This topic will guide you through your first steps in DCZ, assuming the game was already generated and you are now in the main menu. For details regarding specific topics, please have a look at the respective sites.

After login in, “Continue existing game” will bring you to the main view of the game. The world map shows you the conflict zones (CZs), the area you can conquer. The grey ones are neutral, while the colored ones belong to players.

Your first step should be to have a look around, in which direction are your opponents, how many CZs are between you, where are airports. [picture]

Also, how many credits do the CZs near generate? It is very important to have a steady income, so it´s a good call to develop in a direction with rich CZs. [pic]

However, credits are not everything, poorer CZs can house more buildings, so keep that in mind aswell (depending on how many credits you start with, it´s a good move to first take a poor zone with many building opportunities, and then take rich ones). After you have an idea which CZs to conquer first, it´s time to take action. To conquer CZs, you need two things: infantry and construction units.

So you want to build barracks and factories. Your starting zones can only hold a small amount of buildings, so you should build 50/50 of both, or a bit more factories, depending how many you can actually build. To construct a building click into your CZs and on the crane symbol. [pic] Here you can set the amount of things to build and apply.

Your baracks will automatically give you two infantry units per turn. It´s a unit that doesn´t need fuel to move from zone to zone, so don´t bother yet. Your factories produce CUs per turn (the amount depends on your starting year, you can look it up in your research panel). [pic]

As both buildings need a turn to do their work, you can end yours now. After your peers are done, it´s your second turn. As mentioned before, you need CUs to conquer and hold CZs, but it´s not enough to just have them lying around in your zone. You need a certain amount of deployed CUs. This means, you need to build units with your CUs and keep them alive to be counted as deployed CUs. CZs also need different amounts of infantry to obtain, you can see this here: [pic]

On the right sidebar you can see “Current amount of CUs” and “Needed CUs”. Now use the symbol with the tank and the wrench, where you can build units. You can see the amount of CUs they need, so think about what to build to get enough to conquer your first zone. (Depending on your starting year, that might not be possible in your second turn, but don´t worry, your opponents can´t do anything as well.)

It might be a good idea to calculate a bit, maybe there is a unit that needs little credit but many CUs. Even if that unit is useless in the long run, a quick expansion might be better than units you might think are useful 20 turns later.

If you built your units and have enough infantry, you can now conquer your first zone. To do so, just drag your infantry pawn onto the adjacent CZs you want. Keep in mind that only infantry moves for free, so you might need to use your pawn manager (the symbol with two chess peaces) to separate your infantry from other units. Other than infantry, your units are organized in groups, so just drag all groups to pawn two, until only your infantry remains in pawn one.

After you dragged your soldiers to the new zone, it will be highlighted. Keep in mind, any unit that was move to a freshly conquered zone can´t move until it´s next turn. [pic]

Before ending your turn, you can already construct buildings in your new zone. You might invest mostly into more barracks and factories at this time, again, calculate roughly what lets you expand fastest.

While continuing like this, always keep an eye on what your opponents are doing. While a real attack (meaning with ground forces) needs adjacent zones, airstrike can be made on any zone as soon as you have aircrafts. So like said before, look out for airports (one is enough for the start) and maybe buy some planes that could defend you. While SAMs can help you, they often have very high ammo costs and are mostly stationary, so planes are usually a better option early on.

For everything regarding combat, see the respective page.

When you have such a zone, you need ammo and fuel to use your planes. The amount needs can be seen in the construct units panel. However, the ammo costs only show you, what the unit itself needs regarding planes. Equipping missiles and bombs to your planes while heighten these costs, however, those are often not that expansive, building one or two ammo factories should be enough for the beginning, so build those and two fuel pumps.

While your air force might not look like much, they are a threat and might deter potential attacks, as losing any units would reduce the amount of deployed CUs and therefor throw your enemy back in their expansion plans quite a bit. The same goes for you, don´t risk losing units early on!

The only thing considering attacking are players, which don´t have any aircrafts, so you could bomb some of their buildings. You can see if they have aircrafts by looking at their pawns.

After some turns, you and your opponents might come closer to one another. If you come to a point, where you only have one neutral zone between you and another player, it might be time to fortify your outer zones. You might want to use (in the best case) use poor zones with many building opportunities for this.

Build lots of ammo factories and fuel pumps in these zones. Factories generating CUs can be built behind those zones and import them to the front zone. You can import/export any resource by clicking the zone and the symbol with the arrows. You can chose to export per turn or only once. Keep in mind, you can set the export option before the resource is generated in this turn and then immediately have it in the target zone next turn.

Now build units in your outer most zones. It is advised to organize them from the get go in your pawns, as doing so later is annoying. Units that are in groups in DCZ will also be used as groups in DCS World later and can´t be controlled individually. You can also only have one unit type in any group, the exaptation being SAMs, which need to be in one group to work.

If you generate good credits and have building space left, it´s also a good idea to start placing research facilities. For these you also need infantry besides credits.

If you feel confident, you might want to initiate an attack, for detailed information, see combat.

And now go and have fun with your friends!

Always keep a look on needed ammo and fuel, units are worthless, if you can´t send them to battle!

Ground units attack adjacent zones, planes can go anywhere. SAMs can also be activated anywhere.

Keep in mind, that if you want to move units from zone to zone, you need fuel in any zone on the way to your target CZ! So plan a “road” ahead and maybe export to some zones.

Look at the clock! If it´s dark, things are hard to see, for you and the opponent, players and A.I., so you might want to avoid that. [pic]

You can download a mission file with all the CZs and look at them in DCS World, look where roads are, your ground units are hard to move over rough terrain.

Learn how to use the Mission Editor and test things you want to do in DCS World.

Bring enough infantry when attacking an enemy CZs, sometimes your transporters get stuck or destroyed.

If you decided to attack and realize it´s a bad idea, retreat. It´s better than losing all your units pointlessly.

Talk to the other players, diplomacy is a thing in DCZ, make (temporary) peace, fight together against a stronger player or import/export resources. Everything goes.

It´s a game, have fun.