The rules sound more complicated than they are. You can basically move to an adjacent tile, and you need more armies than the opposition to claim a tile. That's kinda it.
(If you're trying to hold a location, and one army attacks, you hold it ok cos 1=1. But if that any had more support than you do (eg two other supporting it, Vs one supporting your hold), then they win and get the square, so you need to move your army off somewhere else (basically any other free adjacent location). Won't happen for at least a couple of turns though given none of us are even adjacent yet...)
Builds, meanwhile, happen at the end of every year. There's a Spring move, then a Fall move, so build happen after every other move.
What happens then is:
- see how many Service Centres (SCs) you own. These are the special squares with dots in (ie not every region is an SC). You own it if you're in it at year end, or owned it last year and nobody is in it now. (If you get to an SC in spring but move on in Fall then you don't get to own that SC.)
- if you own more SCs than you have units, you can build more units (up to the numbers of SCs you have). But you can only build in your home territory (which conceivably limits you below the number of SCs you gained, particularly if you have units on your home SC locations).
- if you have fewer SCs than units you have to disband down the excess units
Will kinda make sense once you see it happen. I expect we'll all gain an SC or two in the guest year as there are initially lots of unowned ones and easy land grabs available. Will get more interesting in 1902/1903... but getting good alliances in place, deciding whether to go near your neighbors' SCs etc, is already kinda important even on the first move!
So no metagaming in here? I saw it's specifically discouraged in the account details when you sign up anyway. The chat is already excellent, I love the use of correct languages...!
It's fine to "metagame" as in look for the Most Efficient Tactic Available.
But less ok to be metagaming like "Elm let slip he was Turkey on the forum so that means he's noob so I can bully him by going to Sevastopol" type thing. Any chat that's got any details of the game (beyond maybe a totally objective summary of each year maybe) is risky on that front, hence best kept to the anonymous in-game chat instead.