I suppose I have cleared less provinces than average, seeing how I don't clear them of Wonders and the like.
But even then, don't tell me you can't fight a couple? Crystal provinces are still easy as hell, Silk provinces should also be quite doable and a single fight here or there in random provinces should get you quite a bit of KP already. And as I said before, provinces aren't the only way to get KP. There's still tournaments.
Crystal provinces are cackewalks, but in several / a lot of provinces there are fights you simply cant win, or your losses are absolutely massive.
Think about fights with 8 groups of various enemies. you are always fighting agains all odds since the enemy always overpowers you by a lot, so you need to use weaknesses and tactics to overcome the difference.
In general this means fights like these are bought off.
at a certain points all your provinces will have some fights done but none (except those like crystal) will be finished.
So this means you will not be able to get province expansions during that entire time aka months.
If you slam an active player down like that,you most likely will lose the player.
As explained by Muf-Muf, the Orcs that are currently needed in tournaments are not supposed to be there, so you can still get plenty of kp from tournaments.
Regarding population. It's a strategy building game, if you don't have enough population, you need to change your city. Provinces can be cleared by fighting, it's not like we locked them entirely. With the tournaments, players are able to get a massive bonus on their boosted goods, making negotiating provinces a lot easier. This has now become a bit harder. Players can also use the magic academy to produce even more goods, and build ancient wonders to get a decent amount of supplies to breed Orcs. Things are getting more and more connected.
The blooming trader guild wonder comes in very handy now, because that portal bonus will become very important. Nobody wants to build too many of those rally points taking up 35 squares.
Yes, with a new guest race you're going to have to make choices. Use the kp for research, or use it for the ancient wonders. It's going to take a lot longer for a lot of players to finish this chapter. You can't have it all in a short amount of time unless you buy a lot of diamonds.
Since I dont have the space for both the race buildings and culture for upgrading the regular buildings I will start by upgrading the armouries.
I will then destroy any culture building, and will count my houses required in the post research tree case and destroy all others.
This will create a massive amount of space, if multiply rally points are allowed and I have room for them then multiple of them will be build.
since the armouries drain your supply of supplies as well, even if you had the space/culture you simply cant run barracks and armouries at full speed, and still have plenty to upgrade all your houses. the fairy upgrades were already a nightmare to keep your 4 workers in action and not have your supplies dwindle to 0, orcs will be worse.
I will put all effort in getting the research tree done asap, so that I can start rebuilding my town with the orc design. the huge room left by the destruction of factories and culture will help moving around the old buildings to there new position.
wonders can come again after the orcs are completed. in the end no one is slower or faster with the AW in either case.
As for the orcs to me it doesnt really hurt me if I need to pay orcs or not for the provinces, but I would have hit this cap pre dwarves, if at that time orcs where required I would have most likely lost interest and would have quitted elvenar.
I simply do not understand the game designers point in creating doors that slam shut in front of there customers. this aint a traffic jam, but a brick wall that takes ages to bring down.