Well, I backed it!

I hope that mods can allow for an expansion on the economic side as well, since I'm not that interested in RTS but I'm really into city building games (with production chain management, resource management, supply and demand management and traffic management).

Also, building new models to use in-game like Lego is brilliant! (Something Minecraft lacks, imo, with its hardcoded crafting.)

Thanks for the backing!!

Could you describe in more detail what you mean by modding the economic side?  We want as much of the game to be moddable as possible.  Our original thinking on economy is that "gold" would be an abstraction which let you get access to other parts of the game that you may need occasionally, but not want to invest a lot of gameplay in.  For example, if you're really into the military combat game, you would go out questing and killing monsters for gold, then use the gold to buy food.  Conversely, if you're really into the farming game you could create a surplus of food to sell to raise money to hire protection for your crops (or to pay off invaders who want to sack your city).

Did you have other ideas for the economy game?  How would you like to mod it?

Thanks again for the backing. 

It's been a long road, but we're making good progress in converting our prototype build engine into the real thing.  Here's a demonstration of the AI worker scheduler coordinating the construction of a house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djAVxgQm1qM

In our AI system, each unit has their own little brain, complete with observations about the world, goals about what they want to achieve, and ways about getting what they want.  If they're tired, they'll go to sleep, and if they see something scary they'll run away.

For coordinated tasks like building, we have a gang scheduler which coordinates the jobs of the workers.  You can think of this guy like the foreman, who picks out the best thing to work on next.  It has a dependency tree of all the projects the player has diagramed out to make sure things get built in the proper order.  For example, it makes sure the two columns between supporting a wall get built before the wall itself and that all 4 walls of the house are built before someone starts working on the roof.

In the video, you can see the workers coordinating their actions via the gang scheduler to cooperatively build a house.  Though they each have their own, independent agendas, one item in their priority list is to help out with the construction of the house.  Right now it's still very early days for us, so that's about all they care to do. =)  In the real game, there will be all sorts of real-life interruptions.  If an invading force gets too close to your town, they'll of course all run for their lives.  If they get hunger, they'll go looking for food to eat instead of working themselves to death.  You get the idea.  We're striving for this ant-farm quality to the game, where building and exploring are super fun, but just watching your citizens running around doing their thing should be just as engaging and surprising for the player.