How to Play
From Eressea
Contents |
Getting started
| Note Registration is currently closed. Please watch the Homepage for updates! |
To register for the game, go to http://www.eressea.de/en/register.html and fill in the form. After registration, you will receive an email that you must reply to in order to verify your registered email address. When that is done, just wait until your next turn, where you will receive your first report.
New factions are placed in virgin areas of the world, with only players of the same age around them. Some players think it's a good idea to spend the first few weeks registering over and over again until they get a seemingly good position. It's not. It makes it impossible for the GM's to create an adequate population density if too many factions drop out, and it creates holes that are hard to fill. Don't let yourself be fooled by first appearances: The starting positions are not chosen by an unintelligent algorithm, but by someone with five years experience. If your first region looks poor, chances are, there are plenty of resources around you, or a good combination of other races that will help you in the long run. If the region looks too good to be true, it sometimes isn't.
In order to help the GM's fill the gaps that early dropouts create, they have added the option of starting in an already populated area. Select this option on the registration form, and you will be placed among factions that are up to 20 weeks old. You will of receive much better starting equipment, and usually you will be placed among people who need someone just like you.
System Requirements
Eressea requires very little to play. Apart from an email account, the only thing you need is a computer and a text editor. This can be notepad for Windows, or even vi or emacs for Linux. You could even type the orders directly into your mail tool if you like. Make sure you use a plain text editor, not a word processor like Staroffice or Word; the game cannot read anything but plain text.
Most likely, though, you will want something more visual. There are some wonderful graphical clients available to play Eressea with, like Magellan or EMap, as well as secondary tools for statistics, order preprocessing or mapmaking. Most newcomers use Magellan. There are, however, a number of additional tools making your life as a player simpler. Here are some of them:
External links
- http://www.eressea.de/de/downloads.shtml -- Free tools, written by players for players (in german)
Sending in Your Orders
Once you've written your orders, you must send them to the game server. They must be sent to eressea-server@eressea.de with the subject ERESSEA ORDERS in order to be recognized and processed. If you have already sent in orders, and find that you want to make changes, send in a second set of orders; they will override the old ones. A lot of players send in preliminary orders early in the week, and another set later in the week, when diplomacy with other players has made changes necessary. Make sure your computer's clock is set correctly. The game server uses the time at which you send the orders to determine the latest orders, not the time of their arrival.
Remember: Your turn has to be sent as plain text. Today, many mailers offer rich text or even HTML formatted text. These are not readable by the game server. If you want to send your orders as an attachment, they have to be encoded as text/plain MIME attachments. If you don't know what that is, or if you don't want to take chances, paste the orders into the body of your e-mail instead. Due to the increasing number of different formats, mail tools, and buggy implementations that exist today, the number of players who get this wrong increases steadily.
When your orders reach the game server, they are processed by a simple form of our syntax checker, ECheck. The results of this check will be sent to you, and you should read them carefully. While an English version of ECheck exists, it is not perfect, and inconsistencies between it and the server may occur. Orders which ECheck considers legitimate may be ignore by the server, and vice versa. This is an example of sample output you will receive in the mail from ECheck:
ECHECK (Version 3.4.2, Jun 12 2000), Zug-Checker für Eressea - Freeware! Verarbeite Datei `faroul@beyond.kn-bremen.de,2'. Es wurden Befehle für 1 Partei und 100 Einheiten gelesen. Die Befehle scheinen in Ordnung zu sein.
The last two lines of the output are the important ones. In this case, they translate to: "There were orders for 1 faction and 100 units sent in. The orders seem to be okay". If it says 0 factions, or even 0 units, your mail may not be in a proper format. Remember, the English ECheck is not perfect, and may not match what the server will accept. To make sure your orders are valid, ask someone for help.
The game server parses incoming orders immediately. If you do not get a reply to your orders within 20 minutes, there is something wrong, and you should consider sending them again. Try sending them from an alternative mail account if you have one.
If you fail to send in orders for three consecutive weeks, you will be removed from the game.
[de:Befehle einschicken]
