Advice for Beginners
From Eressea
Contents |
Keep your Password Secret
There have been several occasions in the past when careless players lost their factions because another player submitted a QUIT order in their name. This can only happen if you give away your password. You should never give the password to anyone, not even your allies, and you should change it on a regular basis. Nothing is worse than losing two years of empire-building to something like this.
Eressea is a Fantasy Game
While there are many players that play Eressea simply for the strategic aspects, the majority does a good deal of socializing and roleplaying. Try adding some atmosphere to the world, or at least don't break the atmosphere intentionally. Names like "Cyborg Elves" are out of place in Eressea.
Things to remember
The first line of your orders must begin with ERESSEA <faction no.> "<password>", where you replace <faction no.> with the id of your faction, and <password> with your password. A line containing the word NEXT should be at the very end of your order file, telling the server that your orders are finished completely, and that it should ignore everything else in your email.
You can write one order per line. If your mail program breaks long lines, then you have to add a continuation character at the end of the line. Simply add a \ at the end to tell the game server to continue processing in the next line, like this:
DESCRIBE UNIT "The heroes of the second war on Andune have enjoyed \
their retirement for long. Now their country depends upon \
them once again, and they march against the Dark Alliance."
Submitting Orders
The simplest way to write your orders is to use the order template, delivered with your report (if you have OPTION TEMPLATE set). It lists all your units with their default orders and you simply replace these with the orders you would like them to execute in the coming turn. Simply cut and paste the template from the report, edit the orders, and mail the result back to the game server.
While there is no official graphical interface for Eressea, several have been created by dedicated players. At the time of this writing, Magellan and EMap are by far the most popular of them, each boasting a user base of several hundred. We recommend that you give them a try.
Except for your password, the orders are case-insensitive. LeaRN POLEArms is perfectly legal (though confusing to human readers). Names that include spaces must be included in double or single quotes or replaced by the '~' character (tilde). Some examples:
NAME SHIP "Titanic II" USE "Great Amulet of the Chickenpox" LEARN "Unarmed Combat" GIVE 123 ALL "sand reeker" ; or GIVE 123 ALL sand~reeker
You may abbreviate orders (like LEAR pole instead of LEARN polearm). But this is dangerous. RE could mean RECRUIT, RESEARCH, or RESERVE and there might be undocumented orders, skills, or items that are purposefully not listed in the documentation but might start similar to well-known entities.
Use ECheck
ECheck is a little tool that checks your orders for 'grammatical' correctness. When submitting orders you get an automated reply with a very simple syntactical check. By installing ECheck at home the checks can be much more thorough. Be warned, sometimes ECheck accepts/rejects orders the server doesn't and the server may not be using the most recent version. ECheck was not written by the creators of Eressea and is not always perfect.
Comment Your Orders
There are two forms of comments; persistent comments beginning with // (two slashes) 'survive' a turn, i.e. your next turn's report still contains them. Temporary comments starting with ; (a semicolon) are discarded by the Eressea server. Persistent comments in your orders can help you to remember why you did something or what you want to do next week. They can also be very helpful if you're on vacation and someone else is taking care of your faction.
REGION 4,4 ; Lochinver ; remember to recruit a magician before sending this in UNIT zbt ; Ezra, 2 elves MAKE swords GIVE sjur 5 swords // next turn, make spears for 45zt
What You Should Do in the First Few Weeks
Your first goal should be to explore your immediate surroundings and find out who your neighbors are. Look for the important resources, stake your claims, and get in touch with the other players. When sending out scouts, make sure they have enough money to survive but not so much that they cannot move. If the scouting unit needs to recruit, remember that it uses some of the money that you give it to pay the recruitment.
You should also start to create an infrastructure. Try getting a regular income either through entertainment or taxation; they are the easiest forms of making money. Working is not, and you cannot trade before you have at least two regions with some form of castle. Aim at getting your first armed units. There are some skills that may not seem important at the beginning but you should nevertheless try to learn them as soon as possible - perception and tactics are two of them often neglected by beginners.
Keep an eye on the expenses to supply your units with food. Large units need huge sums of silver to survive and if they do not have it they will starve. You need only one unit with the sufficient amount of silver, it will give as much to your other units as they need to survive. However, remember that your startup money is meant to be invested. Only by spending it your faction can grow and your units improve their abilities. If you save more than you need to, you will gradually fall behind.
How to make short orders persistent using @
Sometimes giving the same short order continuously makes sense even for short orders. A weaponsmith might want to always give the swords he made to another unit using a GIVE order. This can be achieved by prefixing the order with a @ character. The order @GIVE trsp 100 sword for example would become a persistent order that reappears in your order template every week.
There is no 'Winner'
The open-ended nature of Eressea ensures that the game cannot be won by a single player. There is not even a goal that you should achieve other than enjoying the game. Even so it is possible to lose. A warmonger may wipe you out, powerful monsters might threaten your people, and you might consider giving up. The history of Eressea is filled with such defeats. But there are also inspiring stories of people who did not give up even in the grimmest situations. Some chose exile and shipped the last of their units into a new land, rebuilding what they lost, finding new allies and occasionally triumphing after many years. There is probably nothing that is more rewarding than making such a comeback. Don't give up lightly. After all, it is just a game.
How to get help
There is more than one face behind Eressea, and not everyone can answer all of your questions. To simplify communications, there are a number of addresses you can write to for help. If you have a question about the rules, please try writing to eressea-help@eressea.de first. Your email will be read by volunteer players that are helping us deal with the sheer amount of questions that beginners usually have. They also know of any existing bugs in the game, should you be so unlucky to encounter one. Other good address are
- English English forum
- Eressea-Forum German forum
- The #eressea chatroom (IRCnet, Who is who?, Web chat client)
- Client for technical discussions about clients and tools for eressea
- eressea-rpg for in character messages to the Eressea world(s)
Bug Report
If you think you've found a bug (and you are quite sure you didn't just make an error or misunderstood something), use the bug tracking system Mantis.
