Elvenar Orcs – Day 27 [71%]

So, we’re in day 27 of Elvenar Orcs chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Orcs – Day 26). After a couple of weeks in negative pop (as low as -5.6K), I am finally back into the positive territory! At the time of writing, my city is at +459 pop. The negative pop experiment was a resounding success – I didn’t miss anything that I wanted to do that would have required positive pop. I even managed to do the whole Carnival event in less than 5 days with all the pre-planned temporary L1 buildings that I’ve made right before going negative pop. And now, in addition to finishing residence upgrades (basically, 4 L19 residences need to be brought up to L21), I can wrap up a few upgrades that were still planned for this chapter.

Outside of residences, I had only one other upgrade left that changes dimensions and as such was not in the proper final position – Training Grounds. Well, I am happy to report that I am upgrading TG to L9, and it is already in the proper position. That required some shuffling small buildings around just to make move and upgrade, but as all the big buildings were already in the right spots that was relatively painless. Planning is important! 😉 So outside of Training Grounds upgrade to L12, I plan only one other upgrade for this chapter – the Elvenar Main Hall, extra two Orcs levels. These are very long upgrades, so I’ll try to start these as soon as I get enough pop (so before finishing Training Ground upgrades).

Ancient Wonder upgrades

In other news, after influx of KP instants from the tournament, I have finally closed research on Martial Monastery L5, and upgrade is underway. That’s another super long one – almost 24 hours. Nice thing about this is that L5 to L6 upgrade doesn’t need any KP – only runes, and I should have plenty of those. Will have to think now about which AW to upgrade next. Strongly considering going back to upgrading Needles of the Tempest above L6, for barracks speed – or perhaps wait for Shrine of Shrewdy Shrooms? We’ll see.

Supplies

Maxed out on supplies. That’s OK as I will need to start removing L1 workshops as they occupy space of future upgraded residences. Even without those WS, my regular x6 WS can produce 50K+ supplies every 3 hours with quest cycling, and there are also Tome of Secrets and Endless Excavation AWs. Don’t think I would have any issues with supplies in this chapter.

Tournament aftermath

Today was the last day of the dust tournament, which means in addition to 18 KPs from 6* provinces, I went back to 2* provinces 13-20 and picked up another 40 KPs. As all the troops are gone, these provinces are all catered, and that’s expensive – I dropped quite a bit in scrolls and dust, everything else is rebalanced already. It is critical to have great fellowship and/or neighbors for efficient trading!

Now I get several days to recover the goods before the next tournament. T2 goods do not look too bad, but T3 goods need to be ramped up a bit, there is not much margin there (I am running Magical Manufacturing spells on my dust factories every day). Luckily, I have already researched 4 more levels of T3; but upgrades won’t be happening until later in Woodelves. I need a lot of pop for those upgrades, and right now all the space is allocated to the Orcs settlement. Also, I am starting to get Royal Restoration spells starting from this tournament (more on that in a separate post!), and this will allow me to upgrade my Winter Market set, which will ramp up T2 and T3 production.

Elvenar Orcs research goods

Research goods – shrooms of wisdom and loot – are on target. Loot is maxed out, even after activating elixir and dust upgrades. Shrooms of wisdom, on the other hand, are more of a constraint. While ~35 L2 mushroom farms should be sufficient not to be techlocked, the 2 day production cycles are annoying. This is the reason why I am going Wooden Trail first, and Campfire BBQ second on the next research – Wooden Trail is 1200/1800 SoW/Loot, while Campfire BBQ is heavier on SoW and lighter on Loot at 1750/700 – the opposite of what I have.

And the reason why these two Elvenar techs are going before Rewards & Kisses is that these two are sufficient to unlock Sinister Cerberus, which is an extra 55 KP sink (and doesn’t even require any Orcs goods to activate); Rewards & Kisses does not open anything by itself (even though at 600/2500 might be an excellent match to my current inventory).