Yeah, there’s a lot of potential here. If you really feel like you’re stuck with what you’ve done, start over. But the core idea is great!
Sorry - reading that back I think I made it sound more negative than I meant to!
‘Shelved’ isn’t ‘binned’, there’s a lot of code I can re-use &c and it was fun playing with it, but I’ll just leave it in situ for now…
I’m thinking this way at the moment:
Use the existing engine to provide a landscape sparsely populated with ‘serfs’
Allow users to make lego-style buildings (or use default prefabs) to represent farms, mines, houses, factories &c which they can place on the landscape in any empty square.
If the serfs like the building they’ll use it and maintain it, if not the building will gradually decay to nothing, leaving an empty space for something else.
The idea of the game is to score usage points - the more your buildings are used the higher your score.
Example: The player finds an empty area and builds a farm. The serfs like the farm as it’s better than hunter-gathering so they use it. The player gets enough points to build a mill beside the farm. The serfs like this too as it improves the quality of the farm produce so more points are scored. The player then builds a forge. The serfs don’t like this (they have no metal) so the forge slowly crumbles away. The player builds a house. The serfs do like this as it’s nice to sleep in. And so on…
The gameplay arises because it’s multiplayer. Another player builds a mine and a tavern nearby. The serfs like the mine (wages) and the tavern (food and fun) so they use the mill and the house less - player2 is stealing player1s serfs!
The creative part is modifying buildings (lego-style) and planning towns to keep the serfs interested.
Is this making sense so far? Hmm…
I think the reasoning that ‘user-generated-content would result in everything looking the same’ downright stupid. Show me one instance where that happened.
Or merge ideas: Players build dungeons for monsters to move into.
Dungeon Keeper was cool, maybe steal something from there… I liked the feel of this though a bit crude still,
lots and lots of good basework…
Particularly i think being constrained in the applet window is always demeaning, full screen would do more justice to it…
Interesting idea! Not sure how that would actually work though?
Me neither, but I’m tickled by the idea of keeping monsters well-fed with adventurers.
Tasty Half-Elf Mage! Yum! 
Simon