At its (*) heart, Clockwork Empires is a game where you organize people and build stuff. Those are the two main systems of player interaction with the game. You reward yourself for building things however you like, we reward you for building things effectively. Similarly, we reward you for organizing people effectively, and you can reward yourself by trying to get two characters to fall in love, start a riot (or a cult), and otherwise doing whatever it is you think would be most interesting.
(* squamous, eldritch, abominable; stamped, filed, indexed, and numbered)
The core features of the “build stuff” system are almost at their minimum viable state of “complete” (which we will continue to add frosting to): You can construct and destroy modules, buildings, and zones, but there are a few cases where doing so causes the game to get really unstable, so we’re working on that. We’ll expand this to include “rearranging” and probably also “upgrading” once the constructing and destroying have all their kinks worked out. The reward mechanisms are in too, but they’re more-or-less in a continuous state of refinement & iteration as we move away from “congrats, you get double production of widgets!” to more interesting rewards.