In my human town I have completed 233 provinces. I might be able to complete a few more by fighting, but certainly not enough to finish any ancient wonders. This means, by the time I can complete any more provinces, I'll be in the Orcs chapter and need orcs to do so. I'll also need orcs to upgrade stuff and by that time, I'll also have been forced to research the earlier AW. That means it will be months before I can continue collecting runes for my ancient wonders, unless I get my runes from tournaments (and why are tournaments not on on the weekends when people have most time to waste doing endless boring battles?). I.e. Inno is forcing us to either not bother with AW's or to participate in tournaments. On the other hand, of course, I won't have any room for the ancient wonders anyway, as I cannot get any expansions via the world map until I'm in Orcs, and by then, I'll need any I get for the orc building upgrades. Do Inno not realise that constantly changing the game dynamics and hence putting people at a serious disadvantage depending upon their progress or lack thereof is terrible game design? I expect there are people who paid for ancient wonders who now feel really annoyed since they can no longer expand their cities unless they pay more money for expansions. There are probably also people who've maxed out bought expansions to make room for stuff they bought and now might even have to delete things they paid for to advance further, so in the end, there are going to be a lot of peeved people with the exception of those who play extremely casually or who were lucky enough to have been able to hoard expansions while stuck at the end of fairies.
Inno are both constantly restricting choice in order to force players to engage in aspects of the game they dislike and adding more and more pressure points to make people cough up money for a game that's becoming incrementally less fun due to players being battered into following a set path as regards playing style. Maybe the game designers should move onto politics if their aim in life is to trick people into doing things they don't want to do any pay for the privilege as well?