Yesterday late in the evening on my side of the world, the first playable version of the Land expansion made its public appearance!
In this initial playable version, we finally can start playing a limited expansion of the game before a fully expanded one, maybe next year. The idea to build this intermediary playable version was 
Seeing how long it took Land 1.5 to come out and knowing the complexity will rise for Land 2.0, I hope we will have it by the end of next year, but I imagine it is not unlikely to see it pushed to Q1 2025, the year when the bull market should approach its apex, by the way. We already have some ideas about what Land 2.0 will encompass, but we will soon have a whitepaper draft with better-refined details.
In the meantime, we have Land 1.5, which will continue to have a few iterations after the initial release to add a couple of important features that didn't make the cut to the initial release. The first iteration will likely bring the grain market and, therefore, the Grain-DEC LP, with DEC rewards.
But I am going too far with my mind right now.
Let's return to the present and the close past (yesterday, the launch day).
I waited for the maintenance to be completed, so I could start setting up my worksites.
As someone who was impatient and didn't want to wait to see if there were any critical issues revealed once everyone jumped in, I want to thank the team and the Mavericks who tested the game extensively on the QA server before launch because there was nothing truly critical I noticed, although, in the heat of the moment, some aspects may have eluded me.
There were some glitches and some hot interface fixes (for example, to the Harvest All view, but not only), but to be honest I expected worse. And it's always great when your expectations are exceeded.
I spent around 3 hours well into the night setting up around a quarter of my plots. I would set up more, but my DEC ran out, as expected.
The positive thing is that I set up one plot more than I planned to, due to the fact the true DEC requirements were lower in some cases than 10k per slot, but at the same time, I had a few surprises and changes in strategy compared to what I had in mind.
The biggest surprise I had, and one I could have avoided if I had tested on the Mavs server thoroughly, was that my time crystals (I purchased the starter package containing them for half of my plots) were not even close to enough for these plots. So yes, I purchased quite a few TCs that also drained my DEC. For plots like the Magic ones, waiting for 1+ month to clear them was unacceptable. And they needed lots of TCs to be cleared instantly, unfortunately.
Had I waited until today though, I would have gotten a better deal for most of the TCs. But my thinking was there would be scarcity that would drive the price up (people who purchased them unwilling to sell and not enough players purchasing them with the starter packages, wanting to buy them now). I was mistaken, looks like people wanted to sell what they don't use now and buy them later when they need them.
The second surprise was the duration during which SPS rewards weren't paid. A few hours was quite long. I admit I didn't read the announcement to the end, and I don't really care about feeding the workers for no SPS rewards because I have enough grain in my stash, but it means in a few hours whales had time to set up their SPS mines, and rewards dropped significantly when they started.
By the second day (today), I made about 60% of the SPS I earned from land before the launch. Right after the SPS rewards started, I would have earned a little better than before. Initially, my plan was to have a few other plots mine SPS at the beginning, besides the occupied ones, but seeing how much and how fast this dropped, I realized SPS rewards on land are a whale game now, and it makes no sense to have other plots on that. So I'm in the process of changing their type of work (decided not to pay the TCs and wait 24h instead).
One would say, why is SPS a special case? Whales will definitely earn more than me on any type of resource they focus on, the difference is I can earn more SPS in different ways than through land and without grain costs either.
That means my focus will be on the other two work options, other than on the occupied plots. Curiously, I came back to the original plan, but I didn't think I'd be giving up on SPS so quickly. I thought it would be close to a week before I switched.
What I'd like to see at some point when the devs get a chance is some leaderboards for Research Points (and comparison between territories). :)
Nice to see that with the increased needs of DEC for land, the price of SPS started to pump, and Matt said what they call the "flywheel effect" (burning SPS for DEC) began already, but is not very sustained yet.
What's next for me? I'll have to check to see if I can optimize a few more slots, maybe even using some of the cards from my playing deck. By the way, another surprise I had was that in my setup for land release, I had included by mistake 2 or 3 cards with penalties for the respective land geography. Luckily, the interface let me know I was about to do something stupid.
Coming up with more DEC to unlock the next plot will be a grind unless I decide to take a harvest hit and not have 100% DEC for all my plots. I don't think this is profitable, since I only have natural rare and common plots uncleared now, and unlocking one of them wouldn't be as beneficial as taking a harvest hit on the high PP plots. So, the conclusion is: I NEED MORE DEC! 馃槂
