Coming back to the original post:
I've played a little Elvenar the last few days. I'm still a ways away from wonders, but that's fair enough - previous stints years ago I never got around to building a single wonder after a much longer time. It is much more polished than previous attempts at playing it. Most notably the bug that persisted for years where manual fights would have invisible units and/or lock up if i did more than a couple without reloading seems to be gone. But also just in general the early chapters seem to flow more naturally. I think they reduced the cost of a lot of early levels of buildings. I also noticed the event pass only cost diamonds instead of $ directly which I'd appreciate in FoE (they had it like that at the start of the pass but moved away from it). Though they do also have a season pass there that's $-only like all the FoE passes.
I've started to look into the wonder system though. And reading a lot of people's rants about the changes a year or so ago - which largely reading what they were seemed to have pivoted a lot of useless wonders into usable wonders; and a few OP wonders that some people relied on into balanced wonders requiring them to pivot (or scream bloody murder).
I understand that your main concern with the system was the odd bits and pieces needed to unlock levels. It's a bit early for me to comment on that as some of the bits I can't even make yet to get a sense of how hard that'll be for a new city (wonders don't even unlock til chapter 4 now so not worried about that yet - we'll see if i last that long). But from what I can tell from commentary it essentially comes down to "to unlock levels you have to engage in all the other features to get shards of a bunch of different things". The equivalent being something like each level costing some antique-dealer currency (disenchanting trash = selling trash to antique dealer), some shards specifically for the feature, and every now and then reno kit(s). I can't say that something akin to that would traumatize me - unless a core piece winds up tied strongly to neo-GvG
Though it would be a bit of an odd "fit" in FoE (FoE GBs have always been a little more runaway crazy than Elvenar wonders which often seemed more like a project to keep the biggest players busy doing something).
Also FoE has a lot more FP proliferation than Elvenar's KP which has been kept largely in check - a max level wonder giving 7! KP lol. And the main event building just making 1 KP + some troops at max level (which is basically an ascended level that you have to spend to keep up; without ascending it doesn't make any KP). Overall I'd say the game's been held into a much healthier space than FoE has, as long as its players are still having fun. Years behind FoE in the race to the grave.
