This game is amazing

I don't know where to begin, but this game is insanely deep with how many things that could happen, and each playthrough feels unique, and I love the fact you can boost up the difficulty of the game to however much you want to, it really did help me feel like I am improving on the game every time I tried. Just on the first run, I won on hard so I decided to try Shaman on Harder which took me like 5 more tries to get through and every run after that I could see myself learning from experience of what to mitigate and where I could further optimize which is the game right up my alley - now I'm doing challenger 1 on Matus before I can finally unlock Randolph but I've improved so much even this seems too easy for me now haha. I only picked up the game last week, and I already racked up 100+ hours on this game, and I've not even seen all the buildings yet, so I'm excited to keep playing to 100% the agepedia eventually lmao. But, with so many things in this game, I feel like there are some things I'd really like to mention about the variance of each playthrough made me realize that some buildings are outright better / superior so rerolling for the correct tech at the start is really important. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Tomatoes vs Carrots. Tomatoes are far worse compared to Carrots since you have to place them next to a water maker, which is a much harder requirement to meet compared to Carrots where you can just spam all of them next to each other and still make as much as Tomatoes. There's literally no reason why Tomatoes shouldn't have some additional benefit over Carrots when their optional +2 is much harder to achieve.
2. Cows vs Sheep. Getting Sheeps over Cows in the tech tree is 100% of the time better because Cows have a massive restriction of being needed to be next to Stone, making it incredibly difficult to satisfy the extra benefits of the Slaughterhouse. Plus, you can only store 2 Cows in 1 pen compared to 3 Sheep in pen, so even milk making is better for Sheep. And if we want to talk about Cows having the benefit to making Leather, Leather is a pretty useless resource in the majority of the game since all you really need it for is to convert it to Fabric. Unless you're playing Shaman, the leather is kind of pointless to get, but it's simply more cost-efficient to use Big Game Hunter which is guaranteed on the tech tree rather than going with the hassle to get Cows in a pen which also costs Barley to keep up.
3. Mountain Springs vs Wells. This right here - is my biggest problem so far. There is literally no scenario where you would ever want to pick Mountain Springs over Wells because Mountain Wells make having to place buildings like Cauldrons and Tomato Fields extremely difficult, and plus the final upgrade for the Mountain Springs also only gives 6 water compared to 8 water from the final upgrade for the Well. (when built on underground water) To me, it seems like the only thing Mountain Springs have going for them is "oh you can get 2 water without building on underground water but on stone which is a more common terrain trait" but I have to say that this is not a benefit worthwhile. The best way to beat this game is to focus on nothing but Population expansion as much as possible until you hit 59 Pips, and with how food is distributed amongst trees, makes it so that by the time you need to actually even need to start farming food, you'll have probably expanded far enough to reach an underground water source since expanding using signposts/buoys into more natural food source is way more efficient than trying to farm up food early on due to the reliance on having a bunch of wood makers in the early game to get up Houses as quick as possible.
4. Temples. I'm definitely not missing anything here, but the best Temple by a very large margin is the Water Temple, because you only need a Fisherman to work in it, and the Forest Temple is absolute trash because you need a Bourgeois worker compared to just a Commoner. You have to pay 5x the price of food for a Bourgeois to only return you basically the same amount of Nature. Having a Commoner job is also a huge plus compared to Bourgeois because a huge part of how to optimize this game is that you train professionals and then reassign them to building more things to expand as quick as possible when you don't need their output and you can't do that with Bourgeois pips which is honestly the biggest downside of getting Bourgeois. There is an argument that Hippies can work in Animal Theaters, but there is literally no reason to go out your way to make Animal Theaters when the by far best hope production building in the game is the Pub which gives 50 hope and extremely easy to meet requirements of just 4 Dwellings surrounding it where Animal Theaters have a ridiculously annoying requirement to meet to be effective. (Granted I haven't used the Brothel before but it also seems much easier to satisfy to just have 4 Bourgeois housing compared to a bunch of animals) Plus, it's harder to get Flowers than just literal water for a Water Temple as Flowers are a multi-step process, so you're always reliant on those Flowers that grow 5 turns later, and it's also easier to capitalize on the intensifying of nature production from the Water Temple due to water almost always being generated in a way that you will get large patches of it that allow you to easily place 3 Temples side to side.
5. Still vs Brewery. Getting Fruits for your Still is miles worse than just getting Barley and Water since you will always get Barley to make Flour as the Cauldron's Milk + Flour = 22 (+4) Glop is by far the most efficient food production in the game and you also need the Bakery to get Bourgeois in the first place to use up that Beer. There's literally no benefit for Still over Brewery as far as I can tell.

Those are just some things I've seen from the imbalances of the tech tree - yes the tech tree being different in each game is a good idea, but sometimes it just feels like it's just down to luck whether you got the good building or not and if you didn't then you would just suffer more. I feel like as a game design choice, it would be more interesting if getting let's say the Still instead of the Brewery would give you 3 Beer instead of 2 Beer per day to differentiate it a bit more from being a bad Brewery due to a compromise you'd get since getting Fruit is less efficient compared to Barley in the late game. I might be completely wrong, but at the very least Tomatoes should at least give like 1 more harvest for the added effort of having to keep them next to a water maker.