New Player Guide

Now that you have received your first report, what should you do?

Spend your starting resources. Recruit some essential units, train them in magic, perception, and as a human, entertainment to make some cash.

In the early game, your home region should provide you with the resources needed to start an economy. It’s unlikely you’ll find iron or stones here, but there will be wood, silver, and peasants, the most essential resources for getting off the ground.

Economy

For your economy, unless you chose a race that’s severely handicapped in that skill, train entertainers. Taxation requires armed units, which are going to take you a while to build, and working doesn’t produce much of a surplus – it’s meant as an emergency measure when a unit is stranded somewhere, and provides just enough for subsistence, not a long-term way to support your units.

Perception

Anywhere that you have silver, you should have a unit trained in perception, especially in your home base. Another player might decide start the game by learning stealth, and they can really mess with your plans when they go around undetected and help themselves to your silver. It’s recommended to have one unit per region study perception continuously, starting as early as possible.

Magic

To train magicians, use LEARN MAGIC school, with one of the schools from this list. Different schools of magic have different specializations, and you can only choose one, so choose wisely. Take a loot at the list of spells if you need help to decide.

All magicians can cast a first-level spell that creates cash, so the cost of teaching them amortizes soon enough. Recruit magicians for that, it’s the quickest way to creating a surplus in the early stage of the game. Stop casting this spell and let your magicians study higher levels of magic once you’ve got other sources of income.

MAKE TEMP 1 Gargamel
RECRUIT 1
LEARN MAGIC Illaun
DEFAULT "CAST Divination"
END

Add these orders to your existing unit to create a new magician named Gargamel. The unit will recruit 1 person, and learn the magic skill. Assuming that you have a race with no skill modifier, that will cause him to be level 1 after this turn, and he can start casting.

Note: Magic is one of the few skills that cost silver to learn. This silver, and the silver to recruit one person, will be taken from the unit itself if it has any, but in our example, we are not giving it any, so it needs to take it from another unit in the same region, which happens automatically. The same goes for the 10 silver required to pay this unit’s upkeep at the end of the turn.

Scouts

Send scouts into the adjacent regions to claim some them for you before someone else does. Remember that scouts need to be able to do something once they arrive at their destination, so give them enough silver so they survive long enough to learn a skill.

To create a scout, give your existing unit these additional orders:

MAKE TEMP 1 Scout
DEFAULT "LEARN Entertainment"
MOVE West
RECRUIT 1
END
GIVE TEMP 1 95 Silver

This creates a new unit that’s temporarily assigned the number 1, and can be referred to in other orders as TEMP 1, as seen in the GIVE command at the end. The new unit gets all the orders up to the line that says END, so it will try to recruit 1 person, move to the region west of here, and default to learning the entertainment skill in the future if not given new orders. Assuming that this is a human faction, the unit will use 75 silver to recruit a peasant, and take the remaining 20 with it to the new region, where it will consume 10 for upkeep at the end of the turn. The remaining 10 silver will support it while it learns entertainment next week, after which we can give it the ENTERTAIN command, which will create 20 silver per turn, of which it consumes 10, and saves the remainder. Once it’s making enough silver for us to recruit new people, we’re off to the races!

Armed Units

You probably have wood in your home region, you can turn that into spears and bows, so recruit a unit to produce them, and teach it weaponsmithing.

You are not going to meet heavily armed guys in the first few weeks, but even a single guy with a stick can mess up your well-planned initial steps quiet badly if you’re totally unarmed, because every turn spent in combat is a turn you lose for setting up your economic base, not to mention the risk of losing units and resources. Strive to have an armed unit soon, so you can guard your home.

The Rules

Last but not least, study the rules. We do not have a good compendium of English rules at this time, but using Google Translate with the German Wiki gets you a long way. And for anything else, just drop by our Discord and ask!