Would I make tweaks to the game, given a chance? For sure, but to be honest those mostly have to do with one of two areas: making the late game more challenging, varied, and interesting (frankly I quit playing a lot of clans shortly after becoming tribal king), or making some of the details matter more.
Which when I think about it is probably an argument not so much for simplifying for its own sake, but balance out complexity with impact. Right now pigs matter almost not at all, other than if you need to slaughter a lot of them for food, and the fact that the Ernalda shrine/temple consumes pigs rather than sheep. Oh, and I seem to recall one event where the clan had lots of pigs and was short on wild lands, where the pigs were getting into the crops. Pigs add some complexity to the game (there is a tracker for them, and a blessing for them, a scripting option was added for them, they affect how much food you get from your herds, etc), but they have barely noticeable impact on game play.
So what to do about pigs? I think I'd either simplify them, or give them more significance, or some combination of the two. Perhaps take out the tracker for them, but still show them on the sacred time screen, and when you get Ernalda's "swine blessing" blessing active you get a simple bump to your food from herds, and her shrine/temple moves from consuming sheep to pigs, or something like that.
Sheep are barely more important than pigs as the game stands. But I think having a second herd animal after cows is good for the game. So there I would increase how much they matter. Give a couple more sheep events, and maybe make a direct wealth effect from the number of sheep you have (if you have more than you need, you sell excess wool, for a few cows worth of goods per year, which would matter early in the game). Or something.....right now they just feel like they should be a little more important, other than as being a pain in the late game if you hadn't built your herd up large enough early on to support the cost of supporting your temples.
The blessings I like the way they are, although of course they could be tweaked. I do notice the difference in food production or military success when I have a few blessings of the right kind on-line, and so on. Overall I think they are one of the really fun parts of the game. If you wanted a very different game you could take out individual blessings as someone said (just go to a bigger Ernalda temple helps your food in various ways, Humakt helps war, etc), but I think that would be a lot less fun.
With crafters I'm a bit torn. To me the interesting parts are that valuable trade goods make exploring your tula important, and the decisions to make when another clan comes asking for special access to those resources are interesting decision points. On the other hand, once I've set what my crafters are making I almost never change them. Even when I know our crafters will have bad luck that year I can't be bothered to burn up two actions to shift their work to more basic goods and then back to the usual configuration. Again I guess I'd say either simplify this (when you get a good trade good, it is assumed you use it, you profit), or else make it more significant (there are pop ups that you hear certain things are in great demand or the market is being flooded, so you have incentive to change what you are making). Or take a different approach and have to invest more in special resources but then have a more noticeable pay off...you find iron and you can trade the nodules away. Or in the crafter screen you can build a smelter and mithy (kind of like with fortifications), and if you do that your market gets more profitable, and you get messages about how well armed and armored your weaponthanes are and how that is giving them an edge in battle.
The same theory could apply to crop mix (either get rid of it or make it more than an routine thing to tweak based on the annual predictions), patrol setting (again right now it is pretty routine), what you offer when recruiting new farmers (it doesn't seem to effect your herds currently, so it really seems to be how many you want to have), and the tracking of how many carls versus how many cottars you have (if you are very wealthy should you have a higher ratio of carls? Should that change something else?).
On a different topic: I wonder, were this to be open-sourced or converted to some new format, if it could be made to run on something like an I-Phone? Would have to down-sample the pictures I'd assume, and I don't know how many gigs of memory the game would consume, but wouldn't that make for an amazing app? (not that I have an I-Phone, but this would tempt me to get one!). Most video games won't work on handsets because the processor can't run fast enough, but that is not the same issue for KoDP, so I'd think it would be technically possible (feasible is a whole different issue....)
--Bryan
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