How is your suggestion different from what is already planned? To me this sounds pretty much exactly like the plan: once awakened the player species gains the ability to unlock technology (with the first technologies being primitive tools and fire) but pretty much nothing else changes.
I’ve recently said that we wouldn’t add regressing back stages into the game for two reasons:
- It’s going to be a ton of programming effort meaning that we are pushing back the farther stages even more years than they are going to take at the current pace
- It’s also going to add a ton of testing work to ensure nothing breaks. Imagine the bug reports if someone regressed back to the start of the society stage and as a result got a softlock due to missing some key resource in sufficient quantity to advance further. That would be a doozy of a bug report to read and figure out with the user that the root cause of the bug is actually regressing a stage (as players are really terrible in general writing bug reports with sufficient information that is critical that they don’t think to include). So we would have to test each stage multiple times more than before to catch any edge cases caused by going back stages.
For those two reasons I want to stick to not having stage regressions put into the game. Or at least that feature is not considered until we’ve reached (or are about to reach) Ascension Stage development, when all the other stages are done which would make it much easier to add stage regressing without that feature breaking with every major update to one or more stages.