Gkyr
Chef
City expansions are the strongest determinant on how costly it is/will be to fight or negotiate your way up the Spire or through the rounds of the Tournaments. How far you have progressed in the game chapters is also a determinant of costliness but, for comparison, progressing all the way through Elvenar chapter 16 will increase your Spire and Tourney costs less than adding 7 tech or province earned expansions to your city. Expansions do not affect the cost of province (map) encounters; each province on the map is the same experience for all players, unless overscouted.
If you are a showcase city builder and you want plenty of room and you want to build one of everything (and two or more of some things) then this caveat is not for you.
But if you aspire to be a Gold Spire player, join a competitive fellowship or max out a Tourney, then adding too many expansions too early may frustrate your plans.
Case in point: there was a recent post by a gamer who was used to negotiating their way up the Spire. In the later stages of the game Spire negotiations become too expensive, especially when the resources must also be used for building, upgrades and tech advancement. Everyone, with a few possible exceptions, turns to fighting their way up the Spire. The poster is not able to survive multiple waves of Spire battles. Moreover, they play on Mobile and therefore cannot manual fight.
There are post facto fixes for this that are discussed on other threads but this thread is meant to warn you against setting yourself up for this difficulty by keeping your expansions lean and mean. I could not see the poster's city since we are on different servers, but elvenstats.com could give me an outline of their space use, with my own city as a comparison. Both the poster and I are in Chapter 16; while they cannot survive Spire level 2, I can shinny up to the top as fast or slow as I want to.
There are two broad-outline differences between their city and mine. Most tellingly, they have 120 expansions while I have 103. I have 85% of their expansions and my cost determiner, based on the City Advancement Level (CAL) (google it) is 80% of theirs. This ignores the fact that difficulty is also based on number of Ancient Wonder upgrades but each upgrade increases Cal only by .003. Their AW buildings cover 301 tiles while mine cover 227. While it is impossible to infer any upgrade meaning from that, it is more likely that they have invested in resource-augmenting AWs, which is what their negotiation approach to the Spire would imply and then switched to military AWs as they tried to fight more.
Building both styles of play into AWs requires more expansions and, once you place an expansion, you cannot remove it; you are stuck with it.
The advice you are welcome to take away from this post is to build toward a goal. Either a beautiful city goal with expansions being no problem, a military city goal with lean and men expansions or a resource-intensive city, also with limited expansions. Then there is ultra-casual gaming where none of this matters. Once your military or resource city has matured buildings (AWs, resource or military producing/conserving cities and goal-focused special event buildings) you will have the latitude to expand into the other goals of city-building. That is what the top 50-200 cities on each server have done. But trying to establish a multi-function city early on is a frustrating enterprise.
If you are a showcase city builder and you want plenty of room and you want to build one of everything (and two or more of some things) then this caveat is not for you.
But if you aspire to be a Gold Spire player, join a competitive fellowship or max out a Tourney, then adding too many expansions too early may frustrate your plans.
Case in point: there was a recent post by a gamer who was used to negotiating their way up the Spire. In the later stages of the game Spire negotiations become too expensive, especially when the resources must also be used for building, upgrades and tech advancement. Everyone, with a few possible exceptions, turns to fighting their way up the Spire. The poster is not able to survive multiple waves of Spire battles. Moreover, they play on Mobile and therefore cannot manual fight.
There are post facto fixes for this that are discussed on other threads but this thread is meant to warn you against setting yourself up for this difficulty by keeping your expansions lean and mean. I could not see the poster's city since we are on different servers, but elvenstats.com could give me an outline of their space use, with my own city as a comparison. Both the poster and I are in Chapter 16; while they cannot survive Spire level 2, I can shinny up to the top as fast or slow as I want to.
There are two broad-outline differences between their city and mine. Most tellingly, they have 120 expansions while I have 103. I have 85% of their expansions and my cost determiner, based on the City Advancement Level (CAL) (google it) is 80% of theirs. This ignores the fact that difficulty is also based on number of Ancient Wonder upgrades but each upgrade increases Cal only by .003. Their AW buildings cover 301 tiles while mine cover 227. While it is impossible to infer any upgrade meaning from that, it is more likely that they have invested in resource-augmenting AWs, which is what their negotiation approach to the Spire would imply and then switched to military AWs as they tried to fight more.
Building both styles of play into AWs requires more expansions and, once you place an expansion, you cannot remove it; you are stuck with it.
The advice you are welcome to take away from this post is to build toward a goal. Either a beautiful city goal with expansions being no problem, a military city goal with lean and men expansions or a resource-intensive city, also with limited expansions. Then there is ultra-casual gaming where none of this matters. Once your military or resource city has matured buildings (AWs, resource or military producing/conserving cities and goal-focused special event buildings) you will have the latitude to expand into the other goals of city-building. That is what the top 50-200 cities on each server have done. But trying to establish a multi-function city early on is a frustrating enterprise.