and miss out on a number of Knowledge Points (because I won't be getting any KP per hours once I reach 10 KP
Welcome to the End Game.
Had you reached the end of Chapter IV, there would be nothing, whatever,
that prevented you from contributing to your favorite Ancient Wonders.
As you're only at the end of Chapter II the scouting times are only a very few hours
and it may well be that you've already scouted plenty of sectors
and need only to acquire them.
In any case you'll lose maybe 24 KPs at the most.
Just be grateful that you're not in the middle of discovering your Chapter IV
Advanced Scouting technology, which is gated by 50 sectors.
I know. In my Beta city I tossed off FIVE provincial expansions yesterday (30 sectors)
and I'll need to do a couple more today. My scouting times are 6 hours apiece.
I knew about the gating, but I had assumed that provincial tournaments would be
released before we got the Fairies.
so they can get rune shards for cheaper later on in the game
Which, to me, seems like a pretty good reason for adding the gating. In particular, scouting soaks up a lot of Coins that might otherwise be used to buy non-boosted goods, rather than producing and trading boosted goods. To the point, a "go slow" strategy is just as poisonous to game balance as the declinable quests exploit was, even though I happen to be on the wrong side of the fence this time.
Over at
https://us.forum.elvenar.com/index....ming-about-tournaments.1728/page-3#post-12088 I'm chasing the progression of Scouting costs, and it's a strange world. I'll be very surprised, and disappointed, if the Scouting Costs/Times and the related Acquisition Negotiation Costs / Defensive Army Sizes are all sensible and bug free.
It appears to me that the developers are (wisely) preventing us from cheating their system by using snake patterns to get into the outer rings at a hundredth of the cost that they intended. It's apparent that the scouting costs converge once you've scouted the "appropriate" number of sectors. The unrestrained scouting sequences invited abuse.