Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 15 [45%]

So, we’re in day 15 of Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 14). Today, we cut down a whole bunch of Weeping Willows. And it seems that we’ve got some kind of bird infestation instead. Wait, whaat? Yep. And they threaten to set our whole city on fire!..

City changes

Alright, we’ve got quite a few changes in the city today. Now we have upgraded 5x more residences to L24. And we’re still working fine with a limited space that we have for the residences. No need to temporary storage when buildings changes shape. So far 😉

But wait, what has happened to all the Weeping Willows?! I sold 5 out of 8 of them, so only 3 remain. Why, you may ask? Well, as I was complaining about excess mana (and the accompanying decay) I figured that the only solution to excess mana production is… more mana production 😉 That was not exactly the reasoning, but the end result is the same 😉

So after winning 10x Burning Pools in the Evolution of the Phoenix event, I have finally decided to put them down. I planned to replace most of the Willows with Arcane Libraries anyway, and Burning Pools fit neatly into that layout. Libraries are 5×3, and Burning Pools are 4×3. This means that in the space of 8x Arcane Libraries (4×2 grid) I can place exactly 10x Burning Pools (5×2 grid). Which is exactly what I did, skipping the Libraries stage. This also saved a lot of time building, as well some resources for that.

More importantly, Burning Pools are much better mana producers. These 10x Burning Pools produce 72K of mana a day. With that, my overall daily mana production is closing in on 200K a day. This looks good, even for the next chapter 😉

Mana vs Culture

The small downside of Burning Pools though is that they provide less culture. That is really not a big deal at all. It means that previously I would be at 150% bonus most of the time, with occasional trips to 160% when a lot of neighborly help happens at the same time. But now I am dropping to 125% on semi-regular basis, before popping back up to 150%. The only impact it has is on coins (irrelevant completely) and supplies production in the workshops. This one is at least somewhat noticeable. But given that most of my supplies come from sources not impacted by culture boost, it makes very little difference. Extra mana is much more valuable!

Speaking of – given these changes, and expectation that I would get even more mana daily, I dumped almost 300K into upgraded roads (Greenery Streets from the Woodelves chapter). These are 4.5K of mana per tile, and I mentioned that I just don’t see myself upgrading roads for a very long time, given that culture was just not an issue. Well, the culture is still not an issue, but I have a lot of mana excess that I didn’t anticipate, and I’d rather have this mana deployed into additional culture in the roads than completely wasted to decay. This also somewhat offsets reduced culture from the Burning Pools.

So I have upgraded about half of all the roads so far, and now I am down to 200K of mana. That’s enough for now. I will wait for the final residences layout to finish the roads there. In the meantime, we will be accumulating mana again 😉

Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons progress

Another low KP day today, and we’re right back on target for average KP intake. We’re filling in Banshee promotion upgrade, and have almost all the research goods lined up to unlock the Main Hall upgrade. This would be nice as I would be able to dump even more mana.

Most ETAs are unchanged, but look at that mana ETA! We’re expecting to finish all mana requirements (not including Main Hall, roads and decay) more than a week ahead of our KP ETA. Didn’t think it will be that good – in the last chapter mana was actually pretty tight.

Magic Dust Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is on from the tournament perspective. Not much to update except that increase in training size is nice. I am used to check my barracks frequently, to re-queue troops production, and now I can do it much less frequently. And it is nice to produce more than one squad per slot. Well, until the inevitable Squad Size Upgrades kick in. We are going to have 3 mandatory SS upgrades in this chapter. That’s not amazing, to say the least. But I can’t do anything about that except waiting for the next barracks upgrade in the next chapter.

It is going to be a long wait…