I voted
remove them completely because:
"Have Orcs in Negotiations. But only for those in the Orcs chapter" will not happen. They basically have to make it dependent upon how many provinces people cleared, or there would be even more complaints. If people know they will have to use orcs to negotiate in that chapter, they will make sure they cleared as many provinces as possible *before* unlocking orcs. Unless you spend money on everything, you will be used to taking forever in this game, so you'll prefer to delay orcs by a few weeks and actually be able to do the chapter once you get there without selling half your stuff or being forced to buy expansions. The devs know this, which is why they throttled people by adding orcs to negotiations at a point they knew a lot of people nowhere near orcs had explored to. They could, after all, have figured out the furthest anyone had explored, and then added them there if they cared about the players at all. Take note that exploring was not discouraged prior to this for negotiations beyond requiring a lot of resources.
Having orcs in the orc chapter and not before would entail rearranging the game and putting restrictions on the amount of provinces people could acquire per chapter before so it won't change much as those who are stuck will still be stuck since if you are seeing orcs, that means you are supposed to only have explored to that point once you get to the orcs chapter. However, for lower level players this would actually be a good move as they wouldn't suddenly find themselves in the deep end mid dwarf or at the beginning of fairies.
I don't see what was wrong with the system as it was. If they must be added, restrictions on the amount of provinces people can acquire must be introduced early in the game, as should the requirement to build up the military aspect. We shouldn't neglect the fact that before the or chapter, people were led to believe they could play this game without engaging in the military aspect and have planned their cities accordingly. Why build space wasting armouries if you never fight? How annoying is it to have to waste all that space just so you can keep negotiating? And why do we suddenly need slaves anyway? Our cities did fine without them before
It makes no sense to twist the game in a completely different direction at such a late stage, unless you want to annoy everyone. The only people not affected by this are people who don't mind paying for everything no matter what and people who already benefited from expanding their city while stuck at the end of fairies and thus have plenty of room. Since they are already in the orcs chapter, they will also have orcs available soon enough, making it irritating but not actually ruining their game per se.
Anyway, nothing will change as we were taught by the MA which we are still stuck with and I'd guess everyone who didn't use it still doesn't as it's just as pointless as it's always been. We could use it to "solve" some of the production issues we have, but not everyone is the type who can remember to log on like clockwork/not everyone has that kind of time, so the spells do next to nothing anyway (which I've explained to no avail before
), nor do I personally have any incentive to keep logging on when there's literally almost nothing to do. So we'll be encouraged to complain, and the devs will pretend to listen and do some token thing that amounts to zero, and that will be it until the next bomb explodes and we'll all be complaining about that instead, assuming we are still inflicting this frustration upon ourselves.
