Starting a new thread for this because there are lots of potential sub-topics, and people are likely to have a lot of opinions/ideas.
Anyway, two issues I wanted to raise myself under this banner:
1) Improvements that upgrade after you discover a tech take ages to do so when worked, yet (apart from the cottage line) can easily be built in their upgraded state. This means that any existing lower-level improvemnt in the line (e.g. - seed camps when you get the tech for farms) are actually worse than nothing at all in many ways!
I propose two changes:
1.1) Workers can build the improved version on top of the obsoleted version. Optionally there could be a discount, but I don't think that's necessary personally. This is a simple enough DLL change.
1.2) Regularise the time-to-grow for all improvement lines so that behaviour is consistent. Thus seed camp->farm, mine->shaft mine, log gatherer->lumberjack all change to upgrade over time if worked, and all allow workers to build the improved version over the top. This makes life better than currently for farms/mines, but worse for lumberjacks (benefit is making it regular - I can't see any reason for it not to be)
2) Cottages need a boost. In Vanilla BTS cottages were always the goto improvement, because by the time they eventually develop into towns they are very powerful. In vanilla BTS they were a bit TOO strong relative to farms, but in C2C the dial has swung hugely in the other direction. Uniquely with the cottage line, you have to wait for them to develop, and getting one pillaged is a big set-back. To balance this they should be strong improvements in their later stages, but currently just aren't compared to tech'd out farms, on pretty much any terrain farms can be built on. The main reason for this is all the pluses that farms get from techs (there are a lot of +1 food to farms techs).
Concretely I propose:
2.1) Various tech-based pluses to the cottage line. Other people are better at the details of that sort of thing than I, but I was thinking of things like:
+1 gold to hamlets,villages,towns from <some middle age trade related tech>
+1 hammer to villages,towns from <some political or mild urbanisation tech - feudalism say>
Ideally cottages should get a similar number (most applying at the hamlet or above level I'd say) of tech-based plusses that farms do (slightly less because of their innate development through the line towards towns).
Anyway, two issues I wanted to raise myself under this banner:
1) Improvements that upgrade after you discover a tech take ages to do so when worked, yet (apart from the cottage line) can easily be built in their upgraded state. This means that any existing lower-level improvemnt in the line (e.g. - seed camps when you get the tech for farms) are actually worse than nothing at all in many ways!
I propose two changes:
1.1) Workers can build the improved version on top of the obsoleted version. Optionally there could be a discount, but I don't think that's necessary personally. This is a simple enough DLL change.
1.2) Regularise the time-to-grow for all improvement lines so that behaviour is consistent. Thus seed camp->farm, mine->shaft mine, log gatherer->lumberjack all change to upgrade over time if worked, and all allow workers to build the improved version over the top. This makes life better than currently for farms/mines, but worse for lumberjacks (benefit is making it regular - I can't see any reason for it not to be)
2) Cottages need a boost. In Vanilla BTS cottages were always the goto improvement, because by the time they eventually develop into towns they are very powerful. In vanilla BTS they were a bit TOO strong relative to farms, but in C2C the dial has swung hugely in the other direction. Uniquely with the cottage line, you have to wait for them to develop, and getting one pillaged is a big set-back. To balance this they should be strong improvements in their later stages, but currently just aren't compared to tech'd out farms, on pretty much any terrain farms can be built on. The main reason for this is all the pluses that farms get from techs (there are a lot of +1 food to farms techs).
Concretely I propose:
2.1) Various tech-based pluses to the cottage line. Other people are better at the details of that sort of thing than I, but I was thinking of things like:
+1 gold to hamlets,villages,towns from <some middle age trade related tech>
+1 hammer to villages,towns from <some political or mild urbanisation tech - feudalism say>
Ideally cottages should get a similar number (most applying at the hamlet or above level I'd say) of tech-based plusses that farms do (slightly less because of their innate development through the line towards towns).
. But the factory and the industrial complex don't get any bonuses
, stays. Alongside a river this is "costing" a 
instead while not along a river there's no downside.
and a bit of xp for your trouble. It also helps with speeding things up around smaller cities that don't work every plot of land.
So what we should do is make it so that workers can't build mines or the upgrades only the lowest stone gather. Just like cottages.
