I just thoguht about carnage's sugestion:

I think it's a great idea, if we get 5-6 vets to join we can have this up in a couple hours per person. I broke down the guide in parts so any volunteer can pick a part and write it, later post it for review by others.

Of course this break down is revisable as well, I am sure I forgot something.

I can make easily the recruiting part, I've been working on a manual but it turned to be more an strategy guide than a manual, and thus quite a mess, but the recruiting part is salvageable.

Stamina

This represents the fighting ability of your army. Your army will fight at an effective strength which is decided by the stamina you have. If you have 100 stamina, you fill fight with your full strength. If you have 90 stamina, you will fight with only 90% of your strength and so on. If your stamina is below 100, you will keep recovering 1 stamina point every turn automatically. You can have your army rest and regain all your stamina at once by having them eat the food in your storage.

As a new player, you might probably be thinking that you should always have your stamina at 100. But this is not so. Often it is useful to keep your stamina at a low level in order to both keep your regulars safe and to increase your chances of killing enemy regular troops.


Surrendering

**I'm not sure how exactly this works when it comes to castle attacks. May be Bhaal or someone else that knows how exactly it works can fill it up. I would like to add the following at the bottom**

Surrendering to your enemy is a good way of defending your regular troops. The sooner you surrender to the enemy, more mercenaries you will have to fight your opponent's revenge. Therefore, the enemy would have a harder time taking your regular troops since you will have more mercenaries protecting your regular troops.

Conversely, if your enemy is surrendering to you, may be dropping your own stamina might be useful to get that one final hit before your revenge to ensure that you take your enemy regulars. You can drop your own stamina by attacking someone else. Be careful when you do this because you will be handing out a revenge to the person whom you hit to lower your stamina.

OK. Here are all my various notes that I send to newbs. Some notes were stolen word for word from Rage.


KEY RULES OF WAR

1. Don't rest your troops if you don't have to. Resting while you are under attack means that you fight longer, and you have a better chance of losing your reg troops.
2. Don't attack multiple targets that you are at war with. If you do, they can organize a massive revenge on you and kill off regs.
3. Don't attack if you don't have enough gold in your banks to buy back your mercenaries. You might leave yourself exposed if you do.
4. Always have ALL your mercenaries one level lower than your regular troops. In this way, your mercenaries will die before your regular troops.
5. Get at least the first level of Regency researched. This will buy back one merc every time one dies when you are attacked. Level 4 is better though.
6. If you are going away for a long time, add more troops, and then attack your usual target until your troops are nice and tired but you still aren't losing any recruiting. The lower you can get your stamina, the quicker you will surrender to attacks on you.




HOW TO DO A SIMPLE REVENGE

1. People go in and raid until the target surrenders. During the raiding, it is best not to heal or buy back mercs, because your opponent will fight longer. It is during the raiding time that you will kill the most troops. Just make sure that you always have enough mercs so that you aren't losing regs while attacking.
2. Once the person is surrendering to raids, then buy back all mercs, rest up your troops, and attack with castle attacks to try to kill a few more troops. Again, don't buy back or heal. This prolongs the fights.
3. Once the person is surrendering to castle attacks, bombard the crap out of him.
4. Rest your troops and buy back all your mercs.
5. Once the walls are down. Revenge!!




SIMPLE GUIDE TO SPYING

1. # of spies to use depends on how rich your target is:....
EG. if your target has 500K gold sitting out, then (depending on your spy building level) you can send in about 13 spies (500k gold /40k gold = 13 spies) ... remember, 40K gold is the MAX ONE spy can steal and carry off. So if your spy can only carry about 22k gold, then you should send in (500K/22K = 23 spies) - all figures rounded up!

2. Spy Building level ... determines how much gold each of your spy can carry - up to 40K per spy. typically, for a human race, you need spy building between 8-10 to get 40k gold per spy.... an Orc with Spy Building Level 10 is good too :-)

3. # of turns to use.... this determines the chances your spies will get caught! Now, I use 11 spy turns when the recommended is 22 (I believe up to fort defense). Targets with higher defense level Keeps to Citadels, you will have to use MORE than the recommended turns otherwise you will lose more spy mercs. NOTE: you can lose up to ALL your spy mercs so don't worry about losing spy regs! only time you lose spy regs is if you forget to rebuy spy mercs.




SIMPLE GUIDE TO STARTING THE AGE

After reading this guide, you will be able to do the following:

- help you with your upgrades and thus your race to 25/day.
- help you be able to recover from any attacks that is against you.

the beginning part of the game (the race to 25/day) it is very important to get your production and market up and running as well as do research when you are not going to be online for a long period of time (6 or more hours). you can then do the odd forge and armoury if you like (sometimes a good defense is a good offense).

Early in the game, I suggest to raid for resources and only plunder small amount of gold.... this is because resources are VERY expensive to buy from the market so you need to raid for resources and the gold will be made from your market.... you can use the market to be your extra storage space too.

important thing is that you need a good production and market for your main source of income so you want to get to a lvl 9 market asap, and you'll need storage space as well.... for storage, I wouldn't upgrade too much at first - only upgrade the storage in the order of wood (near the start when all building upgrades are wood intensive)... then upgrade stones (since defense is stone intensive and later the buildings will be stone intensive too), and then ore.... you don't need a HUGE storage, just need to store roughly about 50-70 percent of your most expensive building resource upgrade.

At the start you want to research Management up to level 4 ASAP!!!!!! so usually I research that when I am going to alseep or going to be out for the day.

Of course, this all depends on the style of play you want and the goal of the game that you have set for yourself.

So.. here is what you need to do:

1. Upgrade the resource Production that you get the most bonus with (if you're an Orc, then focus on ORE and not FOOD).
So for Elf it is wood, Dwarf and Trolls is stones, Gnolls, and Humans can focus on Wood at the beginning, and then Stones when the upgrades are more stone intensive.

2. Upgrade your market so that you can start selling resources... try to get to Level 9 market ASAP.

3. Upgrade your storages, but focus on the resource storage that you are producing the most.... the other resources you should upgrade to hold up to 50-75 percent of the cost of the resources you need to upgrade. So if the MOST expensive upgrade you want to get costs 100k stones, then upgrade your storage to hold up to 50-75K stones.

When you have your resources filled, this is when you will raid the rest for when you are READY to upgrade! (don't raid before that otherwise you will have a crap load of resources sitting out and not enough gold to upgrade ;-)

4. Upgrade your gold storages to up to 80-85 percent of the most expensive upgrade you want to do. The gold storage will be filled as your resources sells on the market.

5. Research Management as your first research... Then focus on Efficiency... if you want to be a fighter, then focus on Tactics and Medicine before efficiency. Do research if you are going to be offline for more than 6 hours at a time.

6. Upgrade your defense only when you have enough troops to man your defense WITHOUT hurting your production!

7. Produce when you can be online and log in every 4 hours or so - if you're attacked then do NOT raise your stamina and just keep producing while you're in surrender mode.

Now, the MOST important thing about using the market is that you HAVE to be patient! DO NOT EVER UNDERCUT THE MARKET PRICE! You can only undercut the market if you have at least about 25 percent of the market and you want to screw the others up.





HOW TO FIND RICH TARGETS

Do the following only when you are going to attack to get your upgrades (ideally you would want as many turns saved up as possible)

1. train a scout (in the first 1-2 weeks, you can get by with just one reg scout to do all your scouting... This is only good until the target gets a Keep as defense)... after a Keep, get 3 reg scouts and 1 merc scout .. then use the 1 scout to do your scouting

2. Go down the list of players that is on your page or around your ranking...

3. check their Attack log, and see how often they were attacked and when was the last time they were attacked and what was it for.

4. If they been getting attacked a lot in the past 24 hours then that's a good sign that they are a goo farm for you :D

5. use one scout and the amount of turns you need is 50 percent +1 of the recommended scout turns needed. in some cases you can just use 50 percent of the turns

If recommended is 1-3, then you can use 1 turn
If recommended is 4-5 you can use 2 turns.
If recommended is 6-7, you can use 3 turns.
If recommended is 8-9, you can use 4 turns.
etc..
Once the recommended turns is about 15-20, then you should be careful and use more turns (usually when the person has a Keep and higher defense)

6. If your target is rich, then troop count them to see if you can get to their resources/gold without them defending your attacks or surrendering to you. you would need to have about 25-50 percent MORE strength than they do to get through a Raid. For a successful castle, you would need to drop their stamina by at least 50 percent!

7. Once you finish attacking and scouting, untrain your scouts and make them produce again.. or research.. or market.



THE BUILDING QUEUE

The idea behind the queue is that you put a building in the queue, and then as soon as you get enough resources and gold, the game buys the building for you. So let's say you need 10k wood, 15k stone, and 100k gold to get your next building. At your bed time, you put some of your workers to wood, some to stone, and adjust your slider so you are making some gold, and if all works right, when you wake up, your building has been built. Or, if you have resources on the market, you ignore the tax slider and just produce resrouces. So that way, when your market sells, you have enough to build your building.

This is my idea for the wiki.
At the top goes KL's Basic Concept guide. Each of his points has a basic idea of what that topic entails. For instance one of his topics is:

Now I want to put a link on the title that will take people to the more detailed version that KL just posted. So the person will only have to click on the word "Siege" from the Basic Concept guide, and they will be taken to a more detailed explanation on that topic.

What do you think?

Two more sections for you:

Moved to the help site section of the forum as this is a discuission on a new and better help site

Perhaps it could say: "You cannot go into Vacation Mode if you have attacked someone, or a spy or scout has been caught in the last 16 hours."
I think it's easier to understand this way, no offense meant.

Revenges. (**Ok this is my favourite part in the game :D **)

Anyone bothering you? Or do you need to slow your rival clan from being stronger than you? Revenges are the best solution for these questions. If you know how to revenge effectively, then you will have the advantage in terms of the game and mentality.

In order to deal maximum damage to your enemy with revenges, there are a few things that you have to take into consideration.

1. Information about your enemy. His online/offline times is very handy in planning your attacks. You can guess these by carefully analyzing the attack log of your enemy. Also, you can use scouts to gather more intel about the enemy. Some people switch to full research when they sleep so that enemies can't steal much. So if you find your enemy with a lot of alchemists during a time you assumed he should be online, then you might have gotten the perfect time for the revenge. These do not happen all the time though. Always keep in mind you are up against another human!

2. Proper selection of siege. Having the right siege helps a lot in a revenge. This will vary according to the race you play and your play style. Do a few experiments (specially if you get to play a beta age) and try to find out what siege is best for you.

3. Make sure your enemy is at high stamina. Having your enemy at 100 stamina would be ideal because then you will be able to get the maximum number of raids and kill most of his mercenaries. But this does not mean that you will always fail if the enemy's stamina is less.

How to conduct the attacks.

Here's the most commonly accepted way of commencing a revenge.

1. Raid the enemy until he surrenders. During the raids, some people prefer not to buy back mercenaries or rest the troops because it might help to get an extra raid in. However, this is not necessarily so. The exact method of raiding can differ according to the troop strengths of your army and the enemy army. If the enemy is weaker than you, then it's generally better not to rest your troops or buy back the mercenaries. If the enemy army is a lot stronger than your's, may be getting the second raid with full stamina and full mercenaries might help. This is something you will have to experiment and learn. It is usual practice to see if you can get a raid in at 70 stamina before moving onto castle attacks. (70 is the lowest stamina you can attack with)

2. Castle attacks. The results of the castle attacks will greatly depend on what siege you use. That's why it's important to know what siege you should use. Using siege towers would deal no damage to the walls and will help you kill a few more during the castle attacks. But it has no advantage when it comes to the final revenge attack. Using catapults or trebuchets however will deal damage to the defenses and will make the enemy surrender faster. But they will also kill a lot in the revenge attack and thereby increase your chances of killing a lot of troops in the revenge. Take these into consideration when buying siege. Castle attack the enemy until he surrenders. It would be a good idea to see if you can get a one final hit at 70 stamina.

3. DESTROY THE ENEMY WALLS. One common mistake new players do is to revenge without destroying the enemy walls. Even a partially in tact defense can greatly reduce the number you kill in your revenge. Make sure you blow the enemy defenses to dust (either using spies or bombards) before moving in for the final kill.

4. Revenge! GIVE IT EVERYTHING YOU GOT. Another common mistake new players do is to revenge with only 1 turn! This will exhaust your revenge and all your hard work will be wasted. Make sure your revenge is always a 10 turn revenge. Also, most people prefer hiring extra troops for the revenge to maximize the kills. So it would be a good idea to have extra space in your barracks in case you want to add a lot of troops for the revenge.

Remember.. Every good thing takes time. So don't be discouraged if you didn't get enemy regulars at your first attempt. Keep trying and try to find out what went wrong. Ask for help from the vets. Revenging is an art that should be perfected with experience.

OK, I've written this while chatting, so proof it extra carefully, please! :)

Transferring and empire bank deposits

One of the great aspects of being part of an empire is that the members can help eachother and work together to improve the empire. This can be achieved through transfers of gold and resources between the members and by depositing gold and resources into the empire bank (often referred to as cb). These features are not meant to allow people to push others instead of taking care of their own accounts, so there are some measures in place to avoid that. In short, those measures are there to make sure that you don't neglect upgrading yourself, and to avoid pushing.

To look at those measures in a bit more detail, you need to know a few basic things first. First of all, all resources are calculated together, and the gold is calculated separately. At the "Resource transfer" page, you will find information about gold and resources in/out.
Gold and resources in are the total amounts that you have produced, stolen, bought (for resources), gold earned on the market, received transfers from others and what you have used from the empire bank.
Gold and resources out are the total amounts you have transferred to others, deposited in the empire bank and used directly from your personal supplies for an empire building.
Or, to simplify, the "in" values show your total income, and your "out" values show how generous you have been.

The highest possible amount you can give to anyone is the difference between these values, so this is the amount that your peasants will allow you to transfer to a person ranked below you, or up to 10% higher than you. Please not that the 10% higher rank refers to rank points (link to the section about how rank is calculated?). If the person you want to transfer to is ranked higher than that, you can't send them anymore than the difference between what they have sent out (to other players or to the empire bank) and received. It doesn't matter if they're ranked #1 or #350, as long as they have more than 10% higher rank than you have. If you look at the resource transfer page, you can see how much you are allowed to transfer to every member of your empire.

When it comes to depositing into the empire bank, this is calculated in a different manner altogether. Here, the game makes sure that you don't give away more than you spend on yourself, to make sure that you aren't too generous for your own good. The amount you can deposit equals the amount spent on buildings minus the difference between what you have received in transfers/from the empire bank and your gold/resources out. To save you from calculating this yourself, the game displays how much you can deposit on the empire bank page.
Please note that what you spend on defenses doesn't count for this, so if you need to deposit more, build something else!

Worms - In the newbie protetion mode explanation you should state that if vacation mode ends because of the 24 hours your production drops to 10%. I also think "If you start during the registration period, Newbie Protection coincides with it. " this is a bit hard to understand.

Dang! I forgot worms made one on newbie protection so then I spent the time making this one....


Newbie Protection is what a player receives when they log into the game for the first time. Newbie Protection lasts for either 24 hours or until the player has achieved 100 victories, each individual attack turn counts as a victory so if you attack someone with a 10-turn attack then that will count as 10 victories.

However, you do not have to be online when your 24 hours expires. If you are offline when this happens, you will remain under newbie protection until the next time you log in, but your production will be reduced to 10% of what it should be. ex. You are producing 100 wood per turn while under Newbie Protection, then in real life you go to work and while you are at work the 24 hours of Newbie Protection expires. You get home from work 2 hours after it expired, so then for those 2 hours you will only be making 10 wood per turn instead of 100. Then when you log in, you will get a message that says you have 10 minutes left of newbie protection.

One thing to remember is that Newbie Protection starts as soon as you activate your account, so if you want to use the protection period for safe production, you don't want to activate your account until the age starts, not during pre-registration, otherwise you will waste newbie protection, because during pre-registration you do not receive any resources or gold*.
*Note, you can click incentives during pre-registration to gain more attack and spy turns.

Attacking people while under Newbie Protection is a good strategy to utilize, just make sure that you stop attacking before you get to 100 victories otherwise you will lost the Newbie Protection and then anyone can attack you.

''If you have all your troops at level 3 (both mercenaries and regulars), when you attack someone the first troop to die will be a mercenary. Then any other deaths will have a 20% chance of being a regular.That is why it is advised to keep your mercenaries a level lower than your regular troops!''

DUnno if its any better :P, probably not.

I have the building prices for a lot of them but updating the Wiki with them all will take hours, So I was waiting to see what the format was of this manual before i tried to add anything. If anyone wants to add them to the Wiki and save me having to contemplate it, send me a PM.

I'm starting to move the pages over. If anyone is bored and feels like migrating some pages, here is the HTML template that I'm using.

You can also pick this up by going to:
http://www.warofempires.com/help/template.html and then doing View Source.

I won't mind putting up a few pages. Only that i don't know how to do it. Anyone willing to explain?

1. Take the template and delete the part where is says:

<!----

CONTENT FOR THE HELP PAGES GOES HERE


--->


2. Copy any of the help pages on the Wiki or on the forum into the section that has just been deleted.

3. Add HTML markup to add bolding, headings, or lists.

4. Save with a descriptive name (e.g. AdvancedWarfare.html)

5. Send to admin@warofempires.com

Whatever page anyone does, please post it so that way we dont have to people doing the same page twice.

This is where I'm adding the pages. The menu will be expanding as I add things.

http://www.warofempires.com/help/

Recruiting, Training, Waging War, Empires, Diplomacy, Mutiny, Research, Mercenaries, Siege, Newbie Protection added.

I have also removed lots of the posts that deal with the above, so that I will know what is left to be done.

Wife is out of town tonight so i will take some time and see if i can help with this project

I was thinking about assembling a quick guide to survive newcomers bashers, as there are always one or many as far as I can tell, and it's not fun to see someone lose a lot of regulars because he doesn't know what to do, or, even worse, suicide against the harasser. Also, it's not fun for the targeted player either..

"* Complete success: All spies or scouts return home. For spy attacks, the defender will know that something has been damaged, but he will not know who did the damage.
* Partial success: Some spies or scouts were lost on the way. For scouting missions, you will still get a full scouting report. For spying missions, the damage caused to the defender will be the damage that the remaining spies managed to do.
* Complete failure: All spies or scouts are dead. No damage was done to the defender, and no scouting reports are seen. "

Since you have "the defender will know that something has been damaged, but he will not know who did the damage." under complete success, I think that under Partial success and Complete failure it should be noted that the defender will know who did the spy/scout attack.