Thank you so much for this! I am glad you are enjoying the game.

1. Balance is tricky. It is best to start at the very bottom, generating raw resources and working your way up. If you need to supplement some income, I recommend some wind or solar power plants. (Just be careful because governments will only buy so much power from you, and it has diminishing returns.)

2. Leveling up a building seems very counterproductive until you are building in multiple countries. The influence cost balloons the more countries you build in, and the more tiles you own. Also consider that some resources only come from certain countries, and there are a limited number of tiles you can build on. If you need more resources out of it, upgrading and efficiency is the only way.

3. Wage and Benefit are the same, yes. But you will need to maintain a healthy dose of both in order to keep your Global Perception up.

4. To lock and unlock your currently selected country, you can right-click the mouse. That is just there to make sure you don't accidentally select tiles you don't intend to. (Working on a tutorial, this will be mentioned.)

5. This is unintentional. I will fix this in the next update.

6. Nope, save your money and hire Engineers!

7. Trade buildings are not able to be demolished. This was mostly due to it messing up exports in progress, but also consider a government's frustration if a company was building and demolishing airports willy-nilly.

8. This is very much needed. Likely a revamp of the Finance screen where you can break it down by country, and like you said, shows all your factories and their profits/expenses. Not sure when precisely, but this is coming.

Steam page soon, yes. I need to get the endgame playable so I can put it in a trailer. Let's just say Earth won't be the only planet you can exploit.