Elvenar Woodelves – Day 28 [82%]

So, we’re in day 28 of Elvenar Woodelves chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Woodelves – Day 27). I didn’t expect a lot of changes today, outside of the new event start. But something changed in our forecast, something that we haven’t seen in a long, long time. Is it finally some good news? Or quite the opposite? Let’s find out…

City changes

We’re getting close to being done on the residences upgrades for this chapter – there are only 5x L23 upgrades left. We should be done in a couple of days. Now I need to time my mana in order to initiate the Main Hall upgrade. This takes 160K of mana, and I don’t want to get tech locked because of that. Now that would just be silly 😉

Blooming Trader Guild is getting close to filling in all the KPs for L5 upgrade. That would be great because the next L5->L6 upgrade doesn’t need KPs, only runes. And I should have plenty of those (not to mention all the broken shards). And going from current L4 to L6 ramps up the boost from 109% to 112%. Nice! This doesn’t sound like much, but all these boosts add up. Well, probably not so much for this chapter, but for the ones that follow.

Apart from that you can see that I managed to squeeze 5x L1 planks manufactories for the event. You may notice that not all of them are connected to the roads 😉 That’s right. Due to severe lack of space, I am playing some switcheroo – connect one of the manufactories to the road, finish production then swap it to another one that is not connected – without collecting. If there is sufficient time between T1 quests, this is still a beneficial technique. Just really annoying 😉

Elvenar Woodelves progress

No dramatic changes are visible on the research screen, we keep filling in Mercenary Camp Improvements KPs. And I already have enough resources to unlock it. Well, that would be the first 😉

But look at the progress forecast! Wait, whaaat? Forest Fabrications are no longer in the red! Both KP ETAs are. This means that according to the forecast, we are limited by KP accumulation – nothing else. That’s what we wanted to see all this time!

Now, not to get overly excited. We are entering tournament period, and KP inflow is going to speed up again. We’ll delay it for as long as possible, but it is certainly not guaranteed that ETA picture will stay the same for any period of time. Yet, this is the first time in quite a while when that happened, and that doesn’t even account for potential Forest Fabrications boost if we tear down Grafting Sites early. Everything might just be coming together at the last possible moment. In just a few more days we will find out!

Scrolls Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is on from the tournament perspective. Not much to report here yet, except that we’re on pace to build around 60-65 squads of cerberuses. They better be so much better than the Sword Acrobats, to justify this slow as molasses production. But I strongly suspect they won’t be. We will see, tomorrow is going to be an interesting day from the tournament perspective. It is all in the name of science! 😉

Event – Evolution of the Phoenix

Today we started another 4 week long event – Evolution of the Phoenix. I won’t be repeating much what is written elsewhere, so check out these resources:

• Thorough description of the event, mechanics, quests and prizes at Elvenar’s Gems of Knowledge: Evolution of the Phoenix
• Handy spreadsheet of quests and prizes by TomatoeHu: www.tinyurl.com/phoevo [seems to be defunct]. All credit goes to her!

Now, I’ll be posting some stats, as well as some musings on what to go for in the event (highly subjective 😉 ). So here we go!

We don’t know the full list of daily prizes at that time, so check the links above as event progresses. I know that there will be a Wishing Well as a daily prize on day 15. Previously, I would jump on this and spend all sky essence getting as many WWs as I can. Now, I am not so sure.

The thing is, I still have several WWs in my inventory, and going to get one or two in the Grand Prizes. Generally, I run them 4 at a time (as there is only so much space), and they go for 100 days. Which is usually longer than a time between events where you can win them. That, and as much as I like free diamonds, there is nothing exciting that I will be able to get with them any time soon. Check my musings on that on day 25.

We need more mana and divine seeds!

Having said that, despite still being in Elvenar Woodelves, I have started to look into planning for the next chapters – Sorcerers & Dragons, and Halflings, and it seems that rather than settlement goods I will be constrained by mana (or the space that I can allocate to that) and divine seeds. Mana requirements are immense, and producing with regular buildings (Weeping Willows, Arcane Libraries, Grape Farms) will be taking a lot of space to hit the target rate. If I can get some event buildings that are more efficient than that (e.g. Burning Pool), I can reduce footprint of my mana generation complex, and free up space for anything else. That’s way more efficient than getting enough Wishing Wells to get 2,000 diamonds for a single premium expansion!

Which brings us to divine seeds. This is a tougher one – at least with mana I can trade space for mana, and potentially do some stockpiling. I can’t produce divine seeds until I start Halflings, and I will need extra seeds generation in that chapter already. And there are no regular buildings that will increase seed production. Ouch!

So what to get?

So my current plan is to focus on buildings that can produce divine seeds. They won’t be producing that right now, as I will be getting them in Woodelves or S&D, but I should be able to upgrade those with Royal Restoration spells as soon as I open Elvenar Halflings chapter (need to stockpile those RRs!). So far I see Golden Palace on day 3, which at 3×2 footprint looks excellent for seeds (820/day in Halflings) and Spring Flower Cage on day 16 (2×2, 410/day).

Golden Palace looks good, but it’s pretty early on day 3, so we’ll see how much essence I will have by that time. I expect to burn all that would be available. Spring Flower Cage is not as efficient, but I don’t have that many options. However, we will see the whole list of daily rewards by the time it will come online, so we can see if it is worth to go all-in on that, or if there is anything better.

Second on a priority list are Burning Pools on day 13, for mana generation. I will likely be in S&D chapter, so these would be generating 7,200 mana daily in 4×3 footprint. This is better than Arcane Libraries and Grape Farms. But seed production buildings will have a priority, as I have a lot more options on mana.

So I am not sure I will be doing any Wishing Wells in the daily, unless I reconsider some of the points above. Stay tuned, we need to see what the rest of the prizes look like!

And if you want to get some buildings for culture and/or pop, check out TomatoeHu’s spreadsheet – it has a comparison of all the prizes from pop and culture per square perspective.