Nothing will be better for you, because you decided to do so, and didnt listened devs. You said that you will scout as far away as possible as fast as possible before they block you. I for once listened and have stopped scouting the day they announced it, and now on the map are fights easy peasy for me, tho i have only 310 scouted provinces where enemy squad size is 1539 (in 5v5 scenario) and mine is already 1311.
Technically, they're also listening to the devs. By completing encounters to get relics (you couldn't get enough for the quest from tournaments, not fast enough anyway), completing quests which tell you to complete provinces and encounters, and unlocking province expansions to place those ridiculously oversized new military buildings, they're absolutely playing the way the devs want you to play.
There is simply not enough room in my beta city to build the training grounds, and my beta city has the bare minimum of residences and manufactories that I could get away with without waiting ages after a research is unlocked to produce the goods for it! This forces me to try to negotiate out past the radius of where I can fight, simply to unlock another expansion to place their new required building on. I've been saying for a while that they need to add another row of space to the default map, not because of a new guest race, but because they've added so many new buildings to earlier chapters that they need to add completely new city expansions early on in the game and these need to be in addition to the expansions which are added to make room for new guest race buildings. Magic Academy, Training Grounds (and residences to give the Training Grounds population), three acts of Ancient Wonders? Which they've scaled the combat system assuming you have, but which there is not sufficient room for on the map?
A good f2p game is a game that allows any f2p players to compete with the p2p players, because the p2p players wouldn't buy items to get ahead if they didn't see it as a competition. A city with a training grounds and Magic Academy is effectively forced to buy diamonds to upgrade anything. I would say that this is not a good f2p move. Players should have the space so that f2p players can have the minimum space needed to have all their required buildings at maximum level. P2p players then buy culture buildings and space to exceed that.
When I planned, on Elven Architect, what my main city on us4 would look like on the wood elves level... there was room for the mercenary camp, but not the training grounds. The residences needed to support the population for thirteen workshops, four magic dust manufactories, four scrolls manufactories, six planks manufactories, two armories, a barracks, and the main hall, and the mercenary camp, take so much space that even with venar's rocks 1 from chapter 5 and a golden abyss at level 4 (probably 5 or 6 by the time I get there) most of the map is taken up by residences. This is not one of the cities that people talk about as being too full of manufactories for ranking points, and yet I still don't have the room for it! And this city also doesn't have a Magic Academy, because the supply of relics since they released the new battle system is far too low to ever support having the Magic Academy again. I didn't think it was worth it before, but now it's absolutely useless, so that's another 25 spaces that I have that anyone else doesn't have, and as soon as their relics run out, they won't be able to continue using its magic. Also I have bought diamonds for premium expansions for this city! With every premium expansion filled in, I would still not have enough room!
And that's also without building the Spires of the Tempest, which I had been aggressively pursuing shards for but now that I have it, will probably not build it. The changes to the battle system are simply too harsh for me to want to take the time to relearn it, based on my experiences in beta.
