Elvenar Woodelves – Day 16 [52%]

So, we’re in day 16 of Elvenar Woodelves chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Woodelves – Day 15). A huge day! Today was the most significant day in the whole chapter, by far. Big jump forward in research – crossing 50% mark. Massive settlement is already in place – out of nowhere. The biggest tournament day – completed! So what has happened today, exactly?

City changes

As I mentioned, huge day today in the city. I finally activated Forest Fabrications research, and there are already 10 FFs in the city (3 under construction though). But wait, we were supposed to go for 8L3/9/9/6 build? And we’ve built more fabrications than the target 8. What gives?

This is not a mistake. Well, at least for now I don’t think it is 😉 So implementation plan for the target build is not perfectly straightforward.

First, we will build as many L1 Forest Fabrications as we can squeeze in. This would be more than a target of 8, but that’s OK. We need mana tears to upgrade Forest Glade and build all the Grafting Sites. And that’s a lot of mana tears – we’re talking about 66K!

Until we have enough mana tears to upgrade Forest Glade to L4, we won’t be spending tears on grafting site construction. That’s right, even though we already unlocked Marble and Steel grafting site research, we won’t be building those for now.

But to upgrade Forest Glade to L4, in addition to mana tears you also need ghosts/chimes/sprouts, and these need refined goods from the grafting sites to produce. Right? No. The answer is no, not in this case. We will short-circuit this process with Portal Profits!

Fast-track Forest Glade upgrades

I believe this is an excellent use for PP instants. We want to fast-track portal upgrades ASAP as these would boost input efficiency of all the buildings. Mana tears we have to produce, unfortunately. But the rest of the requirements we would fill in with PP instants, and potentially shorten the build times with time boosters! Going to L4 portal regular way may take several long days, during which all your production is not running at max efficiency. We’re aiming to make L4 portal in a couple of days max! Basically, at the speed of mana tears production.

And it’s not even that expensive from the PP commitment perspective. Here is a breakdown:

Bottom line, all in all you need 65% worth of Portal Profit instants. That’s 13x 5% instants, or 26 days worth of Trading Outpost production (so about half its total output), and about 2/3 worth of chapter time for production. It doesn’t even account for crafting and event instants. So I find 65% worth of PP an excellent value to boost your output from the get go (and potentially save using more PPs down the line due to underdeveloped economy).

So only after we get enough mana tears for L4 portal we will start deploying grafting sites. And their initial output would go straight to the forest fabrication upgrades (only for the 8 of them, as per the plan).

So I am already well underway with this plan, as I plunked 15% PP and kicked off L2 portal upgrade, and I will likely to deploy time boosters as portal upgrades are slow.

This initial buildout and upgrade are the most critical parts of the chapter, so stay tuned!

Elvenar Woodelves progress

Today was the biggest tournament day from the KP perspective. All in all, I’ve got more than 100KP in one day. This allowed to activate 3 different techs! Outside of chapter 1, this is a record. Granted, Forest Fabrications research was almost completed, and Marble Grafting Site tech has pretty low requirements – but still.

This allowed us to jump ahead a little bit comparing to the plan for Elvenar Woodelves. We’re running one day ahead which is good news. For from now on I need to delay KP accumulation to the extent possible – keep scouted provinces non-negotiated, move KP harvesting from day 2 to day 6 of the tournament etc. This will allow more time to ramp up production of settlement goods.

The only possible exception here might be for extra expansion techs. I may want to rush for those still. We’ll see.

But with all this mana tears production and research unlocking my mana reserves started to drop. I am just below 100K now. This is going to be tight…

Planks Tournament – 2* and 3* day

Today is the biggest tournament day, and the day when I harvest KPs from 2* provinces. Overall, things went pretty much as expected. If you look at the losses per stage, these are pretty much exactly the same vs last week. 3* is slightly higher, but that might be simply because there were fewer encounters with 3+ counter units. I cater those, so no troop losses there (but I lose goods).

You may think that I dropped the ball in terms of recoveries before 2* and 3* stages. Perhaps I did, somewhat 😉 But part of it might be that this week I was pretty close to 16 hours for recovery periods, but last week I may have spent more time in-between. We’ll find out at the beginning of the next tournament, that’s the most reliable way to tell for certain 😉

Regardless, tournament is going well, supplies are maxed out and goods are on standby for some incoming catering in 5* and 6* round. We’re all set here.