So with the changes it means I can no longer compete with those who are ahead, rather than allowing me to compete,
It's exactly the other way around
Players who are that far ahead, are being limited now from going even further, so you
will be able to compete again with them in the future
As long as the distance of the provinces you fight, matches your tech tree progress, the fights will be perfectly doable. This means that by this alteration we're making now, a moment will come when all players are as advanced on the World Map as they should be at that point, so it will be an equal competition again, which it currently isn't
we are limited because the village sizes are limited, so villages cannot expand
Yes, that is the whole point. By allowing players to scout ahead 200 provinces further than they should, they gain a lot of expansions that shouldn't be available to them yet in this stage of the game. City space
should be limited, depending on where you are in your tech tree. When it's limited, you have to make better choices on how to arrange your city. When you have all space available, you can just build anything you want without having to think about efficiency, which takes away the fun.
Effectively the devs are penalising those that have chosen to play the game from near the start, and for sticking with it.
No, only if you choose to see it that way yourself
Noone is being punished, we're bringing back the game balance so the game will stay interesting and challening,
particularly for these players. Yes, this means that they're currently stopped from acquiring even more provinces on the World Map, but it
is necessary to make sure that future chapters remain interesting to them. Once their game progress matches their World Map progress again, they will again be able to scout further and fight harder fights and the game will be a lot more fun than it is now (just battling with some overpowered units and keep on acquiring as many city expansions as you can once you're at the end of the tech tree - which is no fun at all). Again: The fun of a
City Builder is having to think strategically about how to design your city in an efficient way. The fun is not in keeping on battling and having plenty of space available once new guest races arrive so you can build anything you like without having to think about strategy.
If I'm getting this right. You are punishing new players
No, then you're not getting it right
As explained above: First of all, noone is being punished. Secondly: We're balancing World Map progression now in such a way that new players have a possibility to catch up with the others again. It's quite a common system, actually. I don't know if you have played more city building games, but it's quite normal that when you're in a certain age/era/chapter, you're limited to explore a World Map beyond that point. This can be because you'd have to fight battles against higher-aged units, for which you're not strong enough at that point or e.g. you'd need higher-era goods for negotiation, which you can't produce yet. This is turn means that you'd have to advance to the next era, to be able to explore those parts on the World Map, which is exactly how it should be.
The big difference here, is that that balance wasn't correct from the start. Yes, we should have seen that coming sooner, but nevertheless it
is something we have to do something about now, to prevent it from getting out of balance even further. The thing is: For new players, it won't be any problem. It's only logical that at a certain point, fights get too hard and the need to progress to be able to win. For our current players now, it is a different story for they were used to a different situation, in which they could just go ahead and fight battles against armies that were 5-6 times as large as theirs. For them it will now (temporarily) be a limit and of course that's never nice, but it
is needed to bring the balance back in the game again and we don't do that because we want to "punish" anyone, we do that because we know it's necessary to keep the game interesting in the long run.