Day 35

Great news my workers have built so much in Dry Steeps that now there are cobble stone roads in the village!  Darn guys they need a holiday or something.  Thanks to four villages and all the resources I am producing now I was able to specialize almost all my units.  till have two more to go.  This time around I went almost exclusively with "strong" which give you more damage points.  Except with the catapults.  I made those "fast" so that I can take them with me on my expeditions.  Oh yeah and my boars I made "tough" cause I wanted them to last longer since they are kinda more expensive to train.  Haha okay okay so I guess it's like split 50-50 between strong and the others.

Auction just closed and guess what?  I won 4 bids!  I bid basically on all the stuff that no one wanted haha.  I did it so I could get closer to the "true bidder" achievement.  So I really like the achievements in Aloriah cause during the more dull times they give me stuff to do.  Plus they are totally bragging rights.

It seems that the animals in MA are attacking about once every 24 hours.  Which I think means that I will be attacked tonight again.  I have been almost exclusively building defenses in order to try and protect my village and win against these guys.  We'll see how it goes.

Days 33 & 34

So I was off Aloriah for a bit, crazy I know.  But yet my civilization has survived :)

My MM village was attack again by emerald dragons.  Because I took with me a big army to MA I had about half the troops that I normally defend with plus no hero (so no +60% life and damage).  Yet I was still able to defend now that the dragons are so weak plus my defenses being pretty high now.  I have been able to concentrate on buildings more like resources, item shop, marketplace, etc.  It is very nice not to have to worry only about defending.

I am in the process of developing an army to go search ruins in MM.  I figure this is the best place right now for me cause MA is too difficult but dry steeps you have to look to hard to find higher ruins (i.e. medium and hard).  This is kinda scary cause the animals in MM are a lot more powerful.  But hopefully I'll be able to upgrade and specialize a bunch of my units in the next few days.  We shall see.

Good news!  My workers in MA have been working so hard that I now have clay roads in MA!  Which is kinda funny since there is lava every where around my village...

Got my armies back to their normal duties.  Two on DOs, one on hunting dragons, one protecting my MA village, and the last is out in MA claiming a mine for me.

Day 32 End

Well alas I was close but not close enough...  Draak came out of left field and settled about two hours and eight minutes before me.  So close it is kinda disheartening.  I work so hard for it yet no.  Oh well that is the game.  I am disappointed I didn't prepare for it more.  Had I just prepared with one step I would have been ahead of everyone by about 12 plus hours.  Let that be a lesson to all.  Be prepared!  But congrats to Draak for getting there before me.

Having said all that I am quite happy with my performance.  Once I did receive the glyph I reduced the original time by more than 3/4 of the original time that was required.  I was a little more than 4 days out when I got my glyph but reduced that to just under 1 and 1/2 days.  So that is an impressive feat to do.

So it is back to work and building up my new MA village is number one priority.

Day 32 Mid-day

Search search search that is the command!  All my armies are running around searching as many knowledge obelisks as they can.  I basically sacrificed all my resources to be able to queue up the level 10 council hall and then the rest of them to give 10k wood to the gods so I could get +70% on building.  Research though is far ahead of my construction which will still take 1 day 2 hours.  But thanks to my armies efforts I am now down to 16.5 hours for the research CP.  Things are looking good.  Still no word on how close the other are... sitting at the edge of my seat right now.  Are you?

Day 32 Morning

Through the night I was able to reduce my research to 1 day 8 hours.  My council halls should be finishing up here in just a couple of hours.  This will leave me 1 CP short however still.  I got to get this either through research, upgrading one of my council halls to level 10, or finding an item.  Still a coupld of thousand off in resources to upgrade to level 10 but I do have surpluses in gold and iron so maybe I can trade some to get enough.  I also tried searching a couple of ruins but to no avail in finding an item with CP in it.

Amazingly my wolf army that I sent to MA with a scroll of recall made it through the night without fighting at all.  So they are only an hour away from MA then it's on to the village spot.  But first I got to aviod hellhounds, spiders, burning pincers, and ruby dragons!

Traded a bunch of resources (with a crappy market value) around and now I am only 1.5 hours from having enough resources to build a level 10 council hall.  But I still need to get that down some cause my level 9 finishes in 1 hour 7 mins.  No time to waste!

Day 31

CAUGHT WITH MY PANTS DOWN!  So last night I got a magic glyph, good right?  It even came with a village spot that is only 12 cells away from my ideal spot.  Yeah except I wasn't prepared for it.  Now I am rushing to get the needed CP to settle in Molten Ashlands.  Geeze I can't believe I was this unprepared.  Not enough CP, no settlers, no army in MA.  So now it is a race.  One that I think I will lose cause Holophobia says in the chat that he is ready to settle in MA.  Already has 50 CP??  Crazy!  I am struggling to find my 35 CP I need to settle there (being on a 4 village strategy so far).  Well I am doing my best to get there.  Either way I need to get there asap cause I need the extra resources etc.  So I canceled all my construction and queued up my council halls.  But they were all already at level 8 so to get to level 9 takes a day to do.  I sent a wolf army with a scroll of recall to MA.  That'll take 20 hours assuming they don't get in a fight to which they will lose so that will add like 2-3 hours more on to the trip.  Then I re-assigned two of my hero armies to just go and claim knowledge obelisks.  My next CP award in research will take 3 days 20 hours to get.  Right now I have to build one council hall to level 10 so that is an additional 1 day 12 hours on top of 23 hours (level 9).  So my goal is to try and get enough research to reduce my CP reward below the amount of time it would take to get to level 10 council hall.  We'll see if it works.  I also just bought a scroll of stone portal and I am waiting to get a scroll of recall so I can send my hero there and then call out my settlers.  So for both CP and getting to my village I have multiple ways to achieve these we'll see which of them ends up being the fastest.  Also retasked one of my dragon obelisk armies to go and search ruins in the hopes that I find an item with CP or research boost.

Mid-day: Found a research parchment +10% on research.  Sacrificed gold +28% on research.  Now my reward is down to 3 days and a couple minutes out.

Day's end: Re-tasked all my armies to search knowledge obelisks.  Got next CP down to 2days 10 hours now.  By next morning it should be down even further.  Looking good so far.  Only problem is that I have no idea where anyone else is in settling.  Had to re-route my wolf army so that added +4 hours but that shouldn't effect the end time so long as they don't get in a fight tonight.  See you tomorrow!

Day 30

Well nothing too special to report today.  Though it is always heart pounding when you sign on after only 10 hours of being off and there are 51 notifications!  It was like man is it good or bad?  But hey I guess that means your doing stuff.

Fought a bunch of black dragons today but I forgot that I was already over on my diamond capacity so they were all for nought.  Oh and sealed my first dragon gate as well!  That is always nice to get that +12 SP bonus.

Bought a "Keg and Ale" plus upgraded some barracks, animal circles, and taverns so I am finally out of the overpopulation problem.  So now I am able to queue up a bunch more troops.  Did that mostly in MM cause in DS there really is no point in killing dragons right now.  I already have too many diamonds with not enough capacity.  So I want to try and hunt down some emerald dragons tomorrow and see if I can get a magic glyph.

Day 29

500 SP reward!  Oh how I love those rewards.  Huge amounts of resources that pretty much let me upgrade the rest of my troops to level two and fill up my building queues in my villages.  I chose the pouch of diamonds for my second reward cause the other option was 750 diamonds and some quick math revealed that with +4 diamond income that is less than 8 days worth of diamonds.  Since I don't need diamonds for anything special right now the pouch seemed like a no brainer.  On top of that after the pouch went into my village thanks to my fountain of fortune I got +1 diamond income for a grand total of 5 income per hour.  Not too much but hey I'll take it.  Also with the reward I got a bronze dragon egg which I found kinda of amusing since the mother dragon hasn't flown once yet to drop them.

Fought some more emerald and black dragons beat them without a problem.  The annoying thing is that even with my thief fighting I didn't steal anything from them.  I was really hoping for a magic glyph to go to MA.  Funny thing about that real quick is that I spent like 4 days of farsight plus two armies scouting out to find the perfect village spot in MA.  It was only then that I realized that where I would settle would be based on luck (magic glyph only opens like 3 village spots to you).

Also now I am dealing with a player who is in the same area as me claiming DOs and keeps taking them from me.  No message or peace request nothing just takes a bunch of my DOs.  Well my solution is I broke off a part of my army and circled around behind him and am reclaiming all the ones he stole from me!

Couple days ago I suggested in the forums that alliance pinpoints should be able to be placed by anyone in the alliance and not just the alliance leader.  Just got word that they are going to try and implement it later this week!  Always exciting to know you contribute to the development of the game.

Day 28

It is just me or do the Black Dragons seem to be a lot more aggressive this round?  Got attacked twice but had no problem defending against them.

I decided this round to give chests a try out.  Last round I didn't bother at all with them.  One of my heroes I am going to take all the way to primary with the lock picking skill.  He almost has secondary as a skill.  I wonder if picking one of those locks is an achievement.

I switched my Zerkers to fire damage.  I did this cause almost every animal except those in MA don't have a fire resistance.  So this means their damage will hit with full power.  I thought this was important cause their damage isn't very high to begin with.  This means I had to raze my arrow tower and build a fire tower in MM.  That was a little scary cause I was without that needed boost for almost the whole day.

So now that everyone is starting to expand PvP is starting to come into play a little more.  Not in the traditional sense of attacking one another's villages but in the sense of controlling lookouts and claiming dragon obelisks.  Had a couple of run ins already but most of the bigger people I just ask for peace with. But that presents it's own problems cause then you can't go claim their DOs and Lookouts which can get annoying if you are in the same area at the same time.

I have the biggest army yet (except the very first army) of dragons coming to attack 363 of the buggers.  Upped my pop slightly and now I should be good.  If 3 more dragon gates are sealed before they attack (very likely) then it'll basically be a cake walk.  And I think that I'll be able to go out and hunt down some dragons after that.  REVENGE!!!

Day 27

So I got 350 SP today which means rewards!!  Course they give you a bunch of resources upfront which is nice, but then you get a choice more resources, or different items to choose from.  Mine were 2 bronze chests or a silver chest or 3750 wood/stone, 2000 iron, 1000 gold, and 62 diamonds.  Since I already had a pretty significant amount of resources I decided to see how the chests would compare to the resources.  I chose the two bronze chests cause I didn't have a hero with lock picking at secondary and didn't plan to for a while.  So from my two bronze chests I received 1311 wood, 1843 stone, 515 iron, and 393 gold plus I chose the items ornamental dagger (+20% sacrifices) and saddle (+7% land movement).  So by far it is much better to choose the resources upfront if that is what you need.  However if you have a good income of resources then by choosing chests you have the opportunity to can items that you otherwise would not have had the opportunity for.  The ornamental dagger will translate into faster building/training/research.  Thought that was an interesting experiment.

Was able to upgrade my zerkers and axe throwers to level 2 today!  This is exciting cause it means I should be able to defend with less units and not keep running into the population problems that I do.

Beat emerald army number 3 today.  It seems I am doing fine in this area now!  Plus the constant attacks provide a nice income of diamonds.  The only thing I am worried about now is when I leave with my hero to go settle in Molten Ashlands.  Because when I do I'll be taking a lot of power with him.  For one he has the protective skill so as it stands right now that is +60% life and damage when defending a village.  I'll need to make sure my troops can survive without him when he leaves.

Black dragons will be attacking me tonight but I got no problems defending my village in DS.  I have noticed though that it seems they are attacking more villages this game round than last.

Nothing else to exciting to report.  Claimed some DO and found some treasure chests.

Oh one last interesting note!  It seems the game map is the same as last round.  I have found some mines lookout towers, etc in the exact same places as the last map.  So if you can remember where any of those secret places you once had were I think they'll still be there.

Day 26

Well today was a great day on Aloriah.  I finally am winning battles in Misty Marshes!  Two of them now with the second army being something like 370 odd dragons.  Feels good to finally not have to log on and see how many resources have been stolen and what buildings were razed and what my happiness level is.  Finally my people are happy!  Guess that is cause they aren't being eaten by dragons anymore.  I'd probably be pretty happy too if that was the case...

Posted my new strategy (not settling the 5th village) up in the forums to see what others thought about the idea.  They'll probably think I am crazy but hey what else is new?

Background

So here is a little about me.  This is my second game round in Aloriah.  I am not a gamer at all and Aloriah is my first browser game I have ever played.  I originally started playing as a way for my girlfriend and I to connect more while I was studying abroad.  However we enjoyed ourselves so much that we have continued to play since I have returned.  I consider myself a passive player though I must admit that I have been much more active this last game round.  Mostly because of the troubles I have faced I think haha.

Well since we are already underway here let me give you a little bit of what I have already done.  For this round since I started at the same time as everyone else (wasn't the case in my first round) I decided to go for some achievements.  The ones I concentrated on were the rushers.  I didn't make it in time for Tropical Islands so instead I decided to rush to Dry Steeps instead of going to TI.  Then I decided to rush Misty Marshes instead of going to TI as well.  I accomplished my goal in that I got the achievements which is good cause they are only available once every time a game round starts.  So I currently have 3 villages but no TI village.  For my 4th I have decided to try the 4 village strategy for a while unless someone can convince me otherwise.  We'll see how it works.  I struggled a lot with MM for a while cause I didn't have the man power or resources to be there.  Lost lots of battles to the vicious Emerald Dragons.  However now I have gotten a handle on it and seem to be doing good there as I have won my last two battles against them.

I have concentrated the main part of my research in Combat and Resources which is different than I did last game round.  A new change this game round is that you can have leveled alliances that will give you buffs.  We have started The Primes and now have all 7 of our spots filled.  Already we have a level 12 alliance that provides a pretty good buff.  The level ups are getting expensive though.  However I like that we have this option to dump our resources in there cause sometimes you have spent all your resources and time so you wonder what to do with the rest.  Now we have the option to dump into the alliance.

The main part of my forces is in MM defending my village.  Some of the players think it was unwise to rush into MM.  One of the reasons is cause you have to have so much of your population in MM.  But I am not so sure on this point.  Normally at this point in the game you want to have the most of your population in DS to hunt dragons and get diamonds.  However the main use of diamonds has always been to get uber units.  These units have changed significantly though in the new game round.  This being that they are now worth 2k pop instead of 500 pop.  So there will be a lot less uber units and they will be used differently.  So we'll see how that all works but perhaps diamonds in large quantities aren't needed as much anymore.

Well there you have it!  Very brief and quick overview of my play so far stay tuned for what happens next!

Getting Started

Hello world!  Well I like this game so much I am starting an Aloriahian blog.  There is the official Aloriah blog you can check out as well as a whole bunch of other players who have their own blog type things.  Most of these are a how-to guides or strategy guides.  Being that this is only my second game round I wouldn't feel adequate enough to create such a blog type.  This blog of mine will simply document my playing with victories, struggles, failures, and all.  Hopefully some people will find it instructive and/or entertaining.