I am fortunate in that first, because of fortuitous timing, I have plenty of unused space to reconfigure my city, and second, the amount of population compensated is comparable to my loss.
My real loss is in my confidence that the game is worth studying, understanding, and devising and implementing strategies based on that understanding. I enjoy Elvenar primarily as a puzzle involving trade offs between in game real estate, the passage of time outside the game, and my available play time. The more uncertainty about the future values of these trade offs, the less worthwhile it is to devise and implement strategies.
It is as if I were trying to solve a series of legacy chess problems, where the solutions chosen for earlier problems affected the initial position of later problems. If, for example, the promotion of pawns to queens were nerfed as being too powerful, so that pawns could henceforth only promote to bishops, knights, or rooks, it would be a much less satisfying puzzle to solve. If some solutions are "too good," and therefore subject to nerfing, then in a sort of Goldilocks Paradox, the optimal solution is suboptimal because it risks being nerfed, and the truly optimal choices are likely to be mediocre ones with no risk of being nerfed.
So the competition becomes who can be ahead of the middle of the pack, but not too far ahead, and the real strategy becomes determining how far ahead is too far ahead, and staying just shy of that.
Or as the Japanese say, "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."