So my friends and I were playing and I am a little confused on the timing of the elf archers.  You refresh all exhausted cards at the beginning then what happened is the elf archers would be played to fight something say a stronghold.  Now he would exhaust the stronghold he had to "save" and then refresh and then exhaust again then exhaust the other stronghold again for a total of 3 influence.  Can he do this or does he have to spend influence only on the spend influence step and if so how does one use the units ablilities such as the pegasus rider and the warrior?

I am kinda confused on this so any help is appreciated thanks.

daveman006 said:

You can't save up gold or influence in between actions.  Addiotinally, there is no such thing as "spend influence step."  During your turn, you can take any number of Actions (the Perform Actions step #2) in any order you wish, and one of the Actions you can take is spending influence.  If you exhaust your strongholds to get some Influence, you must spend that influence before initiating another action (in your case, an attack action).  The attack action, and playing the Elf Archer during that action, is what allows you to reset your strongholds.  By this time, any excess influence (and gold) gained earlier in the round is removed.  This is outlined in the rules on page 8, where it states:

Similar to gold, a player may acquire multiple units by exhausting a single city, or acquire a single unit by exhausting multiple cities.  Once a player exhausts a card to generate its influence, he must spend the entire value of the influence generated by the card(s) or lose it. [b]Players cannot “carry over” any unspent influence from exhausted city, stronghold, or Reward cards.[/b]