Pois1's Season IV Journal (game screenshots and various interesting stuff)

Starting Season at the end of level 96 and beginning of level 97:
Pois1

25.3.2021 - start of Season IV (Underwild)
The inspiration for Season IV is Jules Verne’s book " A journey to the centre of the Earth"

On this day first three Provinces opened:

  1. Underground Entrance
  2. Dusty Stones
  3. Sandfall

We start at 2210 experience points and 6 WE cost which is comparable to somewhere between Provinces 19 and 20 of Season I or Province 16 of Season II or somewhere between Province 3 and 4 of Season III.

Special features:
Underwild Gems: enemies can spawn an uderwild gem of their own element which damages your hero every turn.
In the first Provinces all holy heroes are boosted with +50% attack but all dark heroes lose 50% of accuracy. I don’t know why there is a duration of 5 turns. It just lasts the whole battle.
This is called the Biome Effect and it is active throughout the Sandy Caves which is, as I understand it, the general designation for the first three Provinces.

Let’s start - Province 1 - Underground Entrance

We immediately run into some morlocks who are a character from H.G. Wells book “The Time Machine” and familiar beetles and cyclops.
First Boss of Season IV is a haired cyclops (cyclops mauler) as opposed to the bald cyclops Boss from Season I.

Lots of holy enemies interspersed with some nature ones, namely dust bats and to my confusion, the emerald centipede Bosses.
centipede
The emerald centipede is a beautiful enemy from Season II and it is green as opposed to its predecesor monstrous centipede from Season I which is brownish with yellow belly.
What can you do, SG is just lazy with new names I guess.
This emerald centipede Boss has poison damage over time and look gorgeous as well.

With new Season we also have new missions available so we are looking for savage morlocks (400 of them) and cyclops maulers (50) to get their avatars. We are used to that mission types already from previous Seasons.

What is different?
Well, the XP value does not go up slightly with every stage but tends to be the same for like three stages before it goes up.
Season IV awards 9-11 ingredients and 6-8 ascension items right from the start and that is +1 compared to normal difficulty of Season III.

The number of waves in Province 1 varies between 3 and 4. All stages are 8, 9 or 10 ±/ 1 recruits.
Stages 2,6,9 and 10 have two Bosses.
Last stage of Province 1 features Rokkamush and Tettukh who are the first hero characters we meet and also obtainable from the Underwild Summoning Portal.
The artwork of the new heroes as well as the map are beautiful - especially the map.

Stage 4-1-9 is the first stage of Season IV which can spawn 5 enemy wave. It is a 3 wave stage.
If I use “five enemy wave” it means 5 monsters in a wave.

There is an increased chance in Province 1 for finding fine steel, leather armor and chainmail shirts.

There are no ice or dark enemies in Province 1.

My recommendation:
Don’t use dark heroes at all. Use the attack boost with your holy heroes.
Overal, all stages are easily farmable on normal, even when there is a lot of underwild gems on the board, so far those gems are not an issue…

Province 2 - Dusty Stones (26.3.2021)

Second Province of Season IV is very much like the first one with few exceptions and differences:

new Boss: coldstone orce (ice), first ice Boss in Underwild
new monster: morlock guardian (ice), first ice enemy

Stage 4-2-8 is a top recruit stage so far in Season IV, it gives 13-15 recruits.
Stage 4-2-9 can spawn 5 enemy wave.

Province 2 is also interesting regarding Bosses. Yes, we encountered the cyclops mauler six times in a row from stage 2 to 7. Unheard of right?

XP moves up slightly from 2240 to 2260. No surprises here.
There is an increased chance for practice sword, adventurer’s kit and battle manual.
I can’t recall a Province which has an increased chance for three ascension mats, I do not think that is right or good, but that is how it is.

Final Bosses are the same as in Province 1 (Rokkamush and Tettukh).
Before I finished Province 2 I already had the cyclops mauler avatar mission completed.
Btw, there are no savage morlocks in Province 2 for the avatar mission.

I won’t even be angry that some stages use the same background as Season 1 stages, that we had already seen in Season III so no changes to the SG laziness.

Province 3 - Sandfall (27.3.2021)

No new enemies in Province 3.
XP goes up from 2260 to 2280.
Stage 4-3-6 can spawn 5 enemy wave.
There is an increased chance for string, sunspire feathers and rugged clothes.
Interesting pattern regarding the bosses:
While the cyclops was regularly followed by the centipede in Province 1, we saw no centipedes but a lot of cyclops in Province 2 and no cyclops and lots of centipedes in Province 3.
That concludes the Sandy Caves, we completed much more than 80 stages, so we get the 5 diamonds (wow!) and dive right into the hard mode!

Normal difficulty overview:

Hard mode (28.3.2021)

As well as the normal mode gives one ingredient and one ascension item more than in Season III, the hard mode of Season IV also gives +1/+1, so the overal numbers for the hard mode of Season IV are: 15-17 ingedients and 10-12 ascension items. I expect this number to be valid for the whole Season IV because it has not changed in Season III as well.
It is a very substantial amount of items and at least food and iron wise it pays off to farm hard mode stages. It is also faster since we start on 10 world energy per hard stage in all three Sand Cave Provinces.

Hard mode starts with 3790 XP for 4-1-1 and ends with 3870 XP for 4-3-10.
This is similar to the last stage of Province 4 of Season III to some mid Province 7 stages of Season III.
The overal XP/per stage is very good and also slightly better than in normal difficulty.

Keep an eye on those underwild gems, if there are many on the board it can be a problem.
As well as in the case of normal difficulty I used no dark heroes in hard mode.

Hard difficulty overview:
Completed on 10.4.2021

In hard mode we get some 10,000 food and 16,000 iron per stage for 10 WE.
Advanced farm level 10 gives 14,000 food and mine gives 8,000 iron per 100 minutes.
Loot food and iron ratio is the reverse food and iron production.

Province 4 - Curious Caverns (22.4.2021)

More of the same. Fighting through waves of beetles, morlocks and centipedes (this time already renamed to crystal centipedes - thank you SG).
Stage six offers 5 enemy waves.
Stage 5 features double cyclops mauler (both have the same Special Skill)
New bosses appear in 4-4-10, namely Morel and Russula, both ice.
In XP terms we move from 2280 to 2300 in normal difficulty that is.
Increased chance of finding leather strips, dagger and sharpening stone.

Province 5 - Glimmering Rocks (23.4.2021)

More of the same but with some changes. It is a fast playing Province, featuring five 3 wave stages.
Stages 2, 4, 6 and 8 offer five enemy waves.
Stage 4 features double coldstone orc (both have the same Special Skill)
Stage 10 has 5 waves with three bosses (that’s new!)
XP moves from 2300 to 2320 and per flag it is becoming really interesting for farmers.
2320XP means 389,67 per flag is that is on par with start of Province 23 in Season 1.
More ice enemies in this one, reappearance of morlock guardians and the coldstone orc boss.
New boss in stage 10 - Lepiota, the 5* dark Hero we can get from summons.
Lepiota is also the first dark enemy we met in Season IV.
Increased chance of finding common herbs, crude iron and sharpening stone (again).
Well, that concludes the Sandy Caves series. Fungal Caves are next!

Province 6 - Dikarya Valley (23.4.2021)
It is all about the mushrooms! Remember myconid warriors? They appear as early as 1-7-2 at the beginning of the game. This is their home and the home of their boss, the sporetroll!

New biome effects:
All Nature Heroes get additional +100% power for Special Skills while all Fire Heroes get -90% mana generation. Like in Sandy Caves with Dark Heroes, this literally disqualifies Fire Heroes from any action.
Advice: go with more Nature Heroes (Frigg is devastating here).
New monster resistance: Poison (do not take any Heroes with Poison DoT)

New monsters: fungal soldier (nature), fungal defender (ice), stompshark (nature), terrorfin (ice).
New bosses: anaconda (nature), sporetrroll (ice), abyssaurus (dark)
Gotta say I like all of them, stompsharks movements during battle are funny.
Great artwork, stage backgrounds are colourful and pleasant and mysterious and beautiful.

New missions:
Defeat 650 stompsharks to get the shark avatar!
Defeat 80 sporetrolls to get the fungal boss avatar!
Complete 100 Fungal Caves Map Stages to get meaningless 5 diamonds :-(((((
Best stage for both avatars is the last 4-6-10 with 5 waves.

sharknado

We start at 2320 XP and finish with 2350 (391,67 per flag), very good overal.

Comparison of XP/flag of normal difficulty stages of all Seasons

After the first run I did not see any five enemy wave.
Stage 10 has five waves again and again with three bosses (omg hard mode will be challenging!)
With the exception of the stage 10 dark abyssaurus, all stages feature only nature and ice enemies.
There is an increased chance for finding metal ores, training manual and scabbard in Province 6.
For the first time we get to the 9,000 iron per stage territory. Food is still around 4,400.

Now the grind begins for me - I have to play all stages again in order to get the recruit numbers together.
I will post the normal mode updated table afterwards.

Normal difficulty overview (completed on 24.4.2021):

Let’s dive into the hard mode with 151 sharks, 39 sporetrolls and 49 fungal caves stages completed.

Hard mode stats finally completed!

4-4-6 looks like a sweet spot for the recruits while obviously the last two stages 4-6-9 and 4-6-10 are the best XP/energy.

The avatar hunt will be a long one, so far I have just 196 sharks, 48 sporetrolls.
61 fungal caves stages.
Overal I did very well taking Frygg and Gregorion to do massive damage, I also used Quintus to go right after Frygg to clear the waves super fast and as always I used two Delilahs for healing and minion power.
Hard mode data will be completed over time.

I am pretty sure that from Province 7 we will go up with the WE charge. Normal mode for 7 and hard mode for 11 because we are approaching the best figures for XP per WE as far as the map stages go, take a look:

Map stages XP/WE comparison - both difficulties

image

18 Likes

Interesting. The Alliance Member List doesn’t have the Player Level number in the lower right corner of each member avatar like it does now. I guess tracking opponents’ levels must not have always been a thing.

2 Likes

Haha,

It’s a collector :cookie:

4 Likes

Maybe they could make that level number light up when we’re online, lol.

Great images @Pois1

I see your at level 82, the wiki info only shows it goes to 80 by memory, does this mean the W.E flags go higher also?
What is the Max level then?

I doubt we will see a full set of Atlantis Dragons like that too often though, lol.

1 Like

Tedious avatar missions

Lets hope we wont have to face this boss / monster ratio in season 4…
1-5 - 50 // 400
6-10 - 80 // 650
11-15 - 110 // 900
16-20 - 140 // 1100
21-25 - 170 // 1350
26-30 - 200 // 1600
31-36 - 250 // 2000

2 Likes

Closed per OP’s request.