How To Play Your Adventure
Now, you get to actually play the game! But, as discussed in the previous post, you have a few restrictions on what you can do, since everything has to be self-contained as if you were the only person in the game.
Getting More Dragons
Let's get the big topic out of the way first. You are starting from a single pair of dragons. This means you only have those two dragons to breed with and fight with until you get egg drops - either in the coliseum, from Scavenging, or by brewing eggs. You also have to feed your dragons from either Gather turns or coli food drops. You need to make some decisions early on how you want to handle feeding, so you know if you have turns available to scavenge - after all, the well fed bonus is your most reliable source of gems and additional gathering turns!
My personal recommendation is to spend your first day of gather turns on gathering food that will feed your progens for the next few days. Dragons lose 1 energy every 4 hours, or 6 energy per dragon per day. That means your progens need 12 food points per day. Try to get at least 3 days worth of food (36 food points across the types of food you need) with your first 5 gather turns, and if you got a decent haul, you can spend the other turns on Scavenging (if you want to try and get eggs) or Digging (if you are hoping for chests to get gems/treasure/familiars/apparel).
Once you have your initial food supply sorted, you can start taking your progens into the Coli and hope for some egg drops. In the meantime, breed those progens! It will be 11 days from breeding to the hatchlings maturing for use in the coli, so breed ASAP and make sure you incubate the nest daily. Similarly, any Unhatched Eggs you get will take 6 days to grow up, so you want to hatch eggs as soon as possible.
Also: make sure to pay attention to your bloodlines, since you will not be able to buy alternate partners for your offspring!
Making Money
The most obvious source of money is the Fairgrounds. Doing your daily Lucky Streak is a very good way to accumulate funds not only to buy stuff from the Marketplace (battle stones, genes, apparel, breed changes, and familiars), but also fund Baldwin brews (and you are probably going to be wanting to brew at least a few Bogsneak Eggs over time).
After the Fairgrounds, you have two other significant sources of money: hoardselling and exalting.
Hoardselling Items
This is as the name implies: you pick through what you received from Gathering, Pinkerton, and the Coli, and hoardsell absolutely anything that you do not want to keep for another purpose (brewing, food conversion, swipp swapp, etc).
"But Gryph, I don't want to hoardsell drops that are worth a ton on the AH!"
Don't fret, there is a solve for that! What you do is
sell the item to yourself. Take the hoardsell value for the item from your vaulted funds, and deposit the item in the vault for use in your out-of-Adventure gameplay. Thus, your Adventure only gets the hoardsell value, keeping your Adventure bank integrity, while your out-of-Adventure game can still benefit from the value of the item.
This is especially useful for genes and skins that you would otherwise have no use for in-Adventure.
Exalting
Getting to the point where you can make money exalting is going to be slow going. You need to get your progens high enough level to drag along fodder, and also
have fodder to train! Since your only source of dragons is Unhatched Eggs and breeding your progenitors plus the eggs you hatch, you may not have a lot of fodder early on - and even once you get up a stable of breeders, you will always be limited by your nests. This may make exalting more of a bonus income stream than a steady income source - especially if it is taking a while to get good battle stone drops.
I strongly encourage using
this leveling guide, focusing on a Sedona Team to start, for leveling up your initial team, by the way; it can be really tough to work up to level 25 without access to the AH to get an Eliminate stone, and this guide is great for dealing with training from the ground up and not having an Eliminate stone or two at hand. Most of the critical battle stones start dropping from Waterway onward, so you will have a VERY slow time in the early venues.
Remember to check the Game Database for which stones are available from the Treasure MP before buying stones out of your Vault - elemental buff stones (might/acuity), elemental special attacks (like Enamor and Disorient), Eliminate, Ambush, and Berserker stones cannot be purchased this way.