Writing your first set of orders.

By Niels Lademark

(edited by Morten Larsen)

How to do it.

Writing your first set of orders may take longer then you plan. In order to do it there are a few needed prerequisites

The rules
Your setup (turn 0 reports)
An ASCII editor
At least three hours of uninterrupted time
An e-mail account
An online veteran COSMOS player (optional!)

You will need several hours to familiarise yourself with the rules. The most essential parts are the sections on movement, control and recruiting. Read them before you set down to write your orders.

Familiarise yourself with your setup. Make sure you understand what your units can do, and how your nation is doing in the resource department, i.e. in which areas is your nation deficient and in which does it produce a surplus. Also make sure you understand how recruiting tons of troops will affect your economy.

Write down your long term goals (Which hexes do you plan to control within the next 5 turns, where do you plan to expand your cities, build castles, etc.).

Write down which units you plan to apply to which goal. You should now be ready to write your orders. Once you have written them... print them and read them... a hard earned experience is that you cannot make corrections on screen, it takes paper. After having found any errors type in your corrections cut and paste your orders into the order submission form on the web. Your submission could look more or less like the following:

NATION 1:

3101:
repeat 3 
  orders:
    recruit 56
      orders:
        move 400 401
        waitforone exact 3102
        join 3102
        .
    .
recruit 57
  orders:
    join 3101
    .
wait 1
move 1888
tactics avoid 3101
search 4

3102:
move 399 400 401

Note that this is an example of a fairly complex set of orders including several levels of nesting (in repeat and recruit orders), your first set of orders is likely to be somewhat simpler than this.

Now unless you are the demigod of PBEM wargames you will have made an error! That means that the order checker will return an error message.

The order checker is far from intelligent, it is "only " a syntax checker and it has no idea whatsoever about your intentions. It will report the following types of errors:

Giving orders to units and locations you do not own
Syntax errors

It will try to correct most minor syntactic errors but it may not always guess your intentions, so it is always best to keep editing and resubmitting your orders until you do not get error messages or warnings anymore.

Depending on the error you can unfortunately get a host of error messages in your listing from a single typo. What you need to do is to identify the line(s) containing the errors and correct them from the top. Often a missing period or "orders:" keyword will generate an error message for the next order and/or the next unit as well. If you are in doubt resubmit your orders after each change and take a look at the new receipt. It is a good idea to compare what you submitted with the section "Your orders as submitted to the system". Any derivations/truncations are in all likelihood due to errors.

A note from Morten: It is very hard to write a syntax checker which responds intelligently to all types of errors, and therefore the error messages are unfortunately not always that clear. But at least you can usually easily deduce the location of the error, even if it takes some time to figure out the exact nature of the error.

If all else fails send a copy to an experienced team member, preferably one who has played a similar nation before. Or ask Morten; in this way you not only get help solving your immediate problems, you also help Morten to discover ways in which the syntax checker could be improved.

As you can see all of the above takes time, possibly several evenings, depending upon the need for communication with the team. therefore do not start the morning your orders are due; that will spell disaster and ruin the enjoyment for allies and opponents alike. Remember that after turn 10 you are the experienced one!

Good gaming

Niels Lademark

Last update: April 23, 1999.