building list reduction by replacement buildings

The current list of buildings gets very long in the later ages in newly settled and conquered towns with a lot of cheap buildings you build always however you dont want new cities to be instantly build with all buildings for balance reasons.

A way to reduce this is by adding 2 new buildings at one or more points in the tech tree, the first one is a expense building replacing a lot of older ones that that is cheaper to make the more buildings it replaces you have(i seen this done for the village hall building line) and a auto build building that is made if you do not have the expensive replacement building a few rows later in the tech tree that replaces them as well but provides less happiness, hammers health ect so you want to replace it with the expensive version.

You hit on a major problem, which is that by the Industrial Era or so, build lists get unwieldy. For one thing, it seems rather silly to be thinking about building Bug Catchers and Apiaries alongside Manufacturing Plants and Bioinformatic Labs. For another thing, the huge buildings lists cause major slowdown on the city screen (for my system, at least) and lots of scrolling to find the desired building, which I find to be an inconvenience. It also creates the bizarre situation where building a bunch of Ancient Era buildings will be more effective, per hammer, than a single Modern building. Additionally, by the Transhuman Era, there is an abundance of buildings for health, happiness, crime and pollution reduction, and culture, making many of the late buildings redundant.

Thunderbrd and I talked about some late-game building consolidation a while ago. Out of it came a proposal similar to yours, except buildings would simply go obsolete rather than be replaced by something lesser. Your proposal is a bit more complicated, though it could cushion the shock of many old buildings going away at once and allow new cities built late in the game to get up and running faster.

I did a small amount of that in my space colonization modmod, using some factories and other buildings late in the game to replace a bunch of older buildings. It is only a small step to solving the problem. The main challenge is that it is a big task, and I think that in order to do it right, it must be done comprehensively and systematically, not in a piecemeal manner. There seems to be a general agreement that something needs to be done, but I don't know if there is a consensus on what exactly.

One thing that might be very helpful is a small module that does this for a few buildings, as a proof of concept.

Sounds cool. But don't forget that a buildings are often prerequisites for other buildings, so if you make a replacement building, that building should function as the prerequisite also.

In other words: if building A is prerequisite for building B, and you replace building A by the new building C, the prerequisite for building B should be changed to A OR C. Otherwise you would suddenly no longer by able to build building B once you built C.