Elvenar Embassies – Research Preview

Chapter 16 – whaaat?! Those of you who played Chapter 15 may feel like it did take forever, and yet I feel like it has been a long time since it was over. Even the most optimistic didn’t start to ask questions about Chapter 16 yet as it took so long before Elvenar chapter 15 hit live. And yet here we are 😉 And while nothing has been announced officially yet, there is a ton information that is already in the game files. Which means that Chapter 16 got pretty far along the development cycle. So let’s take a look at what is known so far – of course, anything you find here is subject to change. So without further ado, let’s preview research tree in Elvenar Chapter 16 – Embassies.

SPOILER ALERT! Now, if the intro above didn’t get the message across 😉 The following post is a one giant spoiler for the upcoming chapter. So if you don’t want to spoil this until it hits actual beta or live servers, you should stop reading just about now. You have been warned!

* – * – *

Research Overview

So here is how research tree for chapter 16 looks like currently (you probably want to open the image in the new tab and zoom in):

And here is corresponding research for chapter 15 for reference (without requirements overlay):

OK, so what do we have here? Here are some of the things that pop up:

There is no Advanced Scouts tech in chapter 16. So no reduced scouting costs and times. I am certain a great number of people are excited about that 😉

We’re getting 2 more research expansions – the same as in chapter 15. Warning: those are expensive to activate. The good news is that both techs are terminal (have no dependents) and do not require any of the guest race specific resources. So you can work these after you’re done with the settlement if need be.

So… many… upgrades

There are 4 possible Squad Size upgrades this chapter – the same as in chapter 15. The difference is, in chapter 15 all were optional. This time around, you’re getting 2 mandatory SSUs, and 2 optional ones. And I was so happy keeping squad size the same in the last chapter…

As anticipated, we’re getting 4 extra upgrades for T2/T5 manufactories (I’ll probably make a separate post on buildings / upgrades), as well as very welcome upgrades to the Training Grounds. We’re also getting usual chapter upgrades to residences, workshops, armories and a Main Hall. Nothing unexpected here. Main Hall keeps the same size, but residences will grow in size.

We’re now used to residences, workshops and Main Hall upgrades to be split into 2 techs each. But now manufactories and guest race buildings upgrades are split into 4 techs each. Well, they need to fill this research tree with something I suppose 😉 There are only 3 techs out there that give chapter-specific culture buildings.

You can also see that instead of the usual final AW tech there are two AW research items for each of the two new AWs (Tournament Arena and Spire Library). The rumor is that both give extra ranking points for tournament and Spire performance respectively, and the secondary effect is unknown at this time. So you may decide how useful such AWs might be for you.

Resource Requirements

Now, lets preview resource requirements for the Elvenar Embassies chapter research tree. There is no one single set of requirements as a lot depends on how much Portal Profits you’re going to deploy, what configuration of settlement buildings you’re going to use, what are your production boosts etc. There are also different ways to produce the same settlement resource (different inputs etc). So treat the following table with a big grain of salt – that’s why there are some big ranges in there. Some numbers might be even wrong 😉 But, at least for chapter 15 these were reasonably accurate for my setup. So, here it goes:

These numbers include necessary intermediate production required for research, as well as settlement construction / upgrades. This does not include regular building upgrades that you unlock in a particular chapter. These also do not include optional Squad Size upgrades (because you shouldn’t be touching those with a 10-foot pole ;)). T1-T3 requirements for chapter 15 are empty not because there are none, but because I never bothered to calculate these. Those were never an issue even with fairly lean manufacturing. I also ignored decay.

Minimum Provinces

So, what do we have here? They bumped minimum number of provinces to unlock chapter 16 from 400 to 440. That’s pretty much expected, so just make sure you have enough provinces to proceed.

KPs

Now let’s look at total KP requirements. Whoa, what?! Yep. These are pretty massive. Up to chapter 14 pretty much all the chapters were about 2k in KPs (Constructs were slightly longer, but not by much). Chapter 15 jumped up quite a bit to 3.5k, but chapter 16 went up another factor of 2x to 7k KPs! That’s twice as long as chapter 15, and 3.5 times longer than other chapters – as far as KP is concerned. Unless you’re raking in a metric ton of KPs from tournaments (and I mean a ton, not just a few thousand points in score), this is going to take a long time just to get requisite KPs.

Portal Profits

In chapter 15, you could have used up to 1500-1800% worth of Portal Profits at L4 portal. And you would be losing some resources against the portal cap – hence the top range estimate. In chapter 16, you can only drop up to 1000% worth of PPs – potentially less than that if you have Vortex of Storage AW. And there are no issues with hitting the portal cap, as there is only 1 capped resource – Statutes. So if you stashed 1000% worth of PPs, you’re all good (could be more if your portal is below L4). You have been hitting that Spire hard, right? 😉

Mana

Now mana requirement for chapter 15 were ridiculously low (well, maybe my production is extremely high, but I don’t think that’s an issue). The requirements went up, but not dramatically so – about 2-3x. With longer chapter and low previous requirements I don’t expect this to be an issue at all, unless your mana production is especially low.

Seeds

Moving on to seeds. Ah, the bane of my existence for quite a long time. Was probably toughest resource to acquire when moving fast through the chapters. Now we have more options, and my seeds situation have improved quite a bit. The good news is, that seeds requirements did not go up; if anything, these may have gone down a bit (and all seeds are needed for is sentient production). That’s great news!

Orcs

Orcs, however, are a different story altogether. The requirements for chapter 15 itself were somewhat manageable, but if you’ve completed it and looked at upgrades to military producers and some AWs, you know you had to blow hundreds of thousands of orcs just for that. And these are not superfast to produce. So even back then I already speculated that orcs might be the next bottleneck resource (just as seeds used to be). And lo and behold, here we have some pretty serious orc requirements. We’re looking at 1-2 millions – and that doesn’t include subsequent upgrades. Feeling ready for that? 😉

Regular Goods

Chapter 16 also introduces some pretty sizable regular goods (T1-T3) requirements – and not just as an input into sentients. Quite a few of these are also front-loaded, i.e. you need a good chunk early on in the chapter (e.g. unlocking guest race buildings). While the numbers are doable (certainly for long-time hoarders ;)), you better make sure you have sufficient stash and not running on fumes.

Sentient Goods

Which brings us to sentients; that T6 in particular traumatized so many players in chapter 15. Well, what do you know? Sentient requirements actually went down, and are now more equally distributed across the tiers. T6, in particular, went down by a factor of 3x! So if you’re still keeping those several T6 manufactories from chapter 15, you may want to teleport/delete these for something more useful. In fact, with sentient requirements such as these it might be possible to run a single manufactory per tier again, especially if your decay is low enough. Woot?!

So this is it for now. Let me know what you think about this preview of Elvenar Embassies research tree in the comments below. Certainly let me know if there are other things that you know about the chapter. I may make another post about new buildings / upgrades that are coming up.

Stay tuned! 😉