If I remember correctly, the initial excuse made for revamping the battle system was to make it "easier" and more attractive to players. That is obvious BS, as is the excuse it's about balance.
- Lots of people were stuck unable to fight due to enemy units being too large in the past. Better troops were added to make people able to fight again.
- People affected by the above could still negotiate
- That was then prevented for all but those at the end of the tech tree by adding orcs, but people could still fight to a limited degree
- This in turn is now also no longer possible, but people at the end of the tech tree can still negotiate
So, if people advanced "too far" it is the result of bad game design. What we are seeing here is a game that went live before it was remotely finished and which still is not finished and which tests stuff on a beta server for no apparent reason since it gets released to the live servers anyway, irrespective of anything so why bother with beta in the first place? It seems the devs churn something out which then causes problems because it was not thought out, so something else equally unthought out is changed to create more problems, and so on. Also, there's no such thing as advancing too far while it still remains possible by buying diamonds, and as has been pointed out, expansion is restricted anyway by a limitation of the grid. The restricted grid is clearly there to set a limit, and if it's all about not letting people carry on exploring the map once they hit that limit, the issue could simply be solved by locking further exploration once people hit that limit, or even by reserving part of the grid for bought expansions if we are going to be pushing pay to win aspects. i.e., people can expand x amount of times via exploration, after which any further expansions on the map are locked unless they buy them.
It's really obvious that this - like previous changes - is being made only to prevent those who do not regularly buy diamonds from having a high score. The addition of orcs already led me to leave my previous FS on Winyandor because I could no longer compete with players who had access to more space due to having been at the end of the tech tree when it was implemented. I cannot imagine new players are having a better experience since they now have to build MA and have tons of AW to collect and build.
It's quite bizarre that we are honestly expected to believe this is about balance as opposed to about pressuring people to buy diamonds and/or making the game utterly boring and frustrating unless we do. Of course people who previously bought diamonds are equally being punished, but apparently their custom is as undesirable as that of the ftp players, unless they continue to fork out cash. I honestly don't know why anyone would buy diamonds in the game at this stage unless they were a new player unaware of the situation.
