Anaris Family/Anton's Tome/Basics 1

The Basics, Part I - Hours, Turns & Time

One of the most confusing aspects of BattleMaster to new players is the hours & turns system. The first thing to understand is the time pool. At the bottom left, right under your character's name, you should see something rather like:

10 hours / 25 (+15) gold

We'll look at the gold a little later, but next to it is the number of hours you have remaining in the current turn. Think of these like "time points" which you can spend, and get replenished every turn. When you perform an action, it subtracts from your time pool, and if you don't have enough hours left in your pool, you can't do it.

The second thing to understand is that there are 2 types of actions: immediate actions and turn actions.

• Immediate actions simply subtract from your time pool and happen right away, giving you all the benefits (or drawbacks) of the action. For instance, training is an immediate action. If you choose to train your men with a Light Training session, and you have 10 hours remaining, it will subtract 4 hours from your time pool (leaving you with 6 hours), and 1 gold from your money, and show you the results of the training session. Usually, you'll gain something like 1 point of training and 1 of cohesion, but you might suffer damage to your unit's equipment or a drop in morale (these are all unit stats, which I'll discuss later).
• Turn actions are things you tell your unit to do, and then have to wait until the next turn for them to be resolved. The most common and important of these is travel. If you want to move from Shanandoah to my region, Lothruin, it says it takes about 5 hours. That means that as long as I have 5 hours available, I can travel to Lothruin by the next turn. So, since we still have 6 hours remaining after that training session, we can make it. If you click on "Travel" and then "Lothruin", you'll see at the bottom of the screen it says "travelling" in blue letters. That means that you're now on your way to Lothruin. Notice that the time pool doesn't change: it doesn't use the hours for travel until the end of the turn. If you do anything before then that reduces your available time below 5 hours, you probably won't make it to Lothruin by the next turn, and you'll have to wait for the following one.

Now, to explain turns (which are somewhat simpler to understand...). Every day there are 2 turns, one at 0600 server time and one at 1800 server time. They are also called "sunrise" and "sunset", respectively (these are the in-character, or roleplay, terms that many people, including me, will use to describe the turns). Every sunrise and sunset, you will be given 8 hours for your time pool. You can have up to 12 hours at one time, so keeping more than 4 hours available won't help you much.

Finally, a brief word about server time: it is real time, and it is based in Germany, so it is GMT + 1 (also called CET, I believe). This means that if you live in Germany, or anywhere else within that time zone, the sunrise turn is at 6AM, and the sunset turn is at 6PM. If you live in the US Eastern time zone, like me, the sunrise turn is at 12 midnight, and the sunset turn is at 12 noon. If you live in California (US Pacific), the sunrise turn is at 9PM and the sunset turn is at 9AM. And so forth.

Thus endeth Lesson 1.