How do you organize your turns?

[Cor2]

I am interested in this topic as well.
Nothing I hate worse than taking a magic item away from a commander and forgetting to reset the move order and losing a major battle because of it.

I dont have any special tricks, I use the "n" button alot, I try to keep useless commanders off that list by setting them on patrol or preach if possible. After I have given all commanders orders, I check all my castles, based on production left, and recuit. That is about it.

[CUnknown]

Let's see:

First I check the turn messages and watch battles.
Then I collect goodies from clams and blood hunters if any.
Then I check to see if I got any cool randoms on the mages I just hired, and set them to research typically.
Then I spend my cash money.
Then I move my armies of doom towards the enemy and the survivors of previous "armies of doom" towards the nearest safe area.
Then I hit 'n' to find my sneaky guys and I move them.

Then I sit and think. I might try to do some diplomacy at this stage.
Then I might change some of my previous orders around.

Then I know what items or summons I wish I had, so I forge or summon them if I can.
If I can't do this because of lack of research, I check and see what the heck I am researching and modify it.

Then I double check to see if my battle orders are consistent with my new strategy if I came up with one during the "thinking" stage.

Then I look at the Hall of Fame to see if anyone's SC Pretender died.

Then I hit 'n' again to make sure I didn't miss anyone.

Then I stare at the score graphs for a while if I haven't looked at them much lately.

Then I submit my turn.

[Zeldor]

You don't count forge item orders so you do not overflow the lab?

[moderation]

Cor2 said:
I dont have any special tricks, I use the "n" button alot, I try to keep useless commanders off that list by setting them on patrol or preach if possible.

Yes, exactly. I have this same problem. Having useless commanders is very annoying because then I get tired of cycling through all of them. I wish I could give them an "Idle" order which means "only cycle to me by pressing the I key, but not the N key." Would be nice is cases where patrolling is not appropriate or where you want to make sure you come back to the useless commander later. Just another pipedream management feature we can hope for someday.

My strategy is a little like CUnknown's except that I tend to rearrange the list in a random order, bash 'n' and F1 a lot, flail about, yack on IRC, come back to the job, bash 'n' some more, then press 'e' in frustration and mail in the turn. Then I go find my piece of paper and see if I can submit an updated copy.

Also, I really really really wish I could queue up a set of research targets like Const 6 -> Thau 2 -> Evo 2, etc. Because sometimes, having access to that particular spell a turn earlier can make the difference between winning and losing a battle. Maybe someday... Until then, piece of paper is my friend. Actually, one of the fun things about having the piece of paper is that you can kind of process the 'idea phase' of your turns without a computer. If I could only figure out a way to neatly print out a copy of the map with just the borders and neighboring province links, but without the extra artwork, it would be even better.

[Argitoth]

1. Set some commanders to move to a province.

2. Now select the province your commanders are moving to.

3. Hit 'y' on your keyboard. Vuala.

[Edratman]

Seems like I am not the only one with turn organization issues.

The one thing that I always do is start my "N" button cycle in my capitol and I leave one commander there without orders so that I will always cycle back to it. That keeps me from going through all the provinces multiple times.

Another item to add to my list of end of turn omissions is forgetting to change orders of an army that attacked the previous turn, is not attacking this turn, but is now adjacent to a force that requires a different spells/troop placement plan. Included in this is the death of a critical commander that I didn't notice because I was too lazy/rushed/drunk/tired/stupid.

Other than that I have made every mistake previously itemized, and will make them again and again.

[capnq]

The only thing I do that hasn't already been mentioned is look at the right column buttons before ending the turn. Did I tweak magic research? Did I recruit everything I wanted? Did I check whether I need to renew mercenary bids?

[sector24]

1. View messages, battles. Resolve anything important related to those messages. I get a lot of the large strokes out of the way here.
2. Press F8. Assign items forged last turn, figure out what I need to forge this turn.
3. Press N. A lot. This is the main army movement/combat phase. Eventually I'm left with just a bunch of hiding scouts, so then...
4. Recruit from all my castles. Any units I wanted to recruit out of castles was handled in step 3, but I recruited them last turn so they were set to defend.
5. Press F5. Set research. I always do this last because otherwise I am 2 research points short or several hundred over like previously pointed out.

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The biggest problem I have is pressing F8, assigning items, and then forgetting where my hammers are or what I need to forge this turn. Still haven't figured out a good way to do that. But I catch 99% of everything else.