Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 01 [04%]

So, we have just started Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons chapter. Woodelves are staying behind 😉 All the old settlement buildings are gone and we cleared the space for the sorcerers and, more importantly, the dragons! Can’t wait to get me some dragons in my city. Apprentices? Who cares about apprentices! 😉

City changes

I promised that city will look quite different today, and I think I delivered 😉 Well, it doesn’t look that much different. I will write a big post on overall planning for Sorcerers & Dragons in Elvenar, but let’s just say that the current layout is pretty much the same as our transitional layout.

As you can see, I ripped out all the traces of the Woodelves settlement already. This is unusual – I kept some of the Orcs settlement buildings for several day into Woodelves chapter. The reason was that selling those buildings returns quite a bit coint/supplies, and I was capped on those after Orcs. So I was slowly selling out settlement buildings as to not to exceed the cap.

This time was different. First, I got very little for Woodelves buildings (comparing e.g. to Orcs’ Rally Points). And second, the last couple of techs in Woodelves needed massive amounts of coins and supplies, so selling the settlement didn’t bring us over the cap. Not even close 😉

So we’ve got tons of space for now. I also placed 2 new province expansions that I unlocked yesterday. And I already got the first building for Sorcerers & Dragons! Yep, Wisdom Square is up and running, and is currently producing whopping 6 apprentices a day. Yay. Campus is next, but this is a long research, so may take an extra day until we can build it. Then we can start working on Faculties.

As there is nothing else to build for now, I am rushing in building temporary mana producers (Weeping Willows in this case). While I have space and time, I may as well build up some extra mana reserve.

Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons progress

Unlike Woodelves chapter, Sorcerers & Dragons place all the research necessary for building a guest race settlement at the beginning. I mean, it can’t get any earlier than this 😉 Still, you will need Wisdom Square, Campus and Faculties – and none of these have any pre-requisites! This is nice. Still, it will take a few days before we can construct a viable construction complex.

So let’s take a look at where we’re at on ETA projections. Our target KP ETA (with the same 60 KP/day assumption) is 33 days. As expected. Don’t pay attention to actual KP in the first few days, as it will be quite skewed. Plus, we’re accelerating KP intake for now.

We’re actually pretty good on mana this time – ETA is only 29 days, and this is with the current production rate (i.e. we don’t need to ramp up to it). We will have to transition from Weeping Willows to Arcane Libraries though, and we need to make sure that we won’t lose too much mana production in the meantime. Again, this doesn’t include Main Hall upgrades (we should have enough slack here) nor roads. I think I will be skipping road upgrades for a long-long time. These seem to be very mana intensive, and culture – so far – is simply not a big deal at all. We’ll see.

What’s up with those production ETAs?

But look at the other ETAs. Wait, whaaat? These numbers look terrible. While Faculty productions at 38 days are at least somewhat close to the target KP ETA, apprentices ETA looks just terrible. Keep in mind that these projections assume fully built out settlement, and we’re not even close to that. Indeed, the true numbers are even worse.

So, what the heck? Do these numbers indicate massive tech lock incoming? It surely looks this way. So, did we give up on no tech lock goal? Does our current plan sucks? Hold on, not so fast. I will write more about this in the planning post, but the bottom line is, S&D is the first chapter that is basically designed for tech lock. Unless you accumulate KPs extremely slowly (no tournaments etc), you will get tech locked, there is no way around that by design.

Except there is. It is, again, Portal Profits. Yep, with enough PPs we can circumvent this, and bring ourselves back into no-tech-lock territory. Except this time around you have to use PPs, no amount of other planning or even space would help. And you have to use a ton of PPs. Which is what I am planning to do 😉

So yeah, the production ETA numbers will look bad for a long time, and will get better in time as we use PPs as necessary. And it’s really the apprentices – once we remove that bottleneck, faculties productions would look fine.

Silk Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is on from the tournament perspective. I managed to wrap up production of the Elder Treants for the upcoming tournament to 120 squads. Now, switching to Sword Acrobats production to create a massive surplus of light melee before the next scrolls tournament (or perhaps any tournament that relies on light melee). Things are progressing well here, but it is a long way to go. I am starting literally with zero here.

Tomorrow silk tournament will begin. We’ll see how would that compare with the scrolls and crystals before that.