If you are just heading into orcs, you might want to keep the winter stars in your inventory. Once you place them, you will lose them forever if you try to delete them. And I am telling you...you want to delete EVERYTHING you can to get through the orc chapter.
Dikke, you can have as few farms and portals as you want, it will just take you a LOT longer. It took me a long time to get through that chapter and I hated every second of it. I couldn't build anything else because I had no culture and no population. The buildings are very ugly to me, so I didn't even want to see them. Plus, there was a contest that happened while I was stuck in orcs and I had so much trouble doing it because of how messed up my city was.
But heck, you can build 5 farms and 1 rally point and take a year to get through the chapter. Whatever you want.
As far as armories go, I have 3 and I think that is about right. They suck because they take SOOO much pop and culture. But I bit the bullet and maxed them out. As I was going through the orc chapter, I thought, oh hey...I don't seem to need that many orcs right now, I won't worry about making them all and just save the supplies. Boy was that a mistake! When it came to upgrading workshops...dang those orcs go fast!!! And even now I am stuck in the world map because I don't have enough orcs. So, don't let the armories sit idle. Make as many orcs as you can. I think I had 30,000 saved up and then all went in a few days! whooosh!
Is it just me or is this game getting more and more frustrating?
Not just you. The wood elves may be my last race. I am so bored. It has turned into a real snoozefest. I don't have any room for the tons of things you need and I won't destroy my whole city again...besides....I need all the culture/mana buildings now and can't do that. Because of all the stupid new "don't scout" stuff and the stupidly high scouting times anyway, I don't have room for this race. You really need to buy expansions to have the room for the woodelves. It is a lovely race, but it is so slow I just don't care about the game any more. I am not angry, or passionate, or fighting for anything. I just simply don't care. I make 200 mana tears a day and I need 3000 to get something done. Yeah sure. Oh, I could make more if I sat here every 3 hours to get them, but there just isn't anything for me to do except that, and it isn't worth it to sign in just for that and there is no other time frame to make them in. Whatever. Fighting has become wayyyyyyy too complicated for me and I don't care about it at all either. What difference would it make if I did care? I don't have any room to put up all these new military buildings because again, I don't have any room. All I seem to do is log in and do chores every day. Instead of an interesting puzzle, this game has become chores and watching paint dry. The contest is cool, but I don't have any room to put any buildings down anyway, so whatever. For me it all boils down to no room means no game mostly. These end races just take sooooo much space and there isn't any space to put them in.
And I have had some experiences lately with the game having a bad bug, it ate 500kp out of a wonder that I had, and support wouldn't replace the kp and just told me basically...too bad...so sad for you...the game policy is that we don't replace resources lost because of bugs unless you bought them with diamonds. That left a very bad taste in my mouth. Very very bad. 500kp out the window. Do you know how stupidly long it took to get all that finally built up in a stupid ancient wonder that is so stupidly impossible to upgrade anyway and they keep nerfing the things the ancient wonders do, so after the year or more that it takes to get one to nothing more than a mid level and all that kp got destroyed in one second? Those damn ancient wonders are torture. How is something that will take a year or more to build a fun thing? Not fun for me in the least. Talk about frustrating. It is past frustrating into total apathy. So not only am I playing a boring game, not only do I not have any room to build anything, not only do I have to do really bad chores each day that we have all been complaining about since day one ....yes...neighborly help I am talking to you....but on top of all that, players are treated very poorly by the policies. This has led to my best friends all quitting. So...you know....
Idk. Things might change. Might not.