Christmas Event, the Shop

Looking at items that will be available in the Christmas Event tab in the shop.

First, the production buildings

1. Deerstalker Hut: Costs 595 presents, and you can get up to 2 from the event. They produce meat without expending any resources, and can be levelled up to 5. They do have a production time of 8 minutes, slower than the 6 minutes your hunters take, something that needs to be taken into account for swap outs.

2. Rarity Provision House: Costs 995  presents, and you can have 1. At this stage they are not upgradeable.
It has:
Gamekeeper Snacks: Turns 40 bread into a 500 meat refill (can create stacks of 25).
Fish Eggs: Turns 120 fish and 80 water into a 500 fish refill (can create stacks of 25).

•   Slightly oddly, compared to your regular provision house these are the wrong way around current. The regular provision house turns bread into fish, and can turn fish + water into meat. Part of me thinks this is an error. Regardless, it's a discount if you would usually be getting both, frees up your regular provision house for other duties, and since 1 item is 500 versus it being 100 from the provision house, this means a stack will be 12500 instead of 2500, which will save on some RSI.

Employee of the Month: Turns 300 hardwood planks, 300 marble and 50 gold ore into a 3x workyard buff for 6 hours.
Magical Ink: Turns 200 simple paper, 150 intermediate paper and 100 advanced paper into 50 map fragments.


3. Recycling Manufactory: Costs 295 presents, and you can have 2 from the event. Produces coal without expending resources, and can be levelled up to 5. Has a 3 minute production timer like a coking plant.

There's also the Arctic Mine. Costs 295 presents, and acts as a level 5 iron mine, just without needing a license. If it depletes, or you tear it down, it's gone forever.


Next the Decorations.

Decorations don't do anything special, they just look pretty.

1. Snowman:  Costs 40 presents, no special animations

2. Christmas Tree (small): 40 presents, no special animations

3. Christmas Tree: 60 presents, has sparkling lights all over it.

The Buffs.
Hot Lemon Tea: Costs 40 presents and triples village school production for 24 hours
Christmas Feast: Costs 60 presents and increases population growth from your mayors house 6x for 2 hours.
Cookies: Costs 80 presents and triples output from a workyard for 32 hours.
Fermentation Accelerator: Costs 60 presents and quadruples output from a friary/brewery for 24 hours.
A Thousand Snowflakes: Costs 40 presents, and covers your island in blinding snow
Solar Flare: Costs 1 fish, and clears away snow

The Adventures. The present costing adventures are new this year, and I can't tell you much about them. Save the stolen feast if it comes up for a quest will be given to you, and gave fairly decent XP per troop loss in the past. Stolen Sleigh is probably similar. Not sure they're worth spending gems on, previously Save the Christmas Feast gave XP only for a reward, likely unchanged.
More Secluded Experiments: Costs 95 presents
Return to the Bandit Nest: Costs 95 presents
Save the Christmas Feast: Costs 95 gems
The Stolen Sleigh: Costs 95 gems

Gem -> Present packages
Small Present Package: Costs 90 gems, gets you 30 presents
Large Present Package: Costs 300 gems, gets you 100 presents

Exotic Flotsam: random resources (95 gems each box)
Mastert Architect: random buildings (95 gems each box).
The buildings appear to include items such as :

• Raving Rabbid
• Pirate Residence
• Pavillion
• Dark Castle
• Xmas Tree 
• Arctic Mine
• Frozen Manor 
• Storehouse 
• White Castle
• Witch Tower
• Angel Monument

Some stats for opening them from the test server can be found down in the comments.

Christmas Event, the Advent Calendar

The Christmas event is coming, and has gone onto the Test Server. There's a fair bit too the event, so I'll cover it in parts. As with anything from Test, any of this is subject to change before going live, but historically little ends up being changed, so I wouldn't expect anything dramatic.

First up, the Advent Calendar.
I'd anticipate quite a lot of countries would be aware of them, but just in case, an advent calendar is a calendar used to count down the days to Christmas. They tend to be in the form of little cardboard houses, or trees, with a door on them representing each day up until Christmas. You open one per day, often to find a pretty mediocre piece of chocolate.

Anyway.
Here's a picture of what it looks like, and I'll go through the elements of it.

1. First off, how to open it. During the event you'll find next to your avatar a little shooting star icon. Click it to open the calendar (there's also a quest pointing you to open it).

2. The 'doors'. Each day you can go in, and click on the days square and you'll be get a reward. There seems to be a small amount of variation, as you can see, on Day 1 I received 100 stone, someone I checked with got 100 pine. Day 4 we both got the advanced paper, and day 7 we both got 40 presents. Some days being the same and others different make me think there might be 2 - 3 possible variations of similar-ish valued goods on each regular day.

3. Note that Day 6, 12, 18 and 21 are Red, and Day 24 is Yellow. These days differ to the regular doors in that there's a set number of options present, and you must choose one from the boxes on the right (Arrow 4), and lock in the one you want.

• Day 6: Choose between 5x Manuscripts, 3x Tomes and 1x Codex.
• Day 12: Choose between 500 magic bean and 350 star coin
• Day 18: Choose between 2x Rabbit Lucky Charm (3x workyard production for 48 hours), 4x Red Flying Settler (3x workyard production for 24 hours), 3x Gold Fever (3x Gold Mine production for 16 hours), or 2x Fermentation Accelerator (4x Brewery/Friary production for 24 hours)
• Day 21: 2x Bookbinding glue (halve bookbinder production for 24 hours), 2x chocolate rabbit (halve provision house production time for 12 hours), 2x Mr. Myers (4x barracks recruiting time for 1 hour), 2x Training overtime (3x barracks speed for 12 hours).
• Day 24: 1x Silo, 1x Watermill or 1x Premium day.

5. The calendar also mentions a special features item, a Gold tower. It doesn't specifically say, but I imagine this might be the Christmas day present. Plausibly they may also try to make it so that you get the tower only if you have unlocked all of the doors to keep it more special.

Also generally, if you skip a day you are able to spend some gems to unlock the day. I'm not sure if it will get more expensive as you go, or if the general rewards get better, but I found that the regular days up until 7 at least required 20 gems to unlock, and the red door for day 6 cost 50 gems.

Halloween ends

The Halloween event has ended, and I hope everyone managed to get what they wanted.

I managed to get my 3 improved storehouses, and placed one down in between the 2 copper mines on the left in sector 2, giving a nice 12 second walk distance for either mine.

The other 2 storehouses I've placed in Sector 5, like so.

I like this layout. The upper storehouse is in a 2x3 spacing that nothing else would fit in, you can place a stone mason above it to grab the nearby stone, and above that you've got a nice 3x3 square possible for sitting a Gold Tower. As it looks like we'll all have the ability to get one with the upcoming Christmas event (will discuss in another post), this layout should work nicely.

The lower storehouse also includes two 3x2 spaces immediately to the right of it for placing friaries or watermills.

I also snagged the grim reaper general, and three new schools to go alongside the one I picked up last year.

All in all, a good haul.

Now, if you have some funds you can bear to part with and want to look ahead to next year, now's a good time to pick up cheap pumpkins from people who have leftovers. I picked up these relatively quickly at a ratio of 2 coins per pumpkins, and I'm sure you could get them cheaper.

Next up we have the Christmas event, already being shown on the Test Server and it's looking initially quite good, but I'll look at that another night.

Spacing out your building chains

This will be an explanation on how walk times can affect your building layouts with regards to chains. For the benefit of the example, we will assume all buildings are level 1, and you have some supply of the components already in stock that we're trying to keep balanced. The basis stays true for higher level buildings so long as they are all the same level.

To demonstrate, we will be taking a look at the Bread chain. Bread production requires wheat (farms), water (wells) and flour (mills) in the ratio of 4 farms : 2 wells : 2 mills : 1 bakery.

Let's look at this in parts.
First, we'll start at the end of the chain, the bakery and 2 mills.
Mills have a production time of 6 minutes to produce 1 flour, and the bakery has a 3 minute production time to produce a single bread, and requires 1 flour as input. Pretending walk time was instant for a moment, this means that after 6 minutes the baker has done 2 trips from the storehouse to the bakery, and the mills have done a single trip.
Of course, walk time isn't instant, and we now need to account for the fact that the baker has done 2 trips. If the bakers round trip was 24 seconds (shortest possible trip), he now needs 6 minutes, 48 seconds to perform both laps and use up 2x flour. Our mills only need to do a single trip still, and if they were positioned immediately next to a storehouse for a 24 second trip they would need 6 minutes 24 seconds to complete and drop of their 2x flour.
The double trips required by the baker really mean that the mills can be located twice as far away from the baker, and still keep production equal. If your baker is 24 seconds away, the 2x mills feeding him can be 48 seconds away.

Secondly, the 4 farms to feed the 2 mills.
These guys have the same relationship that the bakery has to the mills. Mills have a 6 minute production timer, and the farms have a 12 minute timer. Your mills can similarly do 2 trips in the time it takes the 2 farms feeding it do 1 trip, so again, the farms can be twice the walk distance away.
Of course, if you've made your mills 48 seconds away based on your bakery from before, this would mean the farms could be as much as 96 seconds away, which is probably far far further away then you're likely to make them, but worth keeping in mind that you have that kind of leeway with them.

Finally, the 2 wells to feed the bakery.
Wells produce at the same rate as the bakery, but the bakery needs 2 water per bread, so you need 2 wells per level of bakery. Well's aren't worth upgrading, so if you have a level 5 bakery, you will need 10 level 1 wells. Alternatively, if you go watermills, you will need 2 level 5's per level 5 bakery.
I typically wouldn't worry too much about spacing for wells, or even keeping track of quantity all that much. Since they don't use licences, there's no downside to having extras.

Hopefully this makes sense. Let me know if something isn't clear or any other queries below.

Gem plan in action

Last month I posted about a long term plan to accrue quite a lot of gems through pits, and how buying a gem pit can turn into multiple pits quicker than you might think.

I started this myself, I gave BB enough money to get a pit with a little left over.
As of now, I'm up to three pits up and running, and recently hit 20k again to buy another item.

This time rather than the fourth pit I've gone with the endless copper mine.
They're an excellent investment, and at level 5 at 12 seconds walk distance away it's going to bring in ~4235 ore if unbuffed (and of course it's going to be regularly buffed).

Assuming you only send out your geologists to find copper once a day, this isn't a whole lot less than all 6 mines bring in total before emptying out. If buffed, well more than the regular mines can produce.

The next time I hit 20k gems I'll get another pit, then maybe a second mine after that alternating.

Silos in S6 and S9

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Edit 18/05/2014: A few of the items in this post aren't correct. I pondered correcting and just resubmitting, but might just start again. At the bottom of this post, I'll place ideas for you to correct your layout if you followed this already. Apologies for any inconvenience
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There's a very spacious looking piece of real estate around the border of Sector 6 and Sector 9 that I've been asked to look at for Silo placements.
Despite it's appearance, it took a while to find something I was happy with, but finally I offer the below.

This is how I've laid out my grid for the area. The lines indicated by the arrows are important as they link up some trees to ensure you're buildings go snugly around them without wasting space.

Now, for this layout I've tried to maximise how may silos/farms I can make fit to a single storehouse and field, so positioned them like this. Offsetting the field to the storehouse helps to keep as many squares as possible close to one of the desired locations.
The numbers below represent the total talking time for the mapped out squares.

You will be able to disregard the bottom row entirely as being a little too far to walk if you'd like, I'll be setting one of the 68's and 76's as Silos, and the other pair as Farms, so dropping them won't alter the final result.

For a fairly stylish layout, if you present the buildings like this (where of course S's are for Silos, and F's are for Farms):

The total walk time for the farms is 640 seconds, and the same for the silos, giving an average walk time per building of 53.33 seconds. If you elected to drop the bottom row the average reduces to 49.6 seconds.

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Now for the corrections.
If, you had already swapped the outlying farm and silo like mentioned from the comments (which does improve the timing a little) like so:

I want you to now swap the farm and silo from the top row highlighted here to fix the rest of the imbalance (image also shows your final layout):

The imbalance on this map occurred from a few of the inner buildings getting in the way of pathing for some of the outlying buildings, and since I hadn't placed the inner buildings during the testing for this one, they went unnoticed. More of an issue for large layouts like this one with more places for things to get in the way.
I believe it should now be sorted though, I placed wells all through the inner squares to mimic accurate pathing for the placement of the outer buildings.