Gameplay Strategies

When you set up a play-by-email game ("PBEM"), the computer automatically decides in which order the races will play.  If you have players in multiple countries, this can be inefficient and a real time waster, for it makes no sense for someone in the Netherlands to email the game to Canada and then to someone in Britain.  The changing time zones will only delay the game.  Better to have the game travel from the Netherlands, to Britain to Canada.  Changing the order in which the races play is a bit complicated, but follow these directions and your games will progress much faster.

~ Frogman ~

To edit the turn order you have to go to the editor. Go to options\map settings\players. This will take you to a screen that shows the race settings for the players. You will see player one usually listed as the humans. You see that you can change the race. You can't have two players with the same race. The easiest thing to do for your situation would be to find the player number with the elf race, and switch it to Frostling, then go to the player number assigned to the Frostlings and switch it to elves.

Now you should have the elves going before the Frostlings, but while you have switched the races in the player order, the Frostlings now have the elf cities and the elves have the Frostling cities. You need to go to the map and change the elf cities back to Frostlings and Frostlings to elves as well as fix the race assignments to any units that are on the map. For example, you would need to switch a frost queen from elf race to Frostling race. Is that clear? I think it will be obvious when you see it on the map.

Next you need to fix the leaders. Click on the leader tab. Since you switched races on the leaders, they probably got reset to level 1. Just double click on the leader's picture and you will go to the leader edit screen. You can see that you will easily be able to change the leader name, level and attributes. DON´T FORGET TO CHANGE THE SPHERES. I always forget that. When you swap the slots, the spheres for the elves will be what was set for the Frostlings. So just click on the spheres tab and reset the spheres to whatever you want. With leaders off you don't need to worry about the attributes so the name and spheres are all you need to fix. Remember the leader spheres affects all the heroes even with leaders off.

Solution to the Missing Hero Problem - By Arctic Wolf
Whenever I set up a PBEM game, and I'm player number 1, and the map is set to allow a hero to join - I never get the hero...

I tried playing the maps as scenarios (not PBEM) and the hero joins.
I did tons of tests for PBEM, the hero always joins the other players, but never me..

Finally I solved the mystery. In my setting for PBEM I of course have my regular email address, and the turn automatically starts without a save. (I'm player one, remember.) But if I put in a dummy email address as the local PC and email turn 1 to myself - Voila..I get my Hero!

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