>building menu
>Not quite sure. We are talking about a lot of space here. That could get annoying quickly. I would really prefer it if we managed to give each item a name that is descriptive enough that you don't have to clutter the interface up with even more words.

Ok, decent naming and icon-showing for material costs and alternatives but: No description? Are you serious? Perhaps optional description would be the thing we want: Hold the mouse on the icon for several seconds, and the description pops up. As well a question or an help icon could be attached to each building symbol. Klicking on that will open the text.

Ah one question about the drawbridges: How do you plan on building those features? In a seperated menu?
I planned on building them like this:
Open combo menu -> select castle buildings -> defence -> There's the tower -> drawbridge/direction or nothing? - choose one combo menu entry.

>Hm, maybe we could even have some sort of flint material? It could be a fun element to have. We'd have to decide how to mine it, though. Maybe allow the shovel to make (slow) progress, yielding flints?

Flint as a material is actually quite fun but very dangerous currently ;) - yes I speak of mining flints, yielding flints should be the natural approach to it.
Ah I also thought about loam: One possibility is to make wet earth = loam. The other one is to make loam be a product from water + earth in the foundry.