Wednesday 5 March 2014

Easter Approaches


The Easter event is almost upon us, and will go live on the 9th of April.


Collectibles
Continuing the trend, there will be Easter specific collectibles. Egg Paint, Wicker Baskets and Simple Egg's. You need 25 of each item, and then can convert all of that into 10 actual eggs in the mayors house. Also, these collectibles are rather tiny, I'd certainly call them harder to notice than the Christmas ones.

There's also some other new collectibles on the test server, wine barrels, fur bundles and a few others that make a few new things, but these aren't specific to Easter, and won't necessarily go live with the event.

Explorers
Similar to Christmas, your explorers will be able to find eggs in additional to regular loot they might find when out on searches. Very long searches are certainly capable of bringing back 50 from testing, but much more would need to be done to get an idea of the amounts at different search times.
Now, if you've invested in the Sturdy Shovel skill on explorers (+9% treasure on explorer searches) like you may have if you've made an Artefact Searcher, you'll also find that the egg count gets increased by this skill also.

You can also get a few hundred eggs by completing the quest line.

Now, what can you shop for?

Buying eggs
First, as always, you can spend some gems to buy the holiday resource.
In this case, the small egg basket contains 100 eggs, and the big basket contains 300 eggs. Initially, this seems to make no sense. If you buy 3 small baskets, you can have 300 eggs anyway, but that way would only cost 885 gems. A small discount, but still, cheaper that way.


The Specialists


The Master of Martial Arts (2,395 eggs, max 1): He's the new big ticket item for the event. He holds 220 troops which may not seem like much next to the Veteran, but, as a unit himself he's quite a powerful force. He is a first striker himself, and swings for 450 - 500 damage per blow at the weakest enemy units. Basically he's like having around 50 cavalry in the battle on your side, which are immune to typical enemy first strikers.
Battles you typically wouldn't send cavalry into can now be fought as if you did send some. He will mix things up, and there will be battles that he makes easier (but it is a lot of eggs).

Veteran (1,545 eggs, max 1): Ah, the Vet. If you don't have one, you should consider him an important goal. His 250 troop capacity will help a lot on adventures, reduces losses considerably over your regular 200 generals. If you already have one, an argument could be made for getting another, it's still an additional troop transport in the worst case, and there are some adventures where a second veteran works out well. We at this stage can't be sure if people will be able to get a vet for eggs again if you got one last year for eggs, but last year you could, so it seems plausible that it will work out again.

Experienced Explorer (475 eggs, max 1): Experienced Explorers are like Savage Scouts, and allow you to go on treasure/adventure hunts in half the time, very useful. If you aim to get him early, you can also of course put him to work exploring and finding eggs for the remainder of the event. In previous years, you could get 2 of these, the dropping to 1 probably related to the inclusion of the Master.


The Buildings
Watermill (275 eggs, max 5): The Watermill is always a nice necessary item after a point on your island to reduce the amount of wells you require. Historically however, the amount of cash you could get for 275 eggs was greater than what you could just buy a watermill for, so they tended to not be worthwhile.

Floating Residence (75 eggs, max 3): At level 5, a floating residence holds 80 population, although similar to nobles, it tends to be most economical to get them to level 3 for 60 population. Especially useful as by going on water, they're living on space you couldn't use for anything else anyway.

Rabbit Farm Field (75 eggs, no limit): A field containing 6,000 wheat. Almost certainly not worthwhile.


The Buffs
Rabbit Lucky Charm (145 eggs, no limit): 3x output for a building for 48 hours
Mineral Rabbit (75 eggs, no limit): add 6000 coal to a deposit
Chocolate Rabbit (45 eggs, no limit): Halve production time on your provision house for 12 hours
Inspirational Speech (245 eggs, no limit): "Increases the production of all buildings in a 3 radius square by 3, for 12 hours". Now, this one requires further explanation.
Firstly, you need to remember that typical buildings are 2 squares across.
Secondly, you can't aim for the side of a building to increase the radius, you select a building, and then it counts 3 squares out from the centre of the building.
Thirdly, you must click on a buffable building, so you can't hit a storehouse to get everything around it.
If you had such a layout, this does mean you can hit up to 9 buildings with this buff.

Here's an example:
I can aim on the cutter in the centre, and it will hit the 8 surrounding cutters as well. This is nice, but I'd tend to value getting buffs below getting specialists and buildings. Also, you probably aren't going to have 9 buildings in a tight layout like this, there's probably going to be a storehouse in there somewhere.


The Decoration
Raving Rabbid Statue (195 eggs, no limit): Pretty little statue, also screams a bit when clicked on. That is all.

The Surprise Box

Paula's Surprise Box (145 gems, no limit): Similar to the Master Architect box from Christmas, this box contains an assortment of buildings and decorations. The list of things you can get are fairly similar too. The Xmas tree and Improved storehouse are out, and in their place you can get silos and Bone Churches. Bone Churches seem incredibly rare though.
So the list is:
  • Angel Monument (decoration)
  • Arctic Iron Mine (level 5 Iron Mine, doesn't return to star when depleted)
  • Bone Church (decoration)
  • Dark Tower (100 population)
  • Frozen Manor (140 population)
  • Pavillion (decoration)
  • Pirate Residence (50 population)
  • Raving Rabbid Statue (decoration)
  • Silo (Replenishes wheat fields at the same rate a equal level farm depletes it)
  • White Castle (50 population)
  • Witch Tower (100 population)


Personal notes/suggestions:
If you're new, and don't have a veteran yet at all, you really should place some priority on getting him. He helps reduce losses in adventures so much, and you'll miss having him later in the year if you leave him now. Even though he's great, a case could be made for first focusing on getting the explorer, so that you can use him to go get more eggs for the rest of the event. That would be my main suggestion in that case, get the explorer, then the vet.
Eggs permitting, move onto floating residences.

For myself, I already have a veteran so initially intend on saving up for explorer, and then the master of martial arts. I have 8 explorers currently, so the egg income should be reasonable. After that, floating residences, and then perhaps even the veteran if things go super well.


Let me know what items you're looking to pick up below.
Happy Settling.


2 comments:

  1. hi bro, ur blog is the best xD. I am level 20 in BR server. Hopefully i`ll be able to get the explorer then the veteran =]. i want watermills too, i don`t care you say they aren`t worth i say they are XD. too lazy to keep changing water wells all around the map everyday LOL =]. keep it up ! bye bye

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    Replies
    1. Oh, watermills are excellent items, and very much worth getting.
      They just from past years haven't been worth getting with eggs. In the past you were better off selling 275 eggs for gold, and then spending THAT gold on a watermill and having leftovers.
      This year may differ of course.

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