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The closest example of this idea is already implemented in the game Stronghold: Crusader. Although in Stronghold, citizens are not created, they came to your town center based on how prosper your city is. In other word, citizens are also one of the resources that gathered, not built. In the game there are barracks and weapon factories. Weapon factories produce weapons,automatically and infinitely as long as there are resources. So in barrack, you don't produce a swordsman with 50 food and 100 metal, but you built it with 1 citizen and 1 sword. In case of knight, 1 citizen, 1 sword, 1 shield. The automatic system of weapon creation might make your resources management and your weapon amount uncontrollable, unless you manually controlled them. Either way, it is, in the words of Brightgalrs, "tedious micromanagement." The solutions I suggested to meet your requirement are following: 1. If you build a house, 5 citizens would automatically created (not instantly and not free, mind you. This is just so you don't have to press the button 'create female citizen' ever again. It still takes time to summon all 5 citizens, and your food stock will be reduced too). You can assign them to build or gather. This means citizens are created in houses, not town. Town is only for creating citizen-soldiers. Now since we have female and male citizens, there should be build male house and build female house. Female houses produce 5 female citizens which cannot be converted into soldiers. 2. If you build a soldier (either citizen-soldiers in town center or other soldiers in barrack) one idle nearest male citizen would go to town/barrack and walk out a soldier. If it's a siege weapon, then it's two or three citizens. To save from more micro, there is no weapon factory. So to build swordsman we need 1 citizen, 100 metal. Remember if no one's idle this would reduce workers so you probably should check all the citizens work again. Also if enemy is already in your city, they could slay every citizen trying to enter the barrack so you need to create soldiers when it's still safe or have some citizens garrisoned there first. To make this happen, every time you assign a soldier to gather he would automatically drop the armor and became a male citizen again, with citizen efficiency. But if he is needed to be a soldier again he would have to run to barrack again. Well, this is what I have in mind. I don't even know if the game could actually be modified like that.

It is something I feel is unnatural in the current interface; having to look at the left to adjust the choice, and seeing the resulting change on the right (with a larger monitor this distance effect gets worse). So, yes, I would agree to put the drop down where the action is There appears to be plenty of space since most map descriptions are quite short.

What's the best way to balance that - without making defense towers too strong or walls too expensive? To build a wall tower, a wall segment and end wall tower must also be built, so the stone cost is a lot higher than just 1 defense tower.