Apprentice Handbook

What is the Apprentice Handbook?

The Apprentice Handbook (or AppH) is intended as an easy-access handbook, where primarily new players (and those teaching them) will be able to quickly find topical information that is short and to the point in addressing a wide range of topics. The idea for AppH was born when teachers of Apprentice Academy (AppA) realized they were writing the same things to answer the same questions over and over, as is often the case when teaching new players. Rather than refer to existing guides which may be good in themselves, but that often don't allow for quickly and easily finding concise information suitable to answer common questions, a decision was made to simply start collecting short texts for the specific purpose of being used in the Academy's teaching.

How does the Apprentice Handbook work?

Whenever an AppA teacher would normally spend 5-10 minutes answering a question posed by a student on the Academy forums, they are encouraged to instead take an extra minute or two and write the text in a general form, and save it on the Handbook pages. The text entry can be either placed immediately in an appropriate section/page, or it can be simply saved on a scratch page until further notice, from which someone can then later arrange it properly where it belongs. Please note that a key point to the Handbook is brevity! A typical length for a text entry should be in the region of 5-15 lines of text. This will not answer every aspect of complicated matters, but that also is not the intention. The Handbook should provide a short introduction, or the general idea, of its topic. Further information can be provided in additional text entries, or in other sources entirely.

What isn't the Apprentice Handbook?

As suggested by the "brevity rule", AppH is not yet another guide of page after page of long and intricate game concepts explained in essay style. Keep it short. Keep it simple.

Random list of possible entries to write

The purpose of the game

How do you research?
There are three mains routes to research. In all of them the general idea is to have as many guilds as possible and to spend as many turns as possible on active research, which doubles the research output of your guilds for that turn. Another common point is that you should cast the blue enchantment concentration as soon as you can, and then update it every 100 SL or so.

The first and easiest way is to keep no units and to keep your land below 1666 acres, which means that if someone attacks you, a single full siege will put you in council protection (P) where you cannot be attacked til you move again. Then, you wait for full turns, explore back up, rebuild, and continue research.

The second way is to go above "P land" but still stay unitless. This is mostly good once most active mages have grown bigger, and there are few people attacking at lower land. The cycles are much the same, and you should be able to keep more guilds, but you need to balance that you don't spend too many turns exploring back for it to be worthwhile.

The third and final way is to grow bigger still, and keep an army to defend your land. Typically you should go for a mono stack (like AA, efreeti, djinni, treants or zombies, depending on colour) with cheap item and spell for defense. Which route to take depends on the current situation on the server. It may be worth changing between them too; for example to start at "P land" and then grow somewhat bigger, when fewer people attack. But regardless of method the foundations remain to keep high guilds, and to use a lot of turns for active research.

Buildings

Resources

Basic stacking for blues Basic stacking for reds Basic stacking for greens Basic stacking for blacks Basic stacking for whites

Making a run

Exploring vs attacking

What's OK and what isn't (standard RoEs etc)

War

Non-battle Items Offensive enchantments (non-battle spells)

The Black Market

Heroes Unique items Ancient spells

Guilds

Allies

Starting the set

Further reading