These people are supposedly barely one step ahead of having escaped from tyranny & brutalization, scratching a meager existence from the dirt, and yet are now leaving because I’m not keeping them ‘entertained’.
At this level survival should be the only thing on their minds, not what’s playing at the next puppet show.
Survival is a necessity. Thriving is their goal.
As you level up the town and survival becomes the norm, its only natural to want a better life for not just them, but the next generation. Once they know they can survive, they want to thrive.
In the game mechanics, this is represented by new requirements as you hit the old requirements, entertainment being one such need. By the time you need to meet it, you should have developed enough to meet this need easily.
Good in theory, but a direct recipe for cookie-cutter results. 
Logistics, resources, and terrain all play a huge role in how a town can be developed.
Not every location can be brought along at the same speed or develop resources and goods at the same rate.
Especially considering how much hand-wringing it causes around here to speak of maps with less than the needed resources.
It’s why all mountain-based villages fail.
Required milestones to satisfy some nebulous demand that space does not allow for.
What could produce some of the most beautiful end-results in the game, is for now, off limits.
Sure more difficult maps and higher challenge, with less available, I get what your saying.
But still, that would limit growth, which limits requirements. Is the balance right, too early to say, but the mechanic for now works in all but the harshest of maps, considering the trader mechanic (flawed as it is).
Harsher maps require more trading and a much more nuanced play. So whilst the requirements may be a little rigid, the solutions are many and varied.
Nightsoil builds from the moment you build your first shelter.
No matter how low you try and keep your population, you must eventually build a Market to make the gold to pay for your Compost/Nightsoil collector.
This is just the first trigger that forces you to do things your city-build may not be ready for and will put a rude halt to that map if you don’t.
This is where we differ in strategy. I have a market down as soon as possible. Before 30 pop year 2 -3.
The question is why wouldn’t you. Sure it takes a worker, but they stock the shelters for you. So not only does it make everyone more efficient, each house generates a gold. When the market is down I usually have 8-10 houses. I like to build fast but even on this you can afford a nightsoil and not long after, get your school down as you might only have one educated worker at that point.
So even if you want to go slow, you can afford it all
I am sure I will get round to it. I have done something similar. The key to maps like that are to start in the valley and migrate when you have the pop to “remodel”. That is a massive undertaking
You can move everything remember (TH??)
The Town Hall can’t be moved.
Leaving it behind on the flat gives away it’s substantial defensive capabilities, along with exposing it to incursion and damage unless additional (possibly non-contiguous) fortification and expenditure are incurred.
This is the actual starting position the map provides, not one I searched out.
Space only allows you to do so much but the game demands more.
That’s where cookie-cutter results become SOP.
The TH doesn’t store anything though. You do you by all means but I would leave that up there and start in the valleys. I usually have 2 hunters in the first year an add a couple more before raiders show up. 4 hunters are enough for early raids and then I add walls around the storage, vault and trading post with a couple of towers. Hunters are much cheaper then any other defence and add food stocks when not defending. I can afford proper defences when they become less effective but If can give them crossbows they can still put in a shift later. But that’s me.
I beg to differ, even on the hardest biome I have succeeded in constructing a mountain-based village that is anything but cookie cutter. I’m not saying it is easy, just that it is indeed possible.
The definition of success is relative.
Sustainable self-sufficiency is the metric I use.
If a society is not capable of that then it’s not a success.
As in running the population all the way to the pop cap while feeding, housing and protecting them from the AI.
You have a mountain village with 1,000 population?
Hunters and the Town Hall form the basis of all early raid defense components.
There, our strategies are in line with each other.
But if the Town Hall is destroyed, the game is over.
I also use sustainable self-sufficiency as my metric of success. I only consider my builds complete when they can run for a couple decades with the only clicks being to replace deceased workers. I don’t aim for 1k pops simply because my computer is unable to run the game at that pop count, I generally draw the line at 480 pops as a good compromise for performance.
