The next update for Bronze Age will focus on settlement management. There are two main features: Bonuses and Buffs.

Bonuses

Bonuses are a new element designed to encourage a quality over quantity approach to settlement management. Structures can produce bonuses much like Infrastructure or Items, but unlike those bonuses aren't directly useful. Instead the increase the performance of other structures.

For an example: windmills.

A windmill provides  2 agricultural bonus to all adjacent structures. Farms and vinyards produce an extra item per season for every point of agricultural bonus. 

In this setup these two structures require 2 administration and 2 workers to produce 7 wheat. You'd be better off replacing the windmill with another farm.

In this setup we have 7 structures that require 7 administration and 7 workers. The total output though is 42 wheat per season. Replacing the windmill with a farm would result in only 35 wheat per season.

Bonuses can be local to the same hex, apply to all adjacent hexes, or apply to the entire settlement.

Buffs

Buffs are temporary effects that can target a region, a tribe, or the whole world. They can add or remove item production, infrastructure, or bonuses. They will be managed by scripts, and therefore easily moddable.

A basic example is seasons. As time passes a world-wide season buff will change by the season, providing different effects. During the spring, for example the whole world will get an agricultural bonus, but during the winter the whole world gets a negative agricultural bonus.

Happiness and Morale Rework

As part of this update I'll be using the new bonuses to rework the happiness and moral systems.

Happiness is Kind of Silly

There are a couple silly parts of the current happiness implementation.

1. Notably structures provide happiness no matter where they're located. A monument somehow makes people happy even if it's where no-one could see it.
2. A fully upgraded monument is the most efficient source of happiness, breweries, wineries, and gardens are redundant.

In 2.4 happiness will be somewhat flipped on it's head. Structures wont be the primary source of happiness anymore, instead houses will produce happiness. They will, however, produce a base happiness of 0. The brewery and winery will provide a bonus to happiness generation. A house by itself produces 0 happiness. A house with a brewery next door will produce 1 happiness. A brewery surrounded by 6 houses will produce 6 happiness.

Another change from 2.3 is that each pop will now only require 1 happiness. Previously the happiness required scaled up quadratically with settlement population, that's a little over-complicated and didn't really do what I wanted. So, 1 happiness needed per pop, but your way to produce happiness will be tied to houses. A fully upgraded house will hold 3 pops, but a fully upgraded brewery will only provide a 2 happiness bonus to all adjacent hexes. You'll have to cleverly plan your settlements to get optimal happiness.

The monument and garden will be temporarily demoted to being decorative structures, as they won't have a good role in 2.4. The monument will probably return to significance when religion is introduced.

Riots are Kind of Silly

In 2.3 a settlement with 99% morale will eventually riot. That doesn't make much sense. I don't have this solution fully planned out, but the riots will be replaced with a wide range of civil disobedience, with severity matched to settlement morale. A settlement at 80% morale may have increased crime, but no all out riots.