I do wish I'd read this earlier, that 80,000 story quest sucks! And so stupid, it comes after the training ground quest. Even if you allow zero time to actually do that quest there is only 1 research after it in the tree and that's for 52,000...
I personally dislike that they went back to the 15min production times, but it does allow players to choose their pace so I guess it's not a bad thing. You could also mostly trade resources one for the other to minimise the total goods you need. I won't complain about the teleports needed, still really glad to have them.
It was quite a long grind though. Whilst it's taken me through to about the start of the next chapter it did feel like a longer slog than any other before it. It demands so many more of the decaying resources, obviously a strategy they went with, but it makes the game less enjoyable. Accumulating 2.5 million mana @ 10% decay. You've got to be producing about 350k a day to make any meaningful progress and that's really hard when you're losing even more space to the chapter buildings. Obviously the wonders are the way around that, but I feel they are assuming a higher wonder level than most players are going to have.
Enjoyed the building designs and I'm very appreciative that we can run the troop buildings simultaneously, I think that's made up for the higher costs of tournaments and spire.