Elvenar Woodelves – Day 30 [87%]

So, we’re in day 30 of Elvenar Woodelves chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Woodelves – Day 29). We’re wrapping up the chapter and finishing upgrades in the city. But mostly cleaning up the mess that is the scrolls tournament. I got no troops left, so catering it is. This is going to be an expensive proposition…

City changes

As the chapter is winding down, we’re putting finishing touches on the city. Today, I have finally started two last upgrades of the plan – Main Hall L23 and Mercenary Camp L5. Main Hall upgrade required 160K of mana and I knew that I would need to activate Greenery Street research with 90K as well. So I didn’t know if I’d have enough mana for that, but I decided to go ahead and start the MH upgrade. If I’d be short on mana for research, I’d just cancel the upgrade and get mana back. This would lose build time, but I don’t have anything crucial to use it for, so that was a very acceptable trade off.

L5 Mercenary Camp finally took its final shape, and I relocated it to its proper location. This allowed me to move Builders’ Hut away from the road (it doesn’t need road access, and was hogging that precious resource as no other space was available). With that, all main upgrades to the city are done (well, Main Hall will be under construction for almost 2 days still).

And I also initiated Blooming Trader Guild upgrade to L5. My builders have been busy lately 😉

Squeeze to the max, and then squeeze some more

But the other story of the day is squeezing in to get more temporary L1 buildings for the event. Just when I though I had no more space, I had to find out some more creative solutions to do more. This saves many hours – and even days – of event completion time. So I am going for more drastic measures like removing some roads and cutting off access to non-essential buildings. Right now even my Trader has no access, and the same is true for Golden Abyss and the Training Grounds (yeah, not going to use it any time soon 😉 ).

With that, I managed to bring in my total workshop number to 10 (important for several longer-running productions that need 10), and planks to 13 (event often runs multiple of 3h and 9h productions back to back).

And if everything goes according to plan, tomorrow I should be done with refined steel production. I can sell steel grafting sites, and start substituting with L1 Forest Fabrications for the final production push. Wohoo! Steel is running about 1 day ahead marble and planks because while fully built out rates are matching, I built more steel GS earlier during the ramp up phase. We’re getting close to wrapping up the Woodelves chapter of Elvenar!

Elvenar Woodelves progress

Alright, it was really close, but I managed to activate Greenery Street research today. At 90K mana, I wasn’t sure that me jumping into upgrading the Main Hall would leave me enough mana to activate. Well, I just scraped by with a couple of thousands of mana left. Nice one! Remaining mana requirements for this chapter would be easy to cover. There is only 55K for SS Upgrade 31 and 100K for the Ancient Wonders. Well, 125K for Advanced Scouts, too. But with almost 120K/day generation capacity, and not that much drain from production this will be easy.

Waiting to activating Greenery Street required doing Inspired Meditation trick again, and I went up to 19/20 on the KP bar. So close 😉

Now there is not much left in a way of KP sinking – Drone Rider Promotion, and that’s it. And the tournament is still going on, so more KPs are coming. Ah well, regardless of how it will turn out, we did really well so far, plan worked extremely well and I used Portal Profits for Elvenar Woodelves in a very limited fashion. So far, only for speed up of Forest Glade upgrades to L4.

Scrolls Tournament – 2* Day

Well, today’s tournament went pretty much as expected – given terrible start yesterday. I switched to Sword Acrobats after running completely out of Sinister Cerberuses on day 1*. But I only had about 15 squads of acrobats before the tournament started. Even with delaying tournament encounters (you can’t see that I didn’t do stage 3* that I usually do on the same day as stage 2*) I could only push it so much.

Bottom line, we did run out of Sword Acrobats as well, practically finishing all the fighting in stage 2*. The losses are indeed quite similar to Sinister Cerberuses (i.e. slightly more than 2x of the regular losses in previous tournaments). But I can produce acrobats almost 2x faster…

Even then, I was straight defeated in quite a few encounters already (that’s stage 2*), so even when I had troops I had to cater quite a bit more than usual. And following stages won’t be quite comparable to the previous data as I expect to cater most of those (no troops left, can only recover so much).

Bottom line is, I need to be better prepared the next time. Just as I am stockpiling other troops because I am doing so well in many other tournaments, I should stockpile A TON of Swords Acrobats for any next tournament that needs light melee. I probably need to look at 200+ squads or so. This one, we’ll chalk it for a learning experience…

Event – Evolution of the Phoenix

Today is another day in our current 4 week long event – Evolution of the Phoenix. Again, 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 (expired). All credit goes to her!

Also check out what I am planning to go for in the day 28 post. So here are my stats so far:

Today I burned all available essence trying to get as many Golden Palaces as I could. I though 5x, but got only 4x. As I need it to secure my adequate divine seeds supply later in the Halflings chapter, this is still quite acceptable. I really needed only 3x or so.

Having said that, success of draws was below expectations. As you can see, my realized chest success ratio is 10%. Considering that I only opened chests with 10%, 15% and 30% that’s below average. And the essence spent per daily prize, at ~420, is quite a bit lower than even average chests (and almost 2x worse than the expectations for the best chests).

Disappointing, but it happens, Sometimes you do better than the average, sometimes not so much. The important part is, I managed to accomplish my minimum objective for today.

And along the way I’ve got 2x Phoenix Artifacts and a Wishing Well. Nice, but these were basically guaranteed. Now, I’ll have to see what other prizes will be available. Should I go for those Burning Pools for extra mana generation? We’ll see…