Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 08 [26%]

So, we’re in day 8 of Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 07). We are rushing towards this L4 Campus upgrade as fast as we can. But can we outrun the relentless KP inflow, or will we get forced into inefficient portal profits use by the impending tech lock? Let’s find out…

City changes

All focus is on rushing the Campus upgrades now. I managed to start an L3 upgrade today, and immediately cleaned it up with time boosters. Now I am just waiting on enough resources to kick off an L4 upgrade. It will be so close…

In the meantime, I managed ti squeeze another L1 Necromancy Faculty. With one more Alchemy Faculty at Campus L4 we will have the full complement. I have also upgraded all the faculties to L2 (except the new one). But we’re still less than half way to produce max number of apprentices, and this is our primary constraint. After Campus L4 upgrade we will need to rush the rest of the upgrades to the faculties.

But in order to upgrade Campus to L3 I had to finally clear quite a few Wishing Willows – 4x, to be precise. That’s OK, without unlocking any new research in the last couple of days I accumulated more than half a million of mana. And once I start unlocking next research, I will start rebuilding mana generation with Arcane Libraries. As Arcane Libraries are substantially smaller (5×3 vs 5×5), I will be able to squeeze them in.

And I already cleared out the space for L4 upgrade. Tomorrow is going to be a big day!

I have also sold off my Woodelves Habitat. Instead, I have build Dwarven Bulwark Ancient Wonder. I’ve been sandbagging it for quite a while, but I think now is the tume. Will get some free light melee troops, as well as additional increase in training size. So I should have less troop production losses in the cases where I am unable to check in with the game for more than 3 hours (my current full queue length for the barracks). Nice!

Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons progress

Look at this research screen – it looks a lot like we’ve seen at the end of the last chapter. Techlock, or so it would seem. It’s not, we’re just cutting it really close. I am running Inspired Meditation again, to store up to 20KP in the bar while waiting for the Campus upgrade to L4. If my calculations are correct, when L4 upgrade is completed I will have about half an hour left until the bar is full. This is such a nailbiter.

We will see a lot more of screens like that in this chapter 😉

So tomorrow I should start deploying portal profits to unlock Arcane Library tech, A Market etc – and this should unlock residences upgrade research. It should be relatively open for some time – until we hit another gate. And pretty much every time it would happen I’ll have to use portal profits, there is no way around that. The whole chapter is not about avoiding PPs, but rather to minimize the amount that I’ll need to deploy. So far so good, it seems that I will be able to get to L4 Campus before using any PPs. This is better than I originally expected!

Elixir Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is on from the tournament perspective. I am well underway on getting about 100 squads of Granite Golems. This is less than I would like to due to shifted timing at the last tournament. Oh well. But I will get support of L8 Fire Phoenix that I put down today. This is +40% damage for all units! This is going to be glorious. That is, if I won’t forget to feed the firebird, or do something equally stupid to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory 😉

Event – Evolution of the Phoenix

Today is another day in our current 4 week long event – Evolution of the Phoenix. Again, I won’t be repeating much what is written elsewhere, so check out these resources:

• Thorough description of the event, mechanics, quests and prizes at Elvenar’s Gems of Knowledge: Evolution of the Phoenix
• Handy spreadsheet of quests and prizes by TomatoeHu: www.tinyurl.com/phoevo. All credit goes to her!

Also check out what I am planning to go for in the Woodelves – Day 28 post as well as S&D – Day 5 post. So here are my stats so far:

So today I finished the main quest line – again 😉 And today’s daily prize was Wishing Wells, and it was time to go bananas on it. I’ve got plenty of Burning Pools for mana production, my future divine seeds extras should be covered with the Carnival set (primarily). I still got 4x Golden Palaces to augment that – even though unfortunately I’ve got them in the last chapter, and there will be another day with GPs as a daily prize, and that would have saved a lot of Elvenar Royal Restoration spells as those would be in Sorcerers & Dragons. I may still take a couple of swings with remaining essence when Golden Palaces will come up again.

More Wishing Wells!

So the bottom line is, I’ve already got everything I aimed for from the daily prizes, so it was time to blow everything remaining on Wishing Wells. Which is exactly what I did. And with much better results than on previous days. In fact, every daily prize day went significantly better than the one before. Day 3 was just terrible, with 423 essence per daily which is way worse than expected. Day 12 was pretty much on point with respect to averages.

But today was finally when we did better than averages, and by quite a bit. Think about it – on day 3, I’ve spent about 1,700 essence, and got only 4 daily prizes. Today, I’ve spent just marginally more (about 2,000 essence), but I’ve got 3 times more prizes! With me running 4x wells at any time, and each well good for 100 days, I am stocked now for a year 😉 Now, before someone calls this lucky, look at the overall stats. Actually, with the latest day data I have finally reached about average overall. That’s how bad that start was.

Well, now that I am all set, it is all about trying to get to the max Phoenix level. L9 is pretty much guaranteed, but L10 may or may not happen – we’ll see. And I hope to pick up some additional time boosters along the way!