Elvenar Woodelves – Day 17 [54%]

So, we’re in day 17 of Elvenar Woodelves chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Woodelves – Day 16). Today was almost as significant a day as yesterday. Woodelves settlement is rapidly expanding, but we’re facing some tough decisions. And there is a plot twist that may have solved all our mana and space problems! What is it? How is that even possible? Let’s find out…

City changes

So implementation of the most difficult part of the chapter – settlement buildout – continues. Woodelves are spreading faster than the Orcs! Now we’re up to 14x Forest Fabrications, and I will probably add another one before we start transitioning to grafting sites.

This may sound excessive, but think about it this way. 1x L3 FF is exactly the same production-wise as 2x L1 FF. It just takes less space. So my target 8L3/9/9/6 build specifies 8x L3 fabrications. This is equivalent to 16x L1 FFs! Basically, we’re even slightly below target production for FFs with 14-15 L1 fabrications. We’re simply twice as inefficient space-wise, but that’s not a big problem as we can’t build grafting sites yet due to lack of mana tears. So from this peak of FF coverage we will be removing some FFs to clear space for grafting sites (down to target 8x). And while grafting sites would be coming online, we will be upgrading FFs to higher levels, ideally keeping production from the FF complex roughly at the same target level.

The Forest Glade fast-track upgrade that I outlined yesterday is underway and is going smoothly. L3 is completed, and I am just waiting for the last mana tears to jump into L4. As I mentioned, total cost is 65% worth of portal profits, and I burned a few longer time boosters. Need to use those for something outside of barracks upgrades 😉

Tough decisions

Having said that, it’s not all rosy in the Woodelves settlement. We’re facing some tough decisions on space (and mana, these are interconnected). I just dumped 2x of my Frozen Shipwrecks from the Dwarves chapter (was almost 1.2K pop), briefly dipping into negative pop territory, and cleaned up a couple of L1 workshops.

But that won’t be enough. Up until yesterday there were 3 Weeping Willows that were constructed in the space that is allocated to the settlement. Until that time it was fine as we didn’t use that space, but now we need to ramp up quickly. The idea was that these willows will migrate into new expansions that I will place at the bottom row. However, we’re not there yet. While I can place one premium expansion right now (I am waiting for 10% off), others need to be unlocked via research. I am nowhere close to the next province expansion. So while research expansions would be the next priority, we need to make some decisions now.

It’s cutting time!

And the decision is to cut. Yep, I will be selling those willows (trying to delay as much as I can) to free up settlement space. When new expansions will become available I will rebuild them – that will only lose me 16 hours of build time each (and some coins/supplies, but I don’t care about that). This should be acceptable.

But more importantly, cutting willows will reduce my mana generation. With each one cut I will be losing 4,450 mana a day in production. So can we handle this temporary drop? I believe we can. Timing is unfortunate – mana tears production is a huge mana drain at about 15K every 3 hours (!), and that we can barely sustain with our newly increased production. But after mana tears slow down in a couple of days, our mana rate should be more than sufficient!

So we may stutter for a few hours due to insufficient mana in the next couple of days, but apart from that we should be good. Actually, if we wouldn’t have spent 130K of mana on that unnecessary Main Hall upgrade, we would be totally fine here! Ah well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… 😉

Winter Market set to the rescue!

Wait, did I just say “newly increased production” as it relates to mana?? Um, well… Yes! Yes indeed. In fact, I think today we have just solved our mana generation (and correspondingly space) problems for this chapter. More so, without that I don’t think our plan would have worked without material Portal Profit deployment. So what is this miracle of Elvenar? What happened?

Well, the answer to my mana (and space) concerns was tucked in the left bottom corner of the city. It’s Winter Market set! And in particular, 3x Frost Carved Christmas Trees that I have there. Now, I’ve got the set when I was in Dwarves, and until now the set just boosted massively T3 (gems) production. In fact, it was generating more gems than my 2x boosted dust manufactories. And that’s without any requirements on pop and culture, not to mention build time.

Alright, so the set is awesome for T3 goods production (and other things – KPs, broken shards, supplies, T2 goods etc). How does it help with mana in any way? Well, enter Royal Restoration spell. This allows us to upgrade these event buildings! You get RR spells from tournaments, and can craft conversion from blueprints in the Magic Academy. I’ve been waiting for some RR spells recipes in MA for a long time, and finally I’ve got several!

Mana will be plentiful!

Well guess what? If you upgrade your Frost trees to Elvenar Woodelves chapter (takes quite a few RRs – 18 per level, so that is 108 RR for upgrading two of them 3 chapters), they start to produce mana instead of T3 goods! And boy, do they deliver! A single tree with 2 links (mine have 3) generates 19,600 mana a day. Yep, you read that right. Almost 20K a day, or 40K a day between two of them! To put this in perspective, this is just a tad less than 9 Weeping Willows that will occupy 9 expansions. The upgraded trees? 0 new expansions as they’re already here! Yep, zero! Saving 9 expansions on willows will surely help.

I think this might be the last piece of the puzzle to make it all work!

Elvenar Woodelves progress

Now a lot of progress from a KP perspective today. Which is a good thing for now – we’re entering construction/production phase where we need to stretch time as much as we can. This means delaying all unnecessary KP inflows for as long as possible.

So we’re halfway there with planks grafting site research – this should be done tomorrow. And then we will plunge into extra expansions tech, at least for a while. Even with extra production we don’t want to fall back on mana requirements. Also, it will take some time to construct and upgrade the settlement. And during that time we won’t be producing settlement goods needed to unlock research.

Mana generation impact

So going back to the extra mana generation, how much difference does it make? It’s pretty dramatic, actually. Here are some numbers:

• 58K / day – just current 13 Willows, no other mana generation
  • Mana ETA Completion – Day 44
  • Woefully inadequate!
• 77K / day – the same 13 Willows, but 1x extra Frost Christmas tree (Woodelves level)
  • Mana ETA Completion – Day 37
  • Not terrible, but will probably will require some Portal Profits here and ther to speed things up
• 96K / day – the same 13 Willows, but 2x extra Frost Christmas tree (Woodelves level)
  • Mana ETA Completion – Day 33
  • Wohoo! Mana is no longer the binding constraint. We’re good! It is still the case even if we have to temporarily drop a couple of willows to clear out the space.

So there you have it. We solved our longer term mana production as well as space issues. In the short term, however, mana consumption is spiking due to all these mana tears that need to be produced. And current inventory of mana is dropping fast, currently below 90K.

The next couple of days would be crucial to success of our Elvenar Woodelves plan. Stay tuned!

Planks Tournament – 4* day

Today is a low KP tournament day. And as is customary, 4* stage brings us the first couple of defeats that need to be catered. Not a problem at all at the moment, as goods requirements tapered down a lot. As most of the builders will be focused on settlement buildings and residences, and none of these require goods to build. That leaves only unlocking research, which should not be that often (and will start to be geared towards settlement goods).

Overall, losses track pretty closely to the last week’s tournament. Keep in mind that there was a Squad Size upgrade last week after 4* stage, so numbers are not exactly consistent.

And I am still maxed out on coins and supplies. Don’t think I will be building Prosperity Towers AW this Elvenar Woodelves chapter… 😉