When you first log in the guide will appear in the upper left corner of your screen. He has some good information so we're going to follow him as long as we can stand.

Each faction has one map, their capital, that cannot be attacked. Here you can buy, sell, upgrade, and equip your units. Which we'll get to in a minute after get some experience under out belt at the combat training facility.

Keep following the tutorial and he'll ask you to walk around. When you do so he'll offer you a mission to earn VALUABLE XP for you hero. Accept it and he'll say he likes your style and to go to the combat training facility located on the map.

The minimap is located in the lower left corner of the screen. If you notice, there are letters across the top labeling the columns and numbers across the side labeling the rows. This becomes extreamely importaint in battles as the letters and numbers are the easiest way to discribe quadrent on the map in battle. So when someone shouts out C4 you should know they're not just talking about explosives.

Enter the CTF located in D4 (if you understood that you're doing great so far).

Welcome to your first battle. As you can see the map has changed and your hero has dissapeared to be replaced with units. They've given you two types of units for the purpose of learning: The fast, powerful, melee unit called the Ghast, and the versitile ranged Shade.

In this training excercize you'll only be fighting computer units, a rare occurence, since most of your battles will be against an enemy faction with the support of your faction memebers.

The mission given to you is to take your units to C3 and capture the Point of Contention/Control (PoC) there. There is a number of ways to select your units, you can drag a box around them as shown in figure 5, press the backspace key, or left click one and then hold shift and left click on the others.



Once your units are selected, you need to tell them to move. You can just right click on the ground, or press the move button in the lower right and left click (on the ground). When you tell your units to move they'll ignore all enemies til they reach their destination. If you want you units to attack the units they run into while they're moving you can issue an attack move by pressing 'A' on your keyboard and then left-clicking on the ground or press the attack button in the lower right and left click on the ground. See figure 6 for an example of attack moving.

You should be moving along the winding path to C3 by now. You won't get too far before you run into your first enemy. Attack using either attack move, or manualy selecting individual enemies by right clicking on them or pressing 'A' and left clicking on them

The enemies here are all units you can buy at the factory in your faction capital. They are: Imps, Banshees, Revenents, and Wraiths.

The PoC is a critical part of battles in SG. To capture a poc you must have at least one unit stand on it for a period of time (45 seconds to 1:30 seconds depending on the map). If your units are killed when standing on the poc it will reset and you have to start over from the beginning.

You can tell which quadrent the pocs are located in because they have a red boarder around them on the minimap. A map can have one to five pocs and in standard battles victory is determined by capturing all the pocs or holding the majority by the time the battle timer runs out.

It's importaint to tell your units to stop when they stand on the poc (by pressing S with the unit selected). By telling your units to stop it will make them stand on the poc even if they're attacked and prevent them from running off and reseting the poc.

If you stood on the poc for the time required you'll be taken out of the CTF and congratulated on your victory. Next we'll find out about the units we that can be bought at the factory.