[QUOTE="Moho, post: 203072, member: 27694] I was referring strictly to the provinces I had to scout in order to expand my city. For example, the advisors have proposed the following two different missions: 1) Have three level 5 armories and 2) Upgrade your Main Hall to level 8. My Main Hall is level 5 and I used to have only two level 3 armories. These upgrades need population, that is more Residences with more Cultural buildings. Of course I'm upgrading the existent Cultural buildings, but it takes time and chance, and besides all, everything needs space.
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As your squad size gets larger, that drops the difficulty of combat (though, once scouted, the number of troops/cost of catering remains the same.). There are different philosophies on researching the optional squad size upgrades. Some say do not do so because it only makes for more troops to fight/higher negotiating costs in spire and tournament...but, I just started a second city that is about to make the jump to chapter III... It was prohibitively expensive to scout and clear all the provinces I needed without the squad size upgrade. I don't think it changed catering costs, but made the battles a lot more winnable.
Another one is when to upgrade main hall. MH takes a LOT of people and culture. I tend to only upgrade it when I have to, either because I want more gold from Neighbor Help or because scouting or research activation costs are getting to near my MH gold and supplies capacity! I ignore the MH upgrade quests which seem to always come too soon for me.
As for the space pressure, well, that is part of the game, and I suspect part of Innos way to sell more diamonds (premium province buys), which is about the only way they make money to pay for the servers and all the people who create the game and moderate these forums. They make some from selling troop kits and other packages during events and fellowship adventures, but I bet diamond sales are most of their revenue.