Now, what kind of buildings do we need, and how will we build them? We could let villagers build them all automatically, but that will inevitably lead to player frustration when the villager could really use an extra farm or two in order to build up a surplus of food, but the villagers won't build them because they don't know the player is planning something that will require extra food, and the player, who is supposed to be a god, cannot communicate to them that they need to build more farms. So we need the player to be able to build things himself if he wants to. Black and White did this with scaffoldings, which were made out of wood (Black and White has no stone resource) at a certain building. Which building you made was determined by how many scaffoldings you dropped on one spot. The problem was, you could only hold one object at a time. There was no way to pick up several villagers, objects, or scaffoldings at once. This means that if you wanted to build a six-scaffolding building on the other side of your village from the scaffolding-maker, you'd have to drag yourself across the village six times.
We can resolve this problem by just allowing the player to pick up more than one object at a time. Black and White couldn't do this because you had to left-click to grab the ground and pull yourself around to move, and right click picked things up and put them down. We can simply have movement dictated by the arrow keys as in most games with a bird's eye view, make left click pick things up, and right click drop them. Now you can pick up as many scaffoldings at once as you need to.
Now, then, a single scaffolding will create the simplest building possible, a cottage. Adding extra wood to a cottage will make it bigger, but allow it to contain more people, becoming more and more space-efficient as you add more wood. First, it'll turn into an apartment, then a tenement, and finally a slum. Obviously, people are unhappy to live in these places, and get less happy the bigger and more cramped it is, but you can cram more people into a smaller space this way. If you add gold instead of wood, you'll get the reverse effect, houses that are less space-efficient but more pleasant to live in. You'll start with a manor, then get an estate, and finally a palace. Mixing it with metal yields a rampart, stronghold, and citadel. These are better places to live than the slums, but not by much, and more space-efficient than the palaces, but not by much there either. The advantage to citadels is that they're really, really hard to destroy.
Two scaffoldings gives us resource buildings, a farm if dropped on farmable ground, a fishery if dropped on the shoreline, a logging camp if dropped within ~20 feet of a forest (not just a single tree, but a forest), and a mine if dropped on top of a stone/gold/metal quarry.
Three scaffoldings mixed with some metal will give us a blacksmith to make tools and weapons, mixed with some raw wood or stone will make a carpenter to make more scaffoldings, mixed with gold will give us a building that makes luxury items (which luxury item it is depends on the culture of the village it's located in), and mixed with food will give us a stable where they'll raise horses.
Four scaffoldings mixed with gold will give us a marketplace that allows our village to trade with other villages we control as well as villages belonging to friendly or neutral gods, mixed with metal will give us a barracks where we can recruit soldiers to "persuade" villages to convert, and mixed with raw wood or stone will give us a temple. So far, I've used the word "temple" to refer to the headquarters of your entire religion, but I'm going to use the word "sanctuary" to define the headquarters now, and "temple" will be a lesser religious structure that makes missionaries to convert other villages peacefully, and gives converted villages a place to worship.
Five scaffoldings mixed with gold will give a university, which will make everyone who attends it happier and will also research and unlock technologies that will make things easier, for example inventing a crane will reduce construction time, inventing steel will make tools and weapons more effective, and inventing irrigation will expand the amount of farmable land next to water sources. Mixed with metal will give you a fortress, where you can recruit elite units to fight for you. Fortresses can also be manned by archers recruited at a barracks, resulting in a very dangerous, very hard to kill building. Mixing five scaffoldings with wood will result in a town center. If you have a powerful army, one of your generals will take up residence in the town center, claiming control of the village (though he'll still be loyal to you). Otherwise, the people will elect someone to lead them. If a general takes control of the village and you don't want him there, you can yank him out of the town center and the people will elect someone instead. If the town center is empty and you put someone inside it, that person will become the new theocratic ruler of the town.
Six scaffoldings makes a town square, where your people will gather for holy days, festivals, public executions, etc. This will significantly increase the effectiveness of these events in either satisfying or terrifying your people. Or both.
Seven scaffoldings along with extra wood, gold, and metal will create a monument. What exactly the monument is varies from culture to culture, but it's going to be something along the lines of a wonder of the world. This makes almost everything work better. Your soldiers will be slightly more powerful, your workers will work slightly harder, your people will be slightly more happy/scared of you when you perform miracles, your miracles will last slightly longer, effect a slightly larger area, and be slightly be slightly more effective, and so on and so forth. It's very expensive, but can give you quite an edge over other gods who don't yet have one. Each new monument you construct will provide only half as much benefit as the one before it.
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