My experience with expeditions

When I first became curious about expeditions there was little constructive info on this topic. All the posts I found were from people who had tried it in 2014 or so and had already made their minds about not playing PvP. So I thought as somebody who has played it fairly recently maybe I give an account of how it worked out for me.

I started playing colonies when I was on lvl 36 and during the Holloween event 2016. At the time I did not have any other viable options to gain titanium to slay Golems and that was my last resort and it actually solved my problem. After that I stopped playing adventures because they had become boring and again I needed titanium to train crossbowmen to do the more interesting ones.

During those two month I saw the following things happen:

1) First of all, let me tell you that there has been a couple of improvement since 2014 for expeditions. Training units is generally cheaper and faster now, and the rewards from the conquest of colonies are somewhat higher. The points that follow are by considering these improvements.

2) Doing colonies and adventures at the same time is a terrible idea. With the cap on the number of troops that you can fit on your island, doing both means you are going to be incompetent at both.

3) Colonies do not give you enough XP. In the two months that I played PvP, players in my guild who were on a lower level and only did adventures had so much progress that now I stand a staggering 7 levels below them (I am on lvl 43 BTW). Getting on higher levels in general has an exponential effect on your economic growth, i.e. new explorer capabilities, new buildings, etc, while PvP levels do not unlock anything.

4) When doing some adventures, there is also the possibility of finding nice buildings and other stuff in your loot which again can boost your performance, while for colonies it is always an alternating set of boring resources. But wait! There is always the expedition water castle for you, so I would say that kind of evens it out.

5) Conquering a colony is more involving than doing adventures. First because there is a lot of hit-and-miss involved: the type of resources you get by searching could all turn out to be hardwood and marble, you might have a nice colony which you can lose at any point in time, or you might arrive at an island which is ridiculously impenetrable. Also, iron is an essential resource for training expedition units, and its production cycle is harder to maintain. Indeed I have found out that mining iron and trading it is a much more lucrative enterprise than doingn expeditions.

6) The development team has given up on expeditions, so unlike the non-PvP feature which are updated and extended regularly, rest assured that the future holds nothing exciting for you there!

That being said, I still play expeditions when I am really bored with adventures, because my opinion is that in the end this is only a game. When I was playing games on my PC I would not stop playing because it had one annoying feature or would occasionally crash or something and an online game is no different.

I've just started doing them, was advised by my guild not to so I gave up on the idea but now I'm a little more experienced I thought I'd try. First mistake, learnt today is that blocks don't work like adv. If the block is still fighting when the leader goes down you still lose troops in that block.

When buildings defences after the conquer you have to place the right building first time as you cannot remove it even though you have the option to. So frustrating!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EasyTarget1

When buildings defences after the conquer you have to place the right building first time as you cannot remove it even though you have the option to. So frustrating!

---

Well, you can always destroy them and you get the points back with which you can rebuild defences / redeploy units.

You'd think so, but once you destroy them a few secends later you get a new quest sound and the building reappears and can no longer be removed.

Get this, wanted to change the def building I put up, so destroyed it and quickly put up the building I wanted. A few seconds later, and ping - a new quest sound and the building changed but -

http://image.prntscr.com/image/07f6d...4f37506020.png

Infantry units in a ranged structure.....

What gets me is new limits on available colonies. I have been playing PVP for a year now and I have kept my six slots full.
For the last 5 months or so I would average 2 lost colonies a day but for the last month it has been 5-7 colonies lost a day.
And the availability of worthwhile colonies to replace my losses and never been slimmer. I have discarded more colony searches
in the last month and the previous year.
I would like to know why game management is doing this. I am close to quitting PVP because of the effort now required(3-4 hours daily)
just to keep up.
For the first time I have started playing other online games because management has made the game a chore. I want my old Settlers Online back.

A lot of players don’t like the PVP system, mainly due to the high cost relative to the loot and the XP gained from the expeditions. But I have enjoyed playing PVP from time to time, it makes a nice break from adventuring and offers a whole new challenge. I would disagree that you cannot do both PVP and adventures effectively, maybe at lower levels or if you are new to the game, but with practice and a larger population you can do both (magnificent residences are very cheap at the moment!). Furthermore, doing a PVP now and again allows your barracks a bit of time to generate more troops for adventures.



The loot rewards and XP are not great, but for some, the game is not all about maximising gains or progressing up the levels as fast as possible. I like the water castle as a trophy building - this makes up for the cost to an extent. How many people pay through the nose either in gold or effort just to get hold of an angel gate? its a shame that the water castle does not hold any population though, as I think this would make it a much more attractive building and encourage more to play PVP.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Brotherjon

Furthermore, doing a PVP now and again allows your barracks a bit of time to generate more troops for adventures.

---

This is essentially spending resources (or to be more precise : spending iron) for something that has almost no contribution towards general progress.

Quote:

---

The loot rewards and XP are not great, but for some, the game is not all about maximising gains or progressing up the levels as fast as possible.

---

Yes, the game is pretty much about progressing through levels, ever since the update that introduced alot of new content (and possibly more content to come), everything with a certain - and high - level requirement.

That being said, xp rewards from colonies are virtually nonexistant, since they dont add up to the levels you need to unlock new content.

__
The entire feature of the pseudoPVP was made incompatible (if not obsolete) over a year ago with the XXL update.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EasyTarget1

learnt today is that blocks don't work like adv. If the block is still fighting when the leader goes down you still lose troops in that block.

---

I havent tried blocking yet, thx for this tip. my blocking guide now makes a lot more sense :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by polarbarez

And the availability of worthwhile colonies to replace my losses and never been slimmer.

---

Worthwhile colonies, ROFL

+1 Brotherjon, i agree with everything u have said :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KharFahm

1) First of all, let me tell you that there has been a couple of improvement since 2014 for expeditions. Training units is generally cheaper and faster now, and the rewards from the conquest of colonies are somewhat higher.

---

No offense, OP, but that's the ONLY info in your post that somewhat differs from what "everyone" has said since expeditions were introduced.

Personally I really dislike the whole idea of expeditions, and will never ever play a single one of them in it's current form. Wasting valuable resourses and building up an unnessary seperate army, just to waste a lot of time on stuff that barely has any reward at all. No thank you.

Are there any basic instructions anywhere?
How does one overcome the lack of troops allowed in an expedition? So far I always run out of troops
Are expeditions worth playing at all?

to answer your last and most important question, no.

This is an update to my post a year ago. Since then, some features have been added which mean that expeditions are now something to seriously consider.

Since last year, two classes of geologists have been introduced which considerably improve the cost effectiveness of mining iron. These are the Iron-Willed Geologist which was offered during the Easter event and the Stone Cold Geologist which was introduced during the championship event. So now, the effort of finding and building iron mines is beginning to resemble those of mining copper, although I think coal is still going to be an issue in the production process.

One other improvement (which I believe many older players are not even aware of yet) is that the expedition castle now holds population, and in case you manage to reach the higher levels it can add up to 3000 to your population limit. So, it seems to me that maintaining a regular army and the expedition forces along-side each other is now a viable option, and doing expeditions can help your overall growth a lot more than it did before.

A problem that remains however, is the large number of timber and marble colonies that you find when doing an expedition search. As somebody on level 51, I would have loved to have a colony which gave me something towards gaining more of the rare material I need to grow.

The two special geologists were much needed to higher levels, a good addition. Coal has the boost from Recyclers so it's not that bad.
The additional population from the Expedition castle was also needed.

if the search you do doesnt give you anything you want .. discard it all .. and send another explorer to search again until you do get something worthwhile.

As for it not being profitable ....if you do it right ... its extremely lucrative - and can be more so than normal adventures .. add to that the recent population boost ... def worth even basically experimenting with. BUT a solid iron economy is essential to get very far in it.

Having said that ... once i hit the max level in 1 or 2 more colony attacks i will probably clear out most of the remaining troops and turn them into extra elite barracks troops so i can chain a few more MCC Ventures together in one go=.. but I will still dabble with it to keep one or 2 colonies running most of the time.