Two New Buildings for Town Management
I have a suggestion that would help with Town Management and create a new resource sink for higher level players. My proposal is to create two new buildings : The Architect, which would focus on building and upgrade management, as well as allowing players to save and swap village setups, and the Headquarters, which would focus on troop and spell management and allow players to save army rosters.
The Architect
This building would share a footprint with the Builder's Hut, to avoid space issues in high level camps. It has the appearance of a 2-story tall builder's hut covered in hanging blueprints.
Level 1 : 2mil gold - 1day build - TH8
At Level 1, the Architect will allow you to see what all builders are currently constructing, as well as their time to completion. From this screen you are able to see how many gems are required for completion as well as spend those gems to finish construction. You are also able to add builders with gems from the Architect.
Finally, the Architect adds its most useful ability. It allows you to store one village template. This would encourage people to experiment more with their setups, without having the tedium of manually recreating their village every time. They can have a "war" template and a "farming" template. From the edit screen there would be a "Save Template" and "Load Template" button that would allow for quick swaps.
Level 2 : 4mil gold - 4day build - TH9
At Level 2, the Architect adds the ability to see current Research, time remaining, and gem cost to hurry. You can also spend gems from this screen to hurry research.
This level also adds a second save slot for village setups.
Level 3 : 8mil gold - 10day build - TH10
At the final level, the Architect unlocks its most powerful ability. It adds a very simple 5% boost to ALL build times. Modest, but worth it at the highest level when upgrades take weeks.
In addition, Level 3 unlocks a 3rd and final save slot for village setup.
The Headquarters
This building also has the small builder's hut footprint. It has the appearance of a Command Tent with a shield hanging at the entrance.
Level 1 : 2mil Elixir - 2day build - TH8
At the first level, the Headquarters shows current production in all Barracks as well as time to completion and gem cost. It allows for hurrying of production. Each barracks can be selected from this screen to jump to it and queue additional production.
The second and more powerful ability of the Headquarters allows for the saving of an army setup. A "create roster" button will be available on the Headquarters screen, which will pull up a barracks screen where you can queue up to the max allowed troops and save the setup. In the actual barracks screen there will be a new button to load the roster in. If the amount of troops in the roster exceeds the available space in the barracks, (ie a 60 spot roster is loaded into a 50 spot barracks,) then only the available number of troops are queued (ie the last two giants aren't queued up so all 50 spots are filled.)
Level 2 : 4mil Elixir - 4day build - TH9
At the second level, the Headquarters will show production in Dark Barracks as well as completion time and gem cost. It will allow for hurrying of production. The dark barracks can be selected in the same way as normal barracks.
A second save slot is added at this level, and the Load Roster button becomes available in Dark Barracks.
Level 3 : 8mil Elixir - 10day build - TH10
At the final level, the Spell Factory is added into the screen with the same time/gem access. A third slot is added for Rosters.
The most powerful ability of this level, similar to the Architect, is a 5% production rate increase for all troop creation.
So that's my idea. If this is overpowered, adding a Dark Elixir cost would probably help balance it. The cost could be added to the saving of Templates for the Village and Rosters for the Army. 500-1000 DE to save a Template/Roster would be fair, with no additional cost to load them. That would encourage people to make better choices.
Or to make this a truly premium item, the initial cost for the building could be gem-based, then regular upgrades. The devs could play around with this a lot.
I think this proposal would solve two major problems with the game, though. First is the burnout rate for people around TH8 level. When you have to load up 200 slots worth of troops, it can be tedious to go to each barracks especially if they're not near each other in your village. Ditto for finding what buildings are upgrading and how long remains. These management changes would help with that tedium.
Second it would create a new resource sink for higher level players. The more resource sinks there are, the more gems people buy, the more money Supercell makes, the more they can invest in improving the game. It's win-win.
Let me know what you all think!