Newbie Guide
For everyone who doesn't know what to do after logging in, this a startup guide for Confrontation Unlimited:
Empire screen
After logging in, you see your Empire screen. It consists mainly of a list of regions/islands known to your empire and a map, shown as a grid,
which represents the game world. Every grid block represents an island of the world. To play on a region/island, you have to click on it, either
in the list or on the map, and click the connect button. Note that you can't connect to every region right away. It has to be known to your empire,
meaning, you need units there to connect to it. All regions in the list are connectable for you and the non-black regions on the map
are connectable. At the beginning, all game world regions are non-connectable because you start playing on your private island and expand
to the game world later on. So your starting island is only visible in the list of known regions. You have to select it - it's named "Home of {your name}"
and click connect. Connecting takes a while - especially if you connect to a new region for the first time. It may take 30 sec depending on your
pc. Ususally, it's a lot faster though.
Interface
After connecting to your home island for the first time, you see your starting units: your Main Hall and five light fighters. You can select them by clicking on them or by dragging a rectangle around them. The right, in the selection dialog, you see what you have currently selected. You can subselect a unit from the selection dialog by clicking on it. That opens a detail dialog about that subselected unit below. This shows you some details about that specific unit.
You can move your camera around in the world by left clicking on the 3D view, and then using WASD. You can zoom in and out with your mouse wheel. If the zoom speed is to slow or high, you can adjust it in the options reachable at the upper right of the screen.
There is another control mode for the camera. Press Tab and turn the camera by moving your mouse. WASD still let's you move around and the mousewheel allows you to go up and down. Also note that you can select units in this mode as well. You can press Tab again to switch back to the normal input mode.
At the lower left bottom, there is the chat dialog. You can push the "C" to show and hide it. You can type msgs in there that you want to send to all players currently online and press enter to send them. On the left side of the dialog, you see a list of channels. There is System, Global and sometimes Region. System is for System messages, you can't post there just read. Global is the global chat where all players chat together. When you are connected to a region, the region channel is available for chatting with players on that region only.
On the upper left is a list of empires existing on the currently connected island. The ones with a * in front are currently online, the others are not connected right now.
Every player has a color. All units of one player have a circle beneath them with the color of that player. The red color indicates NPC monsters which aren't controlled by any player but behave on their own.
To the bottom left there is an overview map of the island. The white dot is your current camera position. The colored dots represent units of the respective player. Yellow dots indicate resources. You can click on the overview map to move your camera to that position.
At the top left you can see as which player you are logged in. Right beside, there are the 3 resources that exist at the moment: wood, metal, gold.
All unmentioned controls have no implemented function yet or I just forgot them right now.
Starting to play
With your first 1000 wood, start building a Peon. A Peon is needed to build other buildings. To do that, click on your Main Hall and in it's detail dialog that opens to the lower right, select the Peon from the buildables list. You'll notice that a Peon appears in the buildqueue and its build progress rises. After a few seconds, your Peon is ready and appears in front of your Main Hall. You might want to zoom in and have a closer look at it.
With your Peon at Hand, you can start building buildings. Select the wood cutter from the pull down menu to the upper right. Then click on the Build button and place it next to your Main Hall. Left click to start the building process. Note that you can change the orientation of the building as well by switching into direct camera mode by pressing the tab key and rotating your view. Also note that you can only build on these dark green flat areas that frequently placed on the island.
After you wood cutter building is complete, build a wood cutter unit inside it, like you did with the Peon in the Main Hall. After completion, move it towards a tree. You will notice that its cargo raises, which you can see in the wood cutters detail dialog, when it stands close to a tree. Let it stay there for a while to gather wood. It can carry up to 1000 wood. After some time, you can move the wood cutter back to the wood cutter building and convert it to wood that you use to build new builgins and units.
You can harvest metal and gold similarily. You just need a metal refinery or a bank. The metal and gold mines are shown on the overview map as yellow dots. You can differentiate them by looking at them in 3D or clicking on them.
Fighting
After all this building and harvesting you probably want to start fighting. Take a couple of units and move them close to enemies. They will start fighting when the enemies are close enough. Choose your enemies wisely. There are monsters that are rather weak as well as some that are nearly impossible to beat. It might help if you build healers to heal your units after a fight.
The rest is up to you to explore :)
