I really need to remember my playstyle is not normal or average, lol! I've been playing over 4.5yrs and moving very slowly through the chapters since Dwarves. I probably need to give more caveats when I post!
I parked between 15/16 for a year
@Henroo (before any of the tourney changes came about, so
not because of that; mainly I don't find the long slow guest race production that's required in higher chapters challenging; it bores me). Then I noticed the Dragon Ark AW at the end of Ch17: It's a dragon, it's a beautiful blue color; absolutely gorgeous bldg. I don't know or care what it does, but I intend to have one. I try to be really efficient in the things I do in my city, so that I can ignore all of those things for pretty buildings lol. I have at least 20 unicorns placed in that city, lol! I always tell FS members to
not look at my city to determine which bldgs are worth placing...ask instead. I know which ones are solely there for my enjoyment
That's probably why I didn't even know the Dojo's gave pop
I run with zero houses(have over a dozen magic ones in inventory if needed), 2 magic workshops (over a half dozen of those extra), and 6 fully upgraded factories with well over 25 expansions dedicated to the guest race right now and still have 85K available pop. Collecting the incidental coins from evolving/event bldgs and doing FS visits daily means I still max out my coins every other day or more. My culture is always maxed at 170% before applying EE spells to anything (the only way to move it above 170). I get most of my regular goods from event/evolving bldgs, I have a Dragon Abbey for mana on demand (several thousand PoP and EE spells in inventory) with event/evolving/crafting bldgs for seeds (and ran out of them for the first time the beginning of this chapter! The amount of Sentient goods required is insane! Back up to ~200K of those in inventory and maintaining ~200K of each of the sentients). I will finish this chapter and activate Ch18 before this event ends (even if it takes diamonds to unlock the research for the
first time ever; I have plenty from Spire/Mystery Object and nothing else to use them on anyway) as the long slow slogs are getting longer and slower. That will mean I can claim the evolving bldg at Ch18 stats and it will produce Unurium (the new decaying resource - yay?), the first bldg other than the trader that I've seen that does that.
And, then I plan to park it for at
least a year.
Or at least until the next pretty/sparkly object catches my eye! Oh, look...a butterfly...it must have flown thru glitter...
@Darielle
Were you in Province 21? I could use 5 sorceresses and win that fight in early provinces; 5 sword dancers and face very few losses, lol! For me, there's a huge jump in squad sizes above province 20 as well as a jump in enemy to player squad size ratio. My Ch17 city (the one I've been looking at for the stats I've given in other posts in this thread) is still doing 6 rounds of 20 provinces; just now thinking about climbing up to 25. I've got 271 AW levels and 138 expansions in that city.
I've gotten my city that's still parked at 15/16 up to consistently doing 6 rounds of 25. With 257 AW levels and 123 expansions, I still drop below the >999 squads weekly; last week, frogs dropped below 900 squads...nothing I couldn't fix with my brown bear and some time boosters