appreciable amount of kingdom building, you are sitting at the kingdom screen for extended periods of time waiting for the resources to finish queuing so you can do what you actually want to do; finish building your kingdom.
Now this in of itself is not a bad thing, if the game is built around/for that- I have a LOT of hours in games like CK2, CK3, and Stellaris, so I can safely say i'm the type of person who actually doesn't mind sitting around. But for how real time kingdom building is implemented, there's another issue;
3) There's a ♥♥♥♥ ton of micro managing. (2 bleeds into this in retrospect)
Not only do you have a small time frame for each resource, you also need to click through 3-4 menus for each resource, and then go through a bunch of intermediaries to get to the resources you actually need; each resource needs to be queued up individually, and because there's a hard limit to resources stored, you can't actually just set up your resources and forget, you have to actually plan out every single build path to make sure you're not wasting time/resources in the queue. This would not be bad in a pure RTS. This is not a pure RTS, this is, at least in my expectations, a RPG which has kingdom building elements.

All of this micromanaging combined with 1 and 2 means, at least in my experience, you are sitting on the kingdom building screen for a long period of time if you want to progress anywhere with kingdom building, otherwise there's literally no progress compared to the turns system previously implemented, and further, this progress takes quite a long time real time. There's no real reason for the real time delay if there's as much micro-managing as there is here, as combined going through every single menu on a RPG maker interface is EXTREMELY tedious.

So whereas before I would go to the kingdom screen every once in a while and bang out a bunch of progress with the turn based system whenever I was in the mood to do it, because of the short time frames and intense micromanaging/intermediaries with the new system.. I'd have to sit there and wait with the game in idle to get anywhere worth a damn in the kingdom building. The reputation system is borked in the sense that with 3-6 units of a given good needed, and each of those goods needing 1-2 intermediaries at times, it takes a very long time to reputation to build up, and because reputation decays in real time, there's no way you're getting anywhere with it unless you're actively sitting at the kingdom screen..
Which sucks ass, because this is a game built in RPG maker, the screen/ui has limitations, and those limitations are very strongly felt, so getting through the screens takes a LONG time, and then waiting for the items to be done takes a LONG time, and honestly, I kind of don't want to engage with the new kingdom system at ALL anymore, which is a shame because ostensibly this is supposed to be a h-rpg game with kingdom building elements- and I think the game largely succeeded at that before the real time patch.

This is to say nothing of the vanguard system which, while good for a rpg maker game, is again tedious because of the limitations of the system.


Personal opinions of what could be done:
Assuming that the real time system is a dead set must have, I would recommend the following;
1) Get rid of the intermediaries between resources.
Navigating a bunch of menus is extremely tedious without a good UI. RPG maker for navigating menus is pretty bad(in my opinion). Reducing intermediaries really 'speeds up' the process of dealing with some of the new issues in the real time system.

It's a pain in the ass going
1 iron + 1 other resource -> research tools
1 iron + 1 other resource-> construction tools
research + construction- > building knowledge
Building knowledge-> actual research you want.

Assuming the intended purpose of the real time system is to incentivize players going to the kingdom screen every once in a while, it makes a lot more sense to simply have 2 iron + resource + resource -> actual research you want, with an extended timer for an abstraction of things getting processed.

I don't need to see the minutiae of things getting processed and done; I'd like to see the end result generally speaking.
Resources could be simplified into;
1) Minerals (Stone value of 1, iron value of 2, coal value of 2, steel value of 4, mithril value of 6.. etc, just as an example)
2) Wood (seems hard coded into the system)
3) Horticultural goods (All the 'raw' plant food items, grains, potatoes, grapes, hops etc)
4) Husbandry goods (all the 'raw' animal items; meat, eggs, milk, etc)

These could then be converted into whatever finished good is needed. There's really no need for nails, pick axes, cloth, etc etc. with the real time system, that just adds a lot of extra clicks to get to the same result

The idea here is to make it so player's don't have to worry about checking in to convert intermediaries all the damn time.

2) Make base resource generation automatic and remove the storage limits.

At present, because base resource generation is singular and storage is limited, it feels like to actually progress with kingdom building, you have to sit on the kingdom building screen for extended periods of time. This is not fun in a rpg maker game.
Removing the storage limits and making resource generation automatic increases the resources the game needs to run, but it also means that players have a bit more freedom in checking in on the kingdom once in a while as opposed to needing to sit on the kingdom screen to try and make sure they have all the needed resources to finally finish the items.
The 'removal' of storage limits is to simply make it such that player's don't feel punished if they don't check on the kingdom for a while- though a very high storage limit might be needed instead.

The idea here, is that real time, as the kingdom is more developed, more resources are generated automatically, such that when the player next checks in on their kingdom, they have the flexibility to queue up the next set of improvements/constructions they're looking for.

3) Rush feature using budget
For the players who want to be done with the system/get through it, I think being able to rush timers with budget is appropriate. As there is already a gold-> budget system and players have an inbuilt gold generation to skip grinding if they want to, I think this would be fair to have.


*Ideally (in my opinion of course) With a real time system, I think you'd want players to check in on the kingdom every 30 mins-hour (maybe even longer), and so you'd want automatic resource generation up to its cap, that players could then spend on whatever researches/constructions they're looking for without having to worry about whatever intermediary they're missing.

At present, the kingdom building is literally.. sitting on the kingdom screen for an extended period of time, doing something else while you check in to make sure you have the queues complete, and honestly, it's not as enjoyable as simply auto skipping turns with gold in the old turn based system.

I think that's a long enough post for now and I'm happy to discuss anything I've mentioned. But I do think the new system needs a lot of tweaks to be enjoyable, as currently I think it's a step back from the old system.