Olympia PBEM

Chapter 4: Submitting orders

Orders should be sent to orders@game.pbm.com. For instance, if you are in game 1 of Olympia, send orders to orders@g1.pbm.com.

The `Reply-To:' header on turn reports is set to the correct orders, so using the reply feature of your mailer should send orders to the right place.

The orders address is read by an automated daemon which scans the orders for syntax errors and queues them for your units. It will send a reply as soon as it receives mail from you, showing whether or not there were any errors with the orders it received.

Orders must be of the following form:

begin player-number password
  .
  .  email, lore, password commands
  .

unit player-number
  .
  .  commands for player entity:  name, format or quit
  .

unit unit-number
  .
  .  commands for unit
  .

unit unit-number
  .
  .  commands for unit
  .

end

The `Subject:' line on your message is ignored.

The begin keyword tells the order scanner what your player number is. If you have not set a password, you do not need to supply one.

The unit command replaces a set of orders for a unit. Any pending orders for the unit will be cleared, and the new orders sent in will queue up. Orders that are still executing for the unit will not be interrupted unless the first order queued is the stop order (see stop).

Do not match an end for every unit command! There should only be one end, at the end of all of the unit sections. The Olympia order parser will not read beyond the end.

For example, here is a set of orders for player Fate [812], who has two characters, Osswid [5499] and Candide [1269]:

begin 812
  password sneaky

unit 5499
  explore
  move east
  explore
  study 120

unit 1269
  move north
  stack 5499

end

The parser tries to be as flexible as possible. It is case insensitive and is not strict about spaces on a line, so you may use indentation to make your orders more readable.

Orders may be commented with the `#' character. Everything from a `#' to the end of the line will be ignored by the parser:

move north    # Head to Drassa to meet up with Osswid
stack 5499    # stack with him

No one will read the comments but you. Neither the GM nor the Olympia engine will try to interpret them for any reason.

Note that arguments must be enclosed in quotes if they are more than one word:

name "Osswid the Constructor"

The acknowledgement will show any errors that occurred while the orders were being parsed, and list the current pending commands for all of your units.