I kind of expect the AI to ramp up the tech tree pretty fast if the queues were implemented this way. But that would provide a greater challenge in the latter part of the game. If the Hojo horde is removed in the next iteration then the game could get outright boring at the end. But facing high honor, well armored samurai weilding superior weapons would make for a fun fight. Plus towards the end you tend to have a ton of koku and could actually use it on better dojos.

I also thought of manpower when I suggested these improved queues. What type of labor is needed to make each building. Improved farming probably involved improving the irrigation to the fields. Once the original engineering is thought out it is pure grunt work. A dojo probably takes some grunt work to transport the raw materials but then is almost all skilled carpenters. A port is probably similar. The larger castles would be very large undertakings involving alot of grunt labor to transport rock and lumber but then alot of engineering and skilled labor to assemble. But that is already reflected in long build times What I am trying to get at is each of the different queues probably pull on different pools of labor. So it is not unrealistic to be improving farmland and building a dojo at the same time. Maybe a good compromise is that when upgrading your castle, that is the only thing that can actively be under construction at that time.

Plus they are talking about adding new dojos to the game. I am not sure if I will ever get around to building a drill dojo if the queues remains the same.

Maybe this could be another option. Serial or parallel queues.

Has anyone here ever played "Lords of the Realm II". It has a very good model for dividing labor and assigning peasants to either food production, making weapons, mining raw materials or conscription into an army. Each province has a certain population of people which either goes up or down based on the happiness in the province. If you want to build a castle you need alot of wood and stone and peasants. Plus you need enough peasants left over to farm and manage livestock to keep the population feed. You can put as many peasants on the castle building as you want. The more you put on the faster the castle is built. But you will suffer in other areas. Plus to build armies you need to conscript peasants. This did two things it left few peasants to do the other tasks and it caused the happiness in the province to go down. This game also had maps similar to the strategic map which you used to invade and conquer other province. The tactical combat model wasn't that great, but the castle sieges were fun. I am not suggesting that Shogun go to this model but they might steal a few ideas from it for labor management. I am suspicious that they stole the strategic map from it, although some other game could have done that before LotR2. I read somewhere that LotR2 was on of the games Stephen Turnbull played.

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