I probably would have left my Halflings settlement untouched, simply because looking at the farms and canals made me happy, except that the FA-that-wasn't was about to happen, and since I was one of the first in my FS to finish the tech tree, I torpedoed it so that I could be useful to my FS. Then I figured I might as well use it for event space, so that's what it's been doing ever since. It's so ugly though.
I did also take advantage of it to build and destroy AWs to cannibalise them, and I built another dust factory I totally didn't need but sort of wanted out of sheer boredom (well, plus it was useful with the higher levelling quests).
As for the event glut... I don't know, I have mixed feelings. You really don't have to do them, and each one will be the first event (and therefore exciting) for at least some players, and there are always people who genuinely like events. But on the other hand... well, what
@Dhurrin said, basically. Even if you don't do the event, and even if you don't feel guilty for skipping events because you're not stupidly neurotic like me (
), you can't really ignore them either, because you've still got the event banners and the advisor avatars and the offer windows.
(Incidentally, I feel like they could make that easier on people by:
- Eliminating one of those avatars. The second one is completely redundant because it's just telling you how many quests you have done, and the event banner also tells you this if you click it. There's no reason to have that second avatar. I play on a GIANT-*** MONITOR and I still find it cluttered; for someone trying to play on a laptop screen, it really must be aggravating.
- Allowing players to banish the other avatar, or something -- like, if you really don't want to do the event, you should be able to tick something to hide the avatar window. This should be reversible, i.e. if you click the event banner, you should be able to un-hide the avatar again. But it would be really nice if you could do something like that.)
The thing that makes me grumpiest, personally, is the need to keep space open for the level one workshops and T1s (which we need more of all the time, now that they've decided unboosted goods should be a thing). It bothers me both aesthetically (I deeply, deeply hate the way it looks) and for space principle reasons. It's one thing if you have some empty space you don't immediately; it's another to expect people to just always keep some open. Space is at a premium in this game. Each chapter has a bigger settlement (the settlement for XII sounds really daunting), bigger buildings, more AWs, but the tech tree expansions are fewer and fewer, premium expansions are now very expensive, and we know that at some point you can't get them from scouting anymore. We know that there are legitimate reasons for this, and that's fine, but it seems kind of unfair to limit the space and then make it so that you have to spend some of your more-limited space on junk buildings if you want to get far in events. Setting aside space occasionally used to annoy me but did not
bother me; having to do it more or less permanently bothers me a lot.