By Edi Birsan, Darren Duffy and friends.
Setup Choices
When making a setup you will have many choices. I will assume you have already decided upon an overlord setup. Most choices come down to just personal preference, or from trying to maximize benefits. Here are a few things you will want to consider on any overlord setup:
Take an Admin/Engineer. This is important to building an economy, and you can use an ‘A’ type character for this. Since that character won’t do much besides public works actions, you shouldn’t bother giving this character an arcane skill. Use the remaining character points to buy skills that can be used passively (like tactics or rumormonger) or skills that you just want to train other characters in, such as knight or ranger. Giving your Admin some tactics will allow him to also be the overall commander of your town and do training camps. Having the Rumormonger skill will give you some idea of what other nearby players are doing through the Palentir news network, without using actions.
Have one of your ‘B’ characters buy a 10 tactics so he can lead your soldiers. It will make battles easier to win and you will lose less soldiers. Buying an arcane skill and getting a decent battle spell is also a good idea for this character. If you plan on having him train some soldiers right off, then buy at least 1 point of PC, since a 2 PC is the minimum needed to train 1st level soldiers.
Start with at least one arcanist, and one priest. Most players have their main character buy an arcane skill, since the higher level characters will get better choices of spells and can research others. A Druid is usually a good choice for an overlord position since you can get spells to build up the province you start in. A priest is important in case your characters get hurt or killed.
Buying an arcane skill on an ‘A’ character isn’t usually a good bargain, since they will only get one spell, and buying the 1st level is so expensive. It’s better to use these characters as admins, merchants, and maybe another tactics character to train troops.
Take guilds that are useful in the early game. You can always build the other ones later. Try to have your main character own the guilds because they’ll be worth more prestige. A church is a good choice because your priest can pray for mana and a church will increase your SEI by double it’s strength. Knights guilds are also nice because you can learn many other skills there for free instead of buying them. A Rangers guild is also useful for learning Stealth and Ranger, and for making potions.
Ask to be setup in a terrain that gives your Race positive modifiers, unless they happen to be barren mountains or swamps. At least try to stay away from a terrain that gives negative modifiers, like Dwarves in the forest. You should also always ask to be set up near a module city that has races compatible to yours. Influencing new characters will be an important part of an overlords success.
Starting Adventures
Most modules have starting adventures that can be completed in the first month or two of the game, and many can only be done by your main character. If an adventure gives a title it will usually be limited to the first 18 players doing them, so plan in advance to do them on your first turn if possible. These adventures can be used to customize your position and get your position moving in the direction you want it to go.
Some adventures will give you crowns, slave pop and other items. These items are deposited into the possessions of the character doing the adventure, so be careful. After doing the adventure (A3 order) it’s a good idea to transfer all (T6) of that characters possessions into your town’s possessions. Then transfer the items you want to keep back into the character. Do this especially if you plan on moving your character, since he may end up being overburdened, or carry the slave population away with him. Since adventures are performed in the BASIC orders you can transfer things around after doing them. Also remember that adventures WILL use character actions, so you will want to prioritize them and do the important ones first.
There are adventures that give you soldiers, and these must be put into an empty slot. They can’t be added to an existing slot even if the soldiers are identical. If you try to put them into a slot that already contains soldiers the order will fail. You can open a force into the province and put the soldiers into that force, and then even use them on your first turn. If you move the force with the soldiers remember to add food to the force first.
There are usually racial adventures that are more of a personal nature for characters that will give PC, Arcane levels, marks, etc. These adventures should say whether they can be done only once or multiple times and if they can be done by secondary characters or only by main characters. Many will also have a cost in crowns, so be careful with them. You may not want to use all your crowns having secondary characters doing adventures and then be caught short.
Scouting
With your starting information you will get a 9×9 map of the area around your starting location, which will usually include some NPC locations, lairs, and ruins. The descriptions of the locations will include information about the population, the size of the walls, and who the owner is. It will not, however, tell you how many soldiers are on the walls. Don’t make assumptions about how many soldiers there are by the size of the walls or the amount of population. Many players have lost their starting armies by doing this. The soldiers can also have special statuses that will make them much harder to kill. To get this information and to expand your view of the world (the map) you will need scouts.
A scout is a force with a single soldier that can be moved around the map and explore. To create scout forces, open (L1) some of your inactive forces into the same province as your location and transfer (T2) a single soldier into each force. Do not use all of your forces for scouting, since you’ll probably want to move characters and have an army, which will also require forces. You will start with 15 forces, so you may want to use only 7-8 for scouting. Scouts often get killed by encounter orders from lairs or other players, so you may not want to use your good soldiers. Instead you can train (T1) some expendable soldiers and use them. If you had one of your ‘A’ characters start with 7 tactics and at least a 2 PC you can train 21 first level soldiers. This will give you some extra scouts to replace any that get killed. It is not even necessary to equip these soldiers since a dragon can kill a scout just as easily whether it has armor or not. Without equipment the scout will have a lower sighting value, which helps them survive because it lessens the chance of being seen by others. Adding food to the scout force is also unnecessary, since a single soldier will not die from starvation. He will just lose morale. The designers have been threatening to have starving low morale scouts revolt and run away but currently (12/1999) the single soldier can starve. If you are kind you can give him some food or have him forage once in a while.
Once created, the scouts can be moved (usually always at forced march rates) through provinces that contain locations and will then get ‘sighting reports’. The sighting reports will tell you how many soldiers are on the walls, what race the soldiers are, if they are mounted or using bows, and if they have any special training or statuses. The report will also tell you how much population is in the force and who is leading the army (the overall commander). If you move the scout into unknown territory you will get the province types in a 3×3 area. If there are locations in the 3×3 area you will get the ID# and the name of the location, but nothing else. You will then have to move your scout through those locations to get the additional information.
Some players like to give their scouts the ranger skill, or a mount, so they can move faster. This may seem like a good idea, but it’s not really necessary for scouts to move quickly, since most of the time they’ll only be traveling 3 provinces at a time. They can also be moved at a force march which will give them 30% more movement and reduce their fighting capacity by 50%, but remember that scouts are expendable and will rarely survive any encounter anyway. There’s no point in trying to protect them, just send out a bunch and be ready to replace them when they are destroyed.
One shortcoming about scouts is that with only a single soldier, they do not always see everything in all the provinces they explore. They are pretty good at the provinces they pass through, but sometimes lairs or underground locations are not spotted, as generally these have to be physically passed over to be spotted. This is usually in the eight provinces that surround the one they land in, since they do not actually pass through them. So do not be surprised if you find a lair (or it finds you) in a province that you thought you explored.
Making an Army
Conquering NPC locations is a good way to build up your position in Legends games. They contain population, resources, and usually a few magic items that will help your characters. They are also a source of prestige for your main character, which you will need if you plan on influencing any of the major characters in the game. To do this you will need an army.
You will start the game with soldiers in your location, which can be used as a starting army, but will then leave your location undefended. These soldiers will have the special guard training type, which give them a bonus while defending walls and a guard rating which will protect your location from thieves. It is often best to leave these soldiers in your location and train an army from your unskilled population (see training soldiers). Depending upon the module, there may be an adventure that will give some additional soldiers. If so you can make an army as follows:
- Activate a Force in the province that you start in using the L-1 order.
- Transfer soldiers into this Force, which will make it a legion. If you are getting the soldiers from an adventure, you can put the soldiers directly into this Force with the A3 order, otherwise you can transfer them in using the T-2 (transfer soldiers) order. If you are training soldiers you can also train them directly into this force. There are eight slots that soldiers can be assigned to, and how you arrange them is more a matter of style or necessity. Soldiers can only be added to a slot that is empty or one that has identical soldiers already in it, so if you have soldiers with different training types, statuses, races, or equipment they will have to be placed in separate slots. Soldiers that have different levels or morale can be combined as long as they are identical in every other way. The level and morale of the combined soldiers will be averaged. For ideas on ways to set up slots see below.
- Transfer characters into the Legion using the T-11 order. An army does not actually require characters to be present, but it is important to try and assign at least one. You should usually start with at least one of your ‘B’ characters with some tactics, and make him your general. If this character also has an arcane or priest rating he might have a battle spell, which can be useful. The presence of characters in battle slots helps improve morale and fighting capacity, and less soldiers will be lost. Battle spells can also improve the characters fighting abilities.
- Transfer supplies into the army using the T-6 order. You will want to add some food and mounts to your army. The amount of food depends on how much you can spare, how much you can carry, and how many soldiers you have. As a general rule you should take enough for at least two productions, but more if possible. Your soldiers will consume food according to their size, 1/2 food per soldier for small races, 1 food for medium, and 11/2 for large races. Mounts will also consume one food each at production. Do not plan on getting food from conquered locations in the early game because many towns are do not start with food and have to generate it at production. If you get mounted soldiers from an adventure, you can un-equip the mounts using a T-16 order and the warmounts will go into the force possessions. Having extra carrying capacity in a force is a good idea if possible, especially if your soldiers are equipped with more than they can carry. The mounts in the possession slots will carry the excess burden of the soldiers automatically. It is assumed that the soldiers let the mounts carry the equipment and grab it at the first sign of battle. Also when a location is conquered the army will be able to carry the loot. Not having enough carrying capacity will slow your army down. Not having enough food will cause your soldiers to starve and desert at production. You will lose 10% of your soldiers and the remaining will lose morale, even if you are only one food short. If mounts don’t get fed you will also lose 10% of them, if the do get fed the untrained mounts (NOT warmounts) will grow by about 10%. Trained warmounts in force possessions do consume food and starve. Soldiers mounted on warmounts in the combat slots will consume an extra 1 food for each warmount.
- Assign the characters to battle slots using the B8 order. Which slots will depend upon how many slots of soldiers you have, and how many characters you want to assign to your army. You will want to assign the character with the best tactics as your overall commander (slot 9) and assign him to one other slot (1-8). As long as you have at least 20 soldiers in a slot the character assigned to that slot will not take damage in battles, so be careful to not spread your soldiers to thin. See setting up the slots below for more on this.
There is a good reason not to have your main character as the over all commander (slot 9) since any location you storm will have the former owner declare the army commander its blood enemy. If your main is your influencer you may want a general type secondary to take the heat so that the main character can still have a chance to influence the former town owners. You will have to remember to keep the blood enemies apart since there are random times when their tempers will get the best of them and they will duel amongst themselves regardless of being in the same position. - Set the reserve slot options using the L-6 order. This is for slots 6-7-8, so if you don’t have soldiers in those slots it won’t matter. Putting soldiers with bows in the back and setting them to use missile support, lets them attack without losing any of the valuable missile troops.
- Set the retreat threshold using L-7. Upon activation your forces retreat threshold is set at 33%. This tells your soldiers how many losses to take before doing an organized retreat. You should leave it at 33% until you’ve had a few battles and get a feel for it. Locations and nomad camps should always be set at 100%, otherwise your soldiers will retreat and the location will get conquered or raided.
Now your army should be ready. Take a last look at it and see how your soldiers are equipped. If any are mounted and you plan to attack walls, you might want to dismount them. If you have flying mounts the attacking walls penalty might not be bad and you can keep them mounted. If you have a mount with a special attack (SA) you can keep them mounted and put them in a rear slot for protection, since they will still get their SA. Next you need a target. If this is your first game I would suggest waiting until your second turn to actually attack something. This way you will have some sighting reports of possible targets and you can make sure you set your army up correctly. There are many things that can go wrong and you could end up having characters attack a city by themselves and get killed. If you must attack on your first turn, then pick the location with the smallest amount of population, since the more pop a city has the more soldiers it will have. If you wait a turn give your army a military order #22 (training camp) this will give them a chance of gaining a level and some morale. When you attack, use military order #1 Conquer. If the population is a hated race you may want to use military order #2 conquer and enslave, otherwise the population can revolt on you. When conquering an NPC location in the early game don’t put a slot of soldiers into the location at the end of the battle (military order #1 or #2, parameter 2 option). The reason is that you will want to keep your army intact in case there’s another player around. If another player tries to conquer the same location without knowing you just conquered it, your army will try to protect the location and intercept the other player. If your army is split, you will take more casualties.
Setting up your Slots
There are many options when putting soldiers into slots. Here are a few ideas:
If you have a large number of soldiers from an adventure that can all be put in one slot, and you have only one character to use in your army, then it might be good to start out with everything in slot 3. This is especially good if your commander has a battle spell that adds combat abilities to your soldiers, then it will affect all the soldiers. If you attack a location that contains 50 soldiers spread out over 8 slots and you have 200 soldiers in slot 3, then you will most likely wipe out 3-4 slots and the remainder will retreat. The retreating soldiers then become unskilled population, and their equipment drops into the possession slots. This gives you supplies to train new soldiers
If you want to put several characters into your army, then make sure there are at least 20 soldiers in each slot with a character. Some players like to put a few soldiers each into slots 1-5, and the remainder into slots 6-7-8 and assign the characters to the rear slots as well. This will cause the front line soldiers to take all of the special and magical attacks while protecting the rear slots who will charge in afterwards. If you are fighting soldiers with statuses and good training types this may work well, but be careful, if all your front slots get killed your force may lose morale and retreat. This works well if your overall commander has a high tactics, because the tactics amount is added to the force morale at the beginning of the battle. The force morale will drop every time a slot of soldiers is wiped out. Once it goes below 100 there’s a chance the whole force will retreat.
There are countless other options. You should try splitting your soldiers into different slots and experiment while attacking small NPC locations. Then study the battle reports to see what works best for you. Try using slots 1-3-5, or 2-4, or 1-5-6-8, to see what the different effects are. You’ll want to be ready because eventually you’ll have to fight against other players, and knowing how to best set up your army can make or break the game.
A Note about Cascading Errors
One of the most frustrating that you can inflict upon yourself is a set of cascading failed orders. This is when you make one bad order and then other orders that depend on it fail because the first one didn’t work. The most common failures happen when making an army and training troops. Therefore, for new players, it recommended to avoid the problem by waiting to use soldiers that are being trained or summoned by adventure until the following turn. This one turn wait will also allow you to set up the army legion correctly with everyone in the right slot and the right tactical orders etc. Many players have been “Trying” to put together an army on their first turn, and then send it off to attack a nearby NPC city. Then when the adventure to get the soldiers doesn’t work, or the soldiers don’t get transferred correctly, the characters end up attacking on their own, and getting killed.
Running a Town
How you manage the resources in your location can have a huge effect on how well you do in Legends. You need an army to win the game, and you need resources to build and supply your army. You can’t just let it sit there, you will need to do the following:
Population
Population Segments (PS) are where you keep your population. Each PS can only have one type of pop, so you should add a few to your location using the T-8 order. This way when your army captures some new pop you can send it home and add it to your location. Be careful not to add to much pop of a hated race, because if they revolt you can lose your town. PS’s have a growth rate which must be set using T-13. Your starting population will be preset to the maximum rate for that race, but when adding population to an empty PS you will have to set the growth rate. Be careful not to run out of food. If you set the growth rate to 5% then the pop will eat 1.5 times its normal rate, for example a large race that would normally eat 1.5 food each, would eat 2.25 each if set to a 5% rate. It would be better to have a growth rate set to zero and not get new pop, rather than have it starve. You also want to be careful to not put so much population into one town so that the growth is restricted. For every 5,000 total pop in a city, each PS’s growth rate is reduced by 1%. See SEI below for a way to counteract this.
You will also have to set the production orders of your PS, including the one you start with. If you don’t, the population will all produce with default orders, which is crowns and food, but no armor, weapons or resources. Many players set up spreadsheets to figure out exactly what they will produce and make sure they make enough of each resource.
Farmers can make food, soft materials (SM), and by-products (BP). You will want to have most of them make food, but set about 5-10% to each SM and BP. You will need the SM and BP to make weapons, armor, ship units, and build walls. It is a good idea to make a little extra if possible to have a stockpile for building up your walls. You can assign more farmers than the cleared land you have, even for SM and BP but only the amount of cleared land worth of farmers will be allowed to produce in the sequence of those assigned to food, then soft material and then by products. If you have more farmers than land the extra will do nothing, and since they produce food first, then SM, and then BP, you may end up not producing BP and therefore no armor. If you end up with excess farmers set them to making BP’s to prevent them from defaulting to food production. You should also try to increase your fertility rating to 5.00, to get the maximum benefit per farmer. As a good back up, place a high number such as 5000 as the amount of farmers to produce By products, this way any excess farmers with land available will produce By Products rather than be sucked into producing food and using up all the land before you get to Soft Material and By Product production.
To figure out how much your farmers will produce, use this formula:
Farmers assigned x fertility rate x seasonal modifier x ((SEI/200)+1)
Craftsmen can make crowns or Tradegoods (TG). If you are making crowns and decide make TG’s instead, make sure you lower the amount of craftsmen that are producing crowns. If you have 200 Craftsmen and 200 are assigned to making crowns, and then you set 100 to make TG’s, you won’t produce any TG’s because crown production goes first. At first, you will probably want to assign some craftsmen to making TG’s and some to crowns. This way you will have some crowns to use until you can sell some TG’s. If you can sell the TG’s at least four provinces away from your home location they will earn more crowns than the craftsmen can produce outright. Craftsmen can also convert resources into crowns. If they do this, the amount of craftsmen making TG’s will be reduced by the amount that converted resources, since crown production goes first.
Miner/Foresters produce stone, lumber, iron, and any other resources that are found in your starting location. You should mine as much Iron as possible, and as much of any special resources (mithril, gold, gems, precious stone, or silver) that you have; then produce lumber and stone. The reason for this is that you can convert the special resources into crowns or tradegoods (T12) order and make some real money or use the items in special weapon and armor production if you know the production secrets. You may need to train some new miner/foresters, if you have more resources than miners. The province report shows the amount of each resource present, which is the amount that can be mined each production. Your base amount of mining is what is reported. This amount is then increased by seasonal modifiers and SEI modifiers. You can increase the base amount present using the Druid spells. Mining does not use up the resources in a province, the amount shown is just the base amount that can be taken per month. Example: If you have 36 Iron in your province, you will be able to mine 36 Iron at each production as a base before SEI and seasonal modifiers pump in. If you assign 50 miners to mine iron then 14 will stand around and pretend to be working, but they won’t actually do anything but eat. The SEI and Seasonal modifiers will then be calculated off the base of 36 Iron. The special resources you mine can be converted to crowns or TG’s. This is usually only efficient to do in the early part of the game. Later, when your SEI is getting higher the craftsmen can make more crowns at production than they can by converting resources. The resources also come in handy to build some wall types and guilds. Some are also needed when casting spells. Mithril is the most valuable resource and can be used to make special armor and weapons.
Shipbuilders make ship units, which can then be assembled into ships using laborers. You usually won’t start with shipbuilders in your province, but you can train them. Making ships can be expensive in resources, so you may want to put this off for a few months. Of course, if you’re not in a coastal province then you would probably never want to produce ships.
Weaponmakers and Armormakers. You will want to set these guys to work making some equipment for your soldiers. Make sure you will produce enough resources for them or else they take the day off and not produce anything. They are not motivated enough to figure out if they could be doing something else. Also remember that unassigned workers produce crowns and that crown production comes before the real work of weapons and armor, so make sure that the number making crowns does not absorb your entire pool of workers.
Laborers can clear land, make wagons, and build guilds, ships, or walls. You will not usually start with many laborers, and they will be needed to clear land for the farmers. If you use them to build guilds, ships or walls, they won’t do anything at the next production. They can only be used once per month, so be careful how you use them.
Administration
Assign your Admin/Engineer as the administrator of your town using the B-9 order. Even if you don’t start doing public works actions right off, you should still assign the admin since there is no cost in actions or crowns. It will get your SEI started, which is very important to the growth of your city. SEI affects the growth rate of your population, and the amount of resources and crowns they produce.
Your growth rate cannot be increased above the racial maximum, but it does get decreased by 1% for every 5,000 population in your city. This is figured on the total population in the city, not by each Popseg. Example: if you have 3 popsegs in one city with populations of 1000, 1200, and 300, and growth rates of 5.0, 3.5, and 2.0, respectively then the net growth rates will be 4.5, 3.0, and 1.5. SEI will counter this loss at a rate of 1% for every 100 SEI. So in the above example an SEI of 50 would be needed to have the full growth rates.
Population will also produce more efficiently at production due to a positive SEI. This affects ALL members of a popseg. Laborers will clear more land or produce more wagons than normal, Craftsmen produce more crowns or tradegoods, Weaponmakers and Armormakers produce additional equipment, Miners will mine additional resources, and shipbuilders will make more ship units. However, SEI will not affect craftsmen that are converting resources, or laborers that are assembling ship units or building walls. The rate of increase in the productivity is the SEI/200. So a 200 SEI will double your production, and a 1000 SEI will add 5 times the normal production. The net SEI for each popseg is the combined force SEI plus the individual popseg SEI. Popseg SEI will be lowered by transferring population into or out of the popseg or by the result of war, it will normally be negative by a small amount.
There are several ways to increase your SEI. An admin/Engineer can increase it by doing public works actions and by being assigned as the city administrator. Guilds can use their monthly allocation of strength points to increase SEI, and Characters can cast the increase SEI spell. Casting the spell is very inefficient unless the character has some free mana for that spell. Using guilds is usually a good idea but it will prevent the guilds from growing at production or from doing other actions, such as making potions. The Admin is usually the best way to increase your SEI, but the regular actions will cost crowns, which are very scarce in the early game. Still in the long run you are better off getting your SEI started early when you have less population. The more population in a city, the more that public works actions will cost. It is increased exponentially, so you should try to keep your main city with a low population for the first few months. Once you’ve increased the SEI over 200 and have started producing a steady income, you can then start adding new population that your army has captured.
To give you an example of how important SEI is lets take a town with an Iron rating of 40. At production, with zero SEI the miners will mine 40 Iron, then 40 weaponmakers can make 120 swords using this iron (each weaponmaker makes 3 swords normally). If the SEI were increased to 400 then the 40 Miners would mine 120 Iron, and you could assign 120 weaponmakers who would then make 1,080 swords with the Iron. So with a 400 SEI you could produce 9 times the number of weapons you would normally produce with the same amount of iron. Imagine what you could do with a 1,000 SEI!
Other Preparations
Set the entry condition of your town and guilds. Do you want other players just wandering in? If not, then tell the guards at the front gate what to check for using the T-14 order. You should always have some sort of entry conditions even if you want other player to enter. Allowing only unmasked players in is a good idea, since then you’ll at least know who has entered. Remember someone with stealth or invisibility can still sneak in, and your entry conditions will be revealed by a scry on your location. Your own characters will never be blocked by your own entry conditions since they always know the secret password.
Assign characters to battle slots. All your characters will be assigned to slots at the beginning of a game, but it’s very unlikely they will be set up the way you want them to be. Some characters will leave, so make sure you have someone in charge of slot 9. Usually your admin/engineer will stay behind in the town, so it is a good idea to assign him as the overall commander, especially if you had the foresight to buy him some tactics at setup. A scry on your town will also reveal who is assigned to each slot and if you don’t unassign characters who are not there you’re just giving away free information. You especially want to unassign covert characters so your enemies do not get their ID#’s. Putting characters like your administrator into the guilds in your city is also a good idea, then they won’t be seen if someone scries your force.
Characters will start with a smattering of flora and resources as well as some equipment. Transfer any items they do not need to your town or guilds. You may also want to give your characters better equipment or mounts. Characters may also have crowns that they don’t need, but your greedy administrator can spend in a heartbeat (you know how politicians are). The flora can be redistributed to characters that can use it or to a guild for potion production.
You may want to unmask your town if you plan being friendly towards your neighbors. If you are working with allies that are nearby, you should also open your town for external transfers to make it easier to trade items. Posting messages to your location is a good way of letting other players know how to contact you. You can put your telephone number or E-mail address in the message. If you don’t have any allies this is a good way to get some. Most players will contact you if they see a message, and if they decide to attack first and make phone calls later, then it won’t matter anyway. Messages can also be a lot of fun if you attach them to locations that you’ve conquered and then emptied out. To post a message to your own forces you use the Basic order B-3, after first constructing it with a B-1 order.
If you are trying to keep other players from sighting your town, you could put a small scout killing force in your province. 10-20 soldiers mounted on warmounts will be plenty for this purpose. Put them into a legion and set encounter orders to kill less than 2-5 soldiers. If a scout enters your province it will usually disappear without getting a sighting report. If you have any flying mounts this would be a good use for them, otherwise you might not be able to catch flying scouts. Don’t forget to add food, and have them do training camps while they wait for the scouts. If you are working with other players, you can have your legion declare them as an ally. There is only one problem with declaring allies, if someone scries your force they will get your allies ID#’s. A way around that is to set your force to attack less than 2 soldiers and tell your allies to make sure they have 3 or more soldiers when they enter your province.
Things to remember to do for characters
- Turn on Stealth (B7) if they have the skill
- Load Battle and Dual Spells (S8/9 if Arcanist/Priest). The target of this spell is the casting character and the amount is always one mana.
- Equip as needed (Q1)
- To learn skills from your own guilds transfer (T-11) INTO the Guild
- Do your racial and factional adventures as appropriate.
- Unmask if you are planning on entering a module city or guild. Also unmask the force that they are traveling in. Even if they meet the entry restrictions, a masked character will be denied entry.
- Open external transfers if you’re planning on trading with other players.
- If you plan to have a character enter a module city, assign the character to slot 9 of the force he’s in. You will then get a full view of the city in your exploration report.
- Give your Admin enough crowns to do public works actions. The Crowns must be in the characters possessions.
- As soon as possible get a supernatural status of some sort for your characters and have all arcanists get familiars.
Making a Template Turn in the LPE
One of the things you can do to cut down on your administrative functions and to automatically provide some back up on your orders is to create a Template turn in the LPE. This is done from the start by selecting under file ‘Make New Turn From Template’ you will be asked if you want to save the current turn, say no since it is blank and then the LPE will pull a blank template turn.
You know it is a template because on the top header of the Menu it will say ‘Basic Orders from ??/??/??’ Template. Then each time you start a new turn select ‘New turn from template’. Once loaded this turn will automatically be set for your next processing date.
Things to put in the Template Turn
Training camps: Military order #22 for your location and any other forces that would do this every turn.
Once you start training soldiers on a regular basis, you will want to put the orders into a template turn, since these orders are complex and take a lot of time. ((Make sure you have not changed the slot assignments of your training location so as to avoid a cascade of errors because the troops do not match.))
In the Second Phase Character orders list each character and give it a back up order so that if for some reasons you forget to give this character an order or an order fails that does not use up a character action, you will do something useful with the character. As a simple default have everyone practice the personal combat attribute or study a skill.
Some characters, such as Admin/Engineers doing public works, will do the same orders every turn. These orders can be set up in the Template turn.