I have seen this posted in the forums. What is the purpose? In our fellowship we just use the heart to shift around where you might want KP placed. Is this the same thing? Also why is it detrimental to have a wonder get to a high level sometimes?
Thanks in advance for any replies.
For the first question, that depends on context.
In the active sense, "dumping" KP just means to unload a lot of KP onto something (usually an AW).
In another sense, it's more like a "dumpster", where KP is "discarded" into a chosen AW for whatever reason. Those reasons may include:
- Your KP bar is full and you're tech locked. Nowhere else to put it but in an AW of your choice.
- Your designated AW in a swap thread is full. The giver has to either remember a debt or "dump" it into another AW to avoid that debt. The more polite people will send you a private message indicating a situation like this and ask what you want done.
- You have a favorited AW that you don't actually want upgraded. It is designated as a dumpster to lure less-effective KP hunters into an AW you have no intention to upgrade further (e.g. Prosperity Towers past lv 16)
As for why having AWs at a high level might be detrimental, it affects your city's
CAL (City Advancement Level), which is then used to calculate the cost of Tournaments and Spire. The relevant part of the equation
is based on the sum of the levels of all your Ancient Wonders. The term involved is also very small.
It takes a combined total of 334 Ancient Wonder Levels in order to fully double the costs of your Tournament and Spire encounters and negotiations. The number is quite small, but if you're chasing the last few fractions of a percent after having optimized everything else, carefully choosing what Ancient Wonders you want in service of boosting your Spire/Tournament effectiveness can help. It's the lesser known aspect of the dev's intent on making us be picky about our choices, aside from the greater known issue of limited space.
Speaking of space, doubling the amount of (province/research) expansions you place in your city has the same effect on the formula as suddenly going from zero AWs to
ten eleven-and-some-change lv 30 AWs. That's a bit of a gap, and that's also (partially) why cities that are smaller than they could be exist. Having as few AWs as possible kinda go hand-in-hand with that ideal, unless you strike upon something very synergistic.
The other reason I can think of regarding smallish cities is that they want their city to be a particular shape at all times, so they'll bank expansions until they get enough to put it all down at once. I'm rather partial to squares and rectangles, with a few exceptions done in service of practicality over purity