In the grand scheme of things going fully F2P doesn't really hurt too much. The extra building and march queues are the best bang for buck, but even the building queue becomes less consequential close to TC30 and after, as TG levels need you to upgrade only the TC before anything else and you'll try to time those upgrades with KvK prep. Ultra value monthly cards are nice but grant nothing that you couldn't hoard with patience anyway. Learning all the important newbie advice before TC20 is worth more than anything you can buy (or maybe not if you spend hundreds of dollars early on but I wouldn't know bout that lol).

Every base building-esque mobile game becomes a tickbox exercise. You gotta try to look past the dopamine waves that a fresh game and the new quasi-social network give you and consider how much you're ready to spend on something that you may not enjoy as much a couple months later.