Elvenar Halflings – Day 01 [08%]

So today we have started Elvenar Halflings chapter! We said goodbye to the Sorcerers & Dragons (see previous day at Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 34), and we continued with the yesterday’s breakneck pace of progress. At the end of day today there was no trace left of the S&D university settlement. Instead, we jumped forward 8% in one day. This is almost 3 times our average pace! So let’s see what Halflings brought to the table (pun intended) 😉

City changes

As I mentioned already, today we ripped out the whole S&D settlement – there are no traces of it left. And as usual, we rearranged our city layout quite a bit to ease transition to the target Halflings layout. Just as a reminder, here is how we entered the Halflings:

And here is how our city looks like now at the end of Day 1:

Some districts are quite recognizable, while others changed quite a bit. You can see that we didn’t touch residential district, T1 planks manufactories and Ancient Wonders area. There is no need, buildings in these districts keep their existing shape in this chapter and won’t be moved.

We relocated (and partially split) workshop district as upgrades in this chapter will change its shape from 4×5 to 3×7. The district is already in the right place, except for 1 workshop on the south side. T3 dust manufactories will be changing and are placed now into temporary spots. T2 scrolls are not changing shape but have to be moved, and are now properly placed.

We will be changing a few military buildings in this chapter – namely, Barracks and Mercenary Camp, and both are for now in the temporary spots.

Mana production and sets

I have also significantly re-arranged our mana production facilities. Outside of the set buildings (Winter Market set and Carnival set), mana is produced by 10x Burning Pools, plus several Arcane Libraries (bumped these from 5 to 6) and a few remaining Weeping Willows. Burning Pools will continue to provide a good chunk of mana production, and we already placed them in their target location, while Arcane Libraries and Willows will likely to be replaced with Grape Farms later in the chapter. But for now I have underutilized space, so I keep those mana buildings to gain some extra mana surplus.

The Carnival set looks very lonely in the south-east corner. That’s because I am planning to move it into the middle of the east edge (the spot is already there). When you move set buildings it resets their production timer, so you effectively lose partial production. That’s why it makes sense to move set buildings right after you collected their output. This means I will have to do it tomorrow.

And with accumulating massive amounts of KPs on closing the Sorcerers & Dragons chapter, we did blitz first couple of research items already. This means we started upgrading our Trader to L2 (so it will start generating divine seeds), and we already started construction of the L1 Spring Grove – that’s portal for Halflings. All this happened on the first day!

Divine seeds

Speaking of divine seeds – this is a new special resource, and it will be very important for this chapter. If my projections are accurate, seeds will be pretty tight, and could even be a binding constraint. So I am trying to ramp up its production by any means necessary – yet opportunities for this are slim. Unlike for mana, there are no regular buildings that you can spam to ramp up seeds production. Trader production is determined by your number of opened provinces, aggregate level of your Ancient Wonders and a level of your Main Hall. None of these can be easily ramped up.

So, Trader is still critical source – that’s why I immediately finished upgrade with time boosters. But now it was time to augment production with some event buildings. In particular, Marching Band from the Carnival set produces 3,900 seeds a day, and only uses 8 squares (and 8 Royal Restoration spells to upgrade). Well, I immediately upgraded this building with my RR stash. Also, I was stockpiling Golden Palaces – these also produce seeds in Halflings. Unfortunately, I only got 1 Golden Palace in Sorcerers & Dragons chapter, and the other 4 I’ve got in Woodelves. With 6 squares per building, this means I need to spend 6 RRs for S&D palace, but 12 RRs for Woodelves ones. So I placed 1 GP for now, and upgraded it to Halflings. We’ll see how it goes and whether I need to spend more RRs on the rest.

Oh yeah, and in the background we were still running residence upgrades from the last chapter. And as an observant reader may notice, another shantytown is coming up – but more about this later. As I said, it was a pretty busy day 😉

Elvenar Halflings progress

So lets take a look at the research tree for the Elvenar Halflings chapter. This is again a more regular tree as far as settlement construction is concerned. All the techs that you need to construct a full settlement are right there in the beginning: Spring Grove (portal), Irrigation Canal (settlement roads), Halfling Farm and Agriculture (for fields). We don’t have a requirement that all buildings connect to each other (hello, S&D 😉 ), but there is another twist. While we have settlement roads – canals – and you can route them as you see fit, canals are only needed to connect portal with farms. Fields, however, need to be directly adjacent to farms, and don’t need portal connection.

In any case, settlement construction research doesn’t have any external dependencies and doesn’t require any special resources (well, mana is not special anymore), so we will be trying to get those as soon as possible. Going to get all those KPs while we can! 😉

And as I mentioned, we already unlocked Spring Grove and Improved Trader, and already started working on Irrigation Canal. Next is Farms, and then Agriculture for fields. But in the meantime I will probably fast track portal upgrades to L4 ASAP. This will require portal profits, but I believe that it is a good value – having max portal is super important as it saves on input into settlement goods production. In this case, it will save on output of fields. Otherwise, it will take a long time before portal is at L4, and during that time the whole settlement is not operating at max efficiency.

As we’re fast-tracking settlement construction research, we will keep negotiating newly scouted provinces. For now.

ETA projections

We now have a new set of ETA projections for the Elvenar Halflings. How does it look? Well, almost as bad as in the beginning of the Sorcerers & Dragons:

The good news is that mana situation looks awesome – we have tons of capacity, and should be in excellent shape there. After our seeds improvements this also looks decent, albeit still potentially tight.

But the usual offenders are settlement goods production – farms and fields. It seems that with the current target we will need to deploy quite a bit of Portal Profits to avoid tech lock. But we’re planning to fast-track the portal upgrades with PPs regardless, and then we’ll have to see how it looks like. If it is still not sufficient, there are a few things that I may be able to adjust. Stay tuned!

Steel Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is on from the tournament perspective. With all this excitement about Elvenar Halflings chapter transition there is not much exciting about next tournament preparation. Not yet at least 😉 The good news is the next tournament – steel – is widely considered to be the easiest one. It would be nice if we can take a little bit of a breather and cruise through at least one tournament. I need a break, and I can use it to replenish my depleted goods inventory. Well, we’ll see it it works out 😉