How to Play BRE - For The Newbie Welcome to the newbie's guide to playing BRE. This will be a VERY basic guide to playing and will work from the lowest degree of the game upwards. It will start from the first login to the game and progress through to the turns til you are well on your way in the world of BRE. On your first entry into the game of BRE, you will be prompted for a realm name. When chosing a name, it is best to choose one that is original and fun. Sometimes place names are fun especially when you are involved in country or city rivalries in interBBS play. You CAN use high ascii characters in your realm's name and many people do use them. Also, colors are not supported in names, which includes both BRE Color Codes or ansi.sys codes . After you have entered your name you will be brought to the BRE start-up menu. BRE Start-up Menu At the BRE start-up menu, you can enter the game, read mail, write mail, or view InterBBS stats. You can either press "1" or just [ENTER] to enter BRE as "1" is the default key pressed. Reading or writing mail is one thing which you will find useful from the start-up menu because it allows you to communicate with other players after all of your turns are over. More about turns later on. Also, the start-up menu allows you to view daily news which would include all attacks to and from your team and many other things like civil wars and tax hikes. Entering the Game When first entering the game you are almost always given some kind of tax refund. Its a small "gift" which will help you on your quest. Occasionally you will also recieve gifts of military which has its obvious advantages. After this, you are asked if you are interested in buying a lottery ticket. DO IT. It is free and the rewards are awesome. As to this date, I know of no one who has every gotten all 6 numbers right. If this ever happens to you, write to me and tell me how much money was won. Prizes vary from 10,000 gold pieces to 4,000,000 gold pieces. If this is your first turn in a new game, every gold coin is very important as you will have to buy some things. The next few things you are asked are somewhat complicated to a newbie and I will let you fool around with them yourself. These have to do with paying off maintenance costs and taxes. Most of the time all you will have to do is press [enter] all the way through this whole section, but occasionally you will not have enough money to pay off these costs. That's where experience comes in. Throughout your BRE career you will make MANY mistakes. I have... a lot. I have caused the death of my whole team but I don't get down on myself. With every mistake you gain valuable experience which will help you out with the game. Now back on topic. Try to pay off costs as often as possible. If you don't you can and will send your realm through civil wars and your people will be mighty pissed at you. If anything, don't pay for region support. You will lose land, but thats it. No military loss. Food Menu and The Bank Your next menu is the food menu. This is where you can buy and sell food which is needed to support the population of your country. At first you will have enough to support your population so you can sell your excess food by pressing "S". Remember you will need all the money you can get. After handling the food stuff you visit the bank. The bank allows you to borrow money, invest money, or just use it as a savings account. You will not need to know about the bank yet. But you will later. Money, as you may have already guessed, is a very big part of the game. Money DOES make the world go round here. Anyways, press [enter] to move on to the next menu. Military Purchasing Menu Yeah... finally you get to do some stuff. What you are to do on your first turn and for most of your first couple days into the game is to go straight into the region purchasing submenu. DO this by pressing "6". While here you can buy different kinds of regions, or land. Click here to find out more about regions. For the first time player and for anyone relatively new to the game the best strategy is to buy regions which make money. These are the coastal, river, desert, and mountain. With the money you have, buy as many coastal regions as possible. Every time you come back to this menu, use the money you have to buy MORE coastal regions. You will find that the money you make increases turns if you do this. You can exit the region submenuy by pressing [enter]. Once a gain, you are back to the Military Purchasing Menu. On your first turn, DO NOT BUY MILITARY. DO NOT START YOUR HEADQUARTERS. DO NOT BUY AGENTS. You need money. Attack Menu and InterBBS Menu hohoho.. fun stuff. The attack menu is where you can attack pirates and or attack your own players. If it is a interBBS game, do not attack your own players. Trust me, you will get flamed so bad. As you do not have any military yet, the attack menu means nothing to you. Press [enter] to move on. Welcome to the InterBBS Menu. This is a version of all the rest of the internal menus but for attacking and communicating with other players on other BBS'. You do not need to know this area yet either but you will learn about them later. Continue on by pressing [enter] again. A couple more clicks of the [enter] key and you are done your first turn of BRE! It wasn't so hard was it? Not at all. You are now ready for your next turn of BRE. In BRE the sysop or league co-ordinator specifies how many turns are allowed in a day of BRE. Most games allow 15 to 20 turns so you could be playing BRE for as much as 30 minutes in a day. Read on and I will walk you through the next few turns of a game of BRE. More will come later. Consider this a draft as it will be revised. This sections was written in one sitdown and is not very fluid.