My Praetorian Pilgrimage To Pandon Reach #41

Announcement

I'm excited to announce that after a series of two land swap deals, I have relocated the majority of my land production to Pandon Reach, Region #41. The Reach is the last region of the Broken Lands, sharing a southern border with the Land of Prosperity and featuring waterfront property on the Southwest Coast of Praetoria.

It was a difficult decision to uproot my land infrastructure from four regions where I had established operations producing Aura and mining SPS. But after careful deliberation, it made the most sense to consolidate into a smaller number of premium plots in a younger region with room for future expansion.

In The Beginning

My land empire started with 5 unclaimed deeds in a group claim tract within the @shield-of-glory. If I remember correctly, @zagorlord sold some parcels of his presale purchase to guild members and hive friends. I acquired 5 deeds from someone who had already bought into the tract. In fact, I ended up running the spreadsheets and distributing the plots from the two "loose" tracts to the 20ish participants in the group claim.

Sadly, I didn't win the lottery with my 5 plots in Region 95, Tract 8, but the person who did open the keep, ironically, did get lucky with only 5 plots in the claim... the last 5 plots, 96 to 100. I think the keep was plot 97. I was fortunate to open a rare iron plot along with a common magic and three common naturals.

During Land 1.0, I made grain and produced research from my single magical plot. I capitalized on the 15% rShare bonus in Ranked play for joining the RUNEGUARD, and enlisted 5 RUNI to help me work my land. I think RUNI are a tremendous bargain for the handy 100% bonus they offer on land production!

Land Strategy

Over the years, as land developed with more resources, I decided to focus on SPS mining and aura production. I liked the idea of earning SPS from the fixed pool allocation and producing the soulbound resource, aura. The rest of my farming would be to support my ongoing Aura/SPS activities.

I picked up a cheap, rare occupied plot in my home region, but I had no stone production and was short on wood and grain. I started finding bargains on epics in a few hot regions like 27, 97, and 136. Before I knew it, I had eclipsed the 50 plot threshold and became a land baron.

Every harvest was becoming tedious, having to purchase resources and balance budgets. None of my four regions was self-sufficient, so each individual region took precious time to buy the necessary resources before I could harvest all. This was an especially bad situation for me in Region 97, where I had an operation of six occupied plots. With barely any other resource support in the same region, it would cost me over half-a-million grain for each harvest every 5 days.

I was tired of the big DEC bill I faced with each harvest because of my unbalanced resource production, so solving this mismatch was my main goal for the move. If I moved somewhere from scratch, I could better balance my resource production and expand more freely.

The Solution

After some brief conversations in passing during an unsuccessful play at a highly coveted Gold Foil card, I responded to an article by @ecoinstant about trading plots. The proposal was to swap plots in regions across Praetoria to acquire land in Pandon Reach and boost tax revenue for their castle. I said I'd bring my RUNIs to boost production in The Reach, and they let me trade up into a spread of epic plots to leverage my highest PP workers.

When the dust settled, I moved out of my full positions in 27 (7 plots), 95 (17 plots), and 136 (2 plots), plus another handful of mostly occupied plots from 97. I gave up a pair of epics, a rare occupied, three magic commons, ten grain, and a mix of other resources. I threw in 20 common totems, 32 CL Max GFCs for 2K PP and 8 CL Max GFRs for 4K PP + $100 in DEC to get the deal over the line. The nice thing about downsizing was being able to find a home for all those displaced Pelacors and totems.

The upside of 41 is huge, as I will finally be able to balance my books and engineer my operations to be mostly self-sufficient after some final tweaking. With the land and survival cooldowns, it's been a bit tricky to get everything sorted in the proper places, but I should have everything in order by next week. And there is plenty of room if I need to level up my production, which was not the case in 27, 95, and 97 -- all three are active and densely populated regions!

The Spread

The jewel of my new spread of land is the keep in Tract 4/54. There's no grain in 4, but in my new home tract, I'll be firing up two epic plots each for wood, stone, iron, and aura, plus three more occupied rares. My grain production will come from Tract 10, where I have an epic and three more rares to feed my workers.

When the initial two swaps are finished, I will have 19 plots in Pandon Reach, with my focus continuing to be on mining SPS from the six occupied plots and producing aura from the two epic magic plots. All my resource production will go to support these eight lands. I'm hoping I will finally be close to breaking even with the grip of epics working to churn out grain, wood, stone, and iron. By the end of April, I should have a new way forward to sort out any resource shortfalls as I finish my transition to Pandon Reach.

Here's to my new chapter of land, Duce 2.0 in Pandon Reach #41!

Check out my affiliated guild alliance for open positions.
Discord invite linked to the picture!

@ducecrypto & @treycrypto & @shaelien
Proud members of Splinterlands' top-rated guild,
the original guild in the KoG alliance, @shield-of-glory!

Link to cheap rentals from GigaCrypto on @peakmonsters!

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