Elvenar – Tournament Tutorial [2020] – Planks

We continue our tutorial series on fighting in different Elvenar tournaments as introduced in the Fall of 2020, and now it is time for the Planks tournament 😉 Fighting in Elvenar is highly specific to individual city – stage of development, troops unlocked and available, Ancient Wonder levels, temporary / evolving building boosts and so on. So it is practically impossible to make a generic advice on specific matchups, but here we will focus on relatively average end-game city (chapter 17). Even if that’s not you, you can still get some ideas on how to approach different matchups, measure your own performance there and pick the ones that work best.

Setup

Because setup is important, here is what was used in this run:

• Chapter 17 / Elf
• All troops unlocked at 3*, no shortages in availability
• Martial Monastery AW – L30 (+30% health)
• Victory Springs AW – L16 (+24% light melee damage)
• Needles of the Tempest AW – L15 (+22% light range damage)
• Dragon Abbey AW – L12 (+19% mage damage)
• Heroes’ Forge AW – L11 (+18% heavy melee damage)
• Temple of the Toads AW – L16 (+24% heavy range damage)

• Fire Phoenix – L10, fed (+50% all units damage)
• Unleashed Unit Upgrade – 2x (+50% health)
• Enlightened Light Range – 1x (+50% light range damage)
• Magnificent Mage Multiplier – 1x (+50% mage damage)

This is a relatively straightforward tournament. You can use additional ELR and these would be helpful. MMM is not super useful in this tournament, so you may want to save it. You can drop down to a single UUU for this tournament, and the losses will likely still be acceptable.

Progression (previous vs 2020 edition)

You may have seen my series with tutorial for the previous version of the tournaments. As my approach have changed, let’s compare the two (old vs 2020):

As you can see, I have calibrated the runs to be as close as possible in terms of tournament points. Of course, the primary goal of tournaments is still acquiring maximum amounts of KPs while keeping it sustainable. Given that difficulty changed quite significantly, previous setup of 50/50/12/12/12/9 is not optimal anymore – you want to keep roughly the same number of provinces all the way into 5*, thus picking up KPs from both 2* and 5* stages instead of just 2* as before.

As you can see, this definitely impacts all rewards. Not all these changes are important though. 8% less relics is utterly irrelevant at this stage of the game. And so is double of the random runes. I personally don’t use EE enchantments, but someone who does may actually benefit from more than double the amount.

Which leaves us with KPs and PoP enchantments. Unfortunately, both are down. We will be getting 20% less of KPs than in the previous setup, and less than half the PoPs. Reduced PoPs can really hurt. With just 3x Magic Workshops I am basically breaking even every week (growing ever so slightly). And as we will see, all this costs us significantly higher troop losses.

Videos

You will see most of the matchups in provinces 01-24. And you can see how much time does it take, and how losses accumulate the deeper you go into the tournament.

Losses (tutorial)

And here is a summary of sustained cumulative losses in this setup, as seen in the video:

Keep in mind that doing 1-24 provinces in 2* is the same as doing 2-25 provinces in 1* etc, so you can see several lines in the chart. Thick red line is the average losses for a particular encounter (adjusted for different star stages). Dashed line is a trendline.

Now, don’t try to extrapolate it like that past province #30. Once you reach that, enemy squad size ratio growth slows down significantly. And while absolute squad sizes will continue to grow, I’d expect the curve to have lower slope after #30 or so. I haven’t gone that far in this playthrough, so that data is not there.

Unlike the two previous tournaments, there are not big jumps here. That’s because we had no defeats this time around. Just keep in mind that defeats (or even just heavy losses) in a single encounter later on can and does lead to disproportionately large total losses. It just didn’t happen this time around 😉

Losses (averages)

Now, the losses from a single tournament may or may not be representative. E.g. freak losses are unlikely to repeat. So here are average losses over several tournament cycles (will be updated as time goes):

And here is comparison of losses between previous tournament and the new 2020 edition:

Keep in mind that this is not apples-to-apples comparison. This is doing 50/50/12/12/12/9 vs 24/24/24/24/24/9, as discussed above. I am pretty certain that I wouldn’t even be able to complete all tournaments to 50/50 in the new setup. Also, I did upgrade a few military AWs since the time of previous tournaments, and my regular squad size is somewhat larger than it used to be (didn’t do any adjustments for that). This means that relatively speaking new losses are even higher than the chart shows.

I’ll keep updating the chart as the time goes on, in particular I will adjust boost distribution over different tournaments, so hopefully total losses will be going down. But I believe this picture is fairly representative.

So hopefully this helped some of you to get a better idea on how to improve your Planks tournament game. And I am planning to do more videos for other tournament types, so stay tuned 😉

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In the meantime, you can check out the rest of our Elvenar Strategy content. Till next time!