I just wanted to comment to disagree with Rob Hoff (no offense Rob). I think the dynamic of picking which places to harvest from was very interesting, especially when you discover that only one area can be farmed by one type of guy (which the desert actually does a great job of teaching me about). I actually think that it might be good to make auto-farming happen right away, and tutorializing the ability to choose targets early in the game instead of making auto-farm an upgrade, because "pro" play will involve saving the 2 wood and 2 food to optimize resource gathering. But I think something of the secret sauce of the game would be lost if you removed having to pick which resources to collect, and would become especially annoying if you had a farmer who selected the least optimal resource to farm every turn for 3 turns in a row and costed you potentially one or two extra farming opportunities.
Another way to teach players about selecting where to farm might be to leave the cheap auto-farming upgrade in the game, but make it a prerequisite for the rest of a skill tree branch, so players didn't feel bad losing resources due to their "laziness" as that upgrade is necessary to get to more powerful upgrades in the future. (You can tell I was repulsed by the idea of paying for that upgrade lol. I'm the type who would rather just do a little extra work to be optimal though.)
Thank you for the extensive feedback! You really hit great points here. The auto picking is important to reduce tedium, as it will be only annoying after you did it a hundred times. Still, i feel like i need the manual bit to really drive home that you have to work on adjacent fields. But pro players shouldn't be incentivized to make the game less enjoyable by saving these resources (which you really do feel in the beginning of the run) - optimizing the fun out of it. The skilltree idea would work great though!
Yea, I imagine it could simply be the first upgrade you have to get, that is literally the base of the skill tree. While I was writing that comment, I did kind of realize that teaching how to target resources in the way you did was actually very elegant. And now that I think about it, the thing that eventually made me buy the auto-picking upgrade was when I bought the sight range upgrade, saw that that unlocked another sight range upgrade, and thought that maybe there was another more interesting upgrade hidden behind the auto-picking one. I think if you were to take this further, probably a skill tree that shows the player "hey, you have to buy auto-picking, but it will be the first in a long line of upgrades" really would be the perfect solution.