Guide by Big Al from Oz at http://warbookforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=94.0

Hi people,

just for fun, I'll share some thoughts about how I'm thinking about the game.

For this first post, I'll start with The Big Picture.

In chess, you aim to get checkmate. In WarBook, the aim is more hard to see, but it is to gain land.

This may seem obvious, but there are several things that can distract from this main aim.

Every Kingdom has seven Assets:

• Land
• Mines
• Buildings
• Soldiers
• Money
• Mana
• Experience

I have listed these in order deliberately. There is an order, it was not obvious to me until I thought about it. But after thinking it through, I found it helped me work out other parts of WarBook strategy.

All assets can be given numerical values based on the gold cost of increasing the assets.

Land is worth either the gold required to purchase it, the gold required to replace soldiers lost when conquering it or the gold surrendered by using mana to boundary shift or land grab rather than for alchemy. Land becomes more expensive and valuable as kingdom size gets larger.

Mines are the core assets of the game, that turn land efficiently into money.

Buildings actually get more expensive with kingdom size. This is harder to see because the price is always the same, but buildings are only an asset because of their effects, which depend on percentage of total land. 100 forts gives +15% defence at 1000 acres, but only +3% at 5000 acres.

Soldiers are easy to value, because they always cost the same to purchase and maintain.

The core business of WarBook is building mines to maintain an army.

Comparing money with itself doesn't make sense. But it is worth noting two things. Money is pretty safe from attack (unlike land, mines, buildings and soldiers) but it is there to be spent. In the next post, I will attempt to refine an approach to strategy by thinking through Assets, Income and Growth.

Mana is approximately worth three times your total income every ten hours (every five hours for Magicians). No matter how high your total mana gets, alchemy cost will increase so that it always takes three hours to replace enough mana for the next alchemy spell. Increasing land rather than total mana is the way to get the most out of alchemy.

Experience provides small, free benefits via stat points.

These are just some brief general comments about the relative importance of building up particular assets. A strong feature of the game is the way these assets are inter-related. While I'm satisfied the priorities above reflect long term realities of the current implementation of the program, best play involves regular adjustment in all assets for most efficient progress. As the user friendly guide suggests, over-extending your acreage will get you in trouble. Working out just how far is too far is what I hope to do over a few posts.

Cheers everyone!
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