Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 26 [77%]

So, we’re in day 26 of Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons – Day 25). We had another big day today. I have completed manufacturing Challenge mini-event, razed the shanty town and finished the gems tournament. But really anticipated event was beginning of deployment of portal profits in order to facilitate research. How did that go? Let’s find out…

City changes

And just like that, the Challenge mini-event was done, in about 1/3 of the time allotted. I’ve got the final prize – one Phoenix Artifact, and it was time to raze the shantytown again. Poof! And it is gone.

With that, I have rearranged the city a bit. It may look a bit suboptimal, with a bunch of holes here and there. It may look like this because it is 😉 I have rearranged residences to minimize need for additional movements when I upgrade residential district. Mostly so it is easier to kick off upgrades on mobile (I don’t like moving buildings on mobile). And I really have no good use for the space that I am currently wasting. I know, it sounds strange – too much space, whaaat?! But it’s true, right now there are no pressing space concerns. All upgrades for this chapter are accounted for. This also means no need for extra pop. I have tons of mana in storage, so don’t need any additional mana producers right away. Culture is sufficient, not worth adding more etc.

So I will cruise with some empty spots for a while. This is actually quite liberating – usually, a need to place even smallest extra building (like good event building etc) can throw the whole layout out of whack. But now, I definitely have some flexibility. This is really nice!

And I have started upgrading my scrolls manufactories that I really wanted to do for quite a while. We already went from 2x L19 to 2x L21, and I need to add two more levels to each. Will need quite a bit of pop, so I may need to add some residence upgrades into the mix.

Elvenar Sorcerers & Dragons progress

It was a huge day today from the research perspective. We have activated 3 techs, completely filled in KPs for the 4th one, and started with the 5th one. Huge I, say 😉 Here is how our research tree looks at the end of day today:

And how do you think we have achieved that much progress in a day? Yep, you got it – Portal Profits. Their time has finally come. And as usual, I am not into easing in 😉 We have dumped grand total of 95% worth of Portal Profits in order to move forward as we would definitely be in techlock otherwise. There is no way around it.

And it seems that research in the last part of the chapter is tricky even with Portal Profits. I mean, tricky to do it efficiently. Quite a few of techs need rather imbalanced amounts of double graduates. Something like 660/220/440. The problem with that is that we have hard cap of 750/750/750, and PPs add them equally. This means that it is quite easy to waste some PP power by running into a cap while trying to achieve higher numbers.

So my production for the rest of the chapter will likely focus on adjusting inventory levels in such a way so that PPs are not wasted. This will require some attention to details 😉

And also, you can finally see catching up in our ETAs. Yesterday, out production was late by 12 days. Today, after deploying all these PPs, we’re late by only 8 days. Finally! Obviously, we’ll need to do quite a bit more. PPs to finish also dropped from 415% down to 300%. We’re starting to see the end of the tunnel…

Gems Tournament – 5* and 6* day

Today we wrapped up the current gems tournament. And the results for the second half are… not terrible. My expectations are pretty low 😉 So today, we completed 5* and 6* stages with Banshees. Of course, we only had recovery troops, so less than 20 squads. And we did kill them all at both stages. But results look promising for the future tournaments where Banshees seem like a viable unit now.

5* stage is where we still go 12 provinces, and as such it is a pretty costly stage from the losses perspective. So here we managed to finish all encounters with no counterunits and went quite deep into encounters with 1 counterunit before running out of troops. That’s not bad considering that we started with few troops, and 3+ counterunits I am catering regardless. Total catering at ~48% looks high, but not ridiculously so comparing to other difficult tournaments.

And 6* stage is usually easier as we only go 9 provinces. However, we had to activate another squad size upgrade right after 5* stage. Still, we actually managed to fight all encounters with no or 1 counterunits, and went quite deep into 2 counterunit encounters. Total catering was at 33%, with only 11% of defeats. This is substantially better than the last dust tournament with Sword Acrobats.

Now, I wish we would have started with Banshees to begin with – our overall results would have been much better. Still, there is hope for the next time 😉