There is nothing "easy" about negotiating in either the Spire or Tourney. Negotiation requires goods, gold, and supplies. Supplies and gold and goods are not easy for younger cities. The higher the chapter you are in the higher the price and the more items it requires to cater. Catering can require orcs, seeds, mana, and sentient goods. A person has to get those goods to negotiate with and that takes effort and planning. Everything that is spent on catering is one less thing you have for Techs and Upgrades and Trading. The costs are too high for negotiation and negotiating can wipe out a person of needed goods/seeds/orcs/mana/sentient goods if they are not very careful.
Fighting? What makes you think everyone wants to fight? I do a mix of catering and fighting. I hate fighting but I do it because otherwise I wouldn't be able to complete the Spire and contribute to Tourney. I wish I could cater everything. I have never played FoE and never intend to play FoE. If that's the game for you then go for it. Play both. Play FoE alone. Play neither. No one is forcing you to play anything. It is your choice. Elvenar was never meant to be a FoE clone. But I challenge you to take one week and just cater the Spire and Tourney--no fighting, just catering. Then tell me how "easy" it is.
you can fully clear the spire and pull way more than your share of a 10 chest tourney, every week, setting up your city for pure negotiator, as a 20k city....
and with little downtime.
You can't even come close to doing that as a fighter or mostly fighter hybrid.
This game currently is designed around taking the easy route, even if so many of you can't see it. If you want to fight, then fight... like i do usually... but it's by design an inferior way to play in terms of reaching rewards faster and doing it with the least downtime.
The answer is balancing... like all games have to do... in this case... nerfing the easy route.
The people who actually are against such nerfing and pretending the game is nearly perfectly balanced that way, are either just not knowing how to set up for such an imbalance, or they are trying to keep the devs from ruining their gig.
When you have people planning out FA's by ripping up their cities to prepare for a few flag pulls, i really don't expect many such people to understand the giant pink elephant that is right in front of their faces, concerning the giant advantage pure negotiating has.... even if you yourself can't figure out how to set up your city to do it.
I think the devs are suffering from a case of too many yes men patting them on their heads, blinding them to gaping holes in this game.
The game is not even close to being perfectly balanced fighting vs negotiating,
unless you city is NOT set up for negotiating then it feels like it's roughly the same. Negotiator setups rule this game... it's not even close.
I'm not complaining... it's just a simple fact and an odd way to create a game considering all the fighting content they created.
"this isn't true".... yeah, and the world was flat