Forecasts for the weather have been asked for for weeks and are already in the next_version beta of the game, shortage and surplus warnings however are still scavenger only. The problem with giving that to everyone is that it can easily be abused by buying before the shortage happens and then selling after the short. This could lead to people who got an early advantage and have the most disposable income to be able to buy into the short the most and just steamroll ahead.
The risk is fine as is. This game is, if anything, far more punishing than the real world at this sort of thing. Putting yourself heavily in debt in order to expand quickly is absolutly a thing in the real world. If you decide your going to rack up a large amount of debt inorder to expand quicker you run 2 very large risks. 1 is that other people can profit heavily off of you consuming resources such as power, which can lead to them getting an even stronger economy than you. This inturn makes it harder for you to be able to pay off your own debt later on, and getting stuck with 150K debt late game agaisnt someone with no debt at all is a huge deal. The other thing is to do with the black market: Your painting a huge target on your back by putting yourself ahead of the pack. I've had pleanty of games where i've moved ahead and then just been shut down by the other 3 players until they were all ahead of me and could easily buy me.
I'm not certain about whether adding less micro is a good or bad thing. I'm not for it, but I'm not against it either. However, I will say that you can speed up this micro process a lot by learning the hotkeys, like in normal RTS's. I feel that by letting players completly ignore a building they've placed down until they get a notification it's off will just encourage people to not pay as much attention to the market until they need to change things around. This is perhaps a similar issue to people who APM spam in parts of other RTS's when there is no real reason to do so, because it gets you into the mindset of thinking about the game more and faster. I don't know, maybe these options would jsut hinder people's ability to learn the game?
Play on reveal map mode. This fixes almsot every map gen proble you have. It will become the default standard eventually as it's far better than the luck-based scan mode.
I like shorter games. This is personal preference and there is no conclusive evidence to support your belief that longer game length is better and there's no evidence to support shorter game length is better. Your belief that the RTS's that made the most profit were longer games is compeltly untrue, and the only old RTS series's I would consider not dead are Starcraft, Command and Conquer and Supreme Commander. All 3 of these games have average game lengths shorter than offworld trading company, with the exception that if you don't know what your doing or want to play with no-rush options supreme commander games could last hours. Indeed, I don't remember AoE 3 games lasting much longer than 30 minutes either and would definitely not call it a 30-60 minute game. I also dislike the late game of this game. It feels like more of a formality than anything else, where 1 person is vastly ahead of everyone else and is just mopping up. He can make a mistake and still lsoe but it isn't likely. Extending this process further would be horrible in my eyes. Back in beta 2 this game was fast, faster than still it currently is. In beta 3 they made the game incredibly slow, and these last 2 patches have been slowly bringing it back to beta 2's standard of game length, and I don't see Mohawk suddenly reversing direction on this. A long RTS experience is also incredibly difficult to make. The only one I can remember that had long average game length (45+ minutes) was Cossaks, and that game did not do well in terms of sales at all.
