Is offline progression too "easy" / am I abusing this too badly?
I'm not sure that I understand how offline progression was supposed to be used or behave. But this is what I've found.
I can, in spring, send out some hunters, and get ivory. At that point, I hit pause. After several minutes of wait (or overnight), I can do things (overnight I have full barns). I have spring day, lots of food. I get happyness bonus. If the ivory runs out, I send out hunters until I get more; then my happyness comes back, and lasts the full time that I'm busy with idling.
Eventually, the need to unpause occasionally will result in the season advancing. At that point, I play a year, and I have more than enough food to make it trivially through the year/winter. Even if I barely had a food profit during spring with the happyness bonus.
This ... seems far too easy/non-challenging. Yes, it might mean that the game takes longer, but ... still, something seems wrong here.
At a minimum, why does the day not advance when the temporal skip happens?
Perhaps better: Why am I getting a bonus production with no day change, while the temporal speedup accumulates which should let me "catch up" from a small nap/pause without this?
And, given the length of this game (which I'm just now starting to understand ... seriously, a 40K year goal?), what is the expected/intended way to play a session, and come back later? If I leave it running in a background tab, it consumes CPU, and I risk a cold year wiping out my kittens. It's not like there's any "run until something goes bad, and then pause for user intervention" feature. I may be on the "barely positive" point, but I consistently see timers of 10-30 minutes, and even saw a 1 day timer. So long pauses between doing things seems like the norm, but being able to keep everything in happyness spring seems too easy for that.