Battle Nations Basics

There's at least two clan members playing Battle Nations now, so I'm not motivated to start posting about it.  The tutorial missions are decent at getting you started, but there's no instructions, so there's a few things you might miss.  The Battle Nations Wiki is a great resource, but here's a primer on some of the basic controls:

1. User Info: This is where you pick up messages, change your icon and other settings
2. Enemies: Raiders and players in your Outpost show up like this.  Touch the player icon and a dialog box will slide out to the right with the option to Attack.  Touch Attack to engage in battle.
• NOTE: You can always Retreat from a battle for free, doesn't cost you anything.  For example, you can select Attack to see what units are there, and then Retreat if you don't think you can beat them.
3. Missions: Each of these icons represents an active campaign mission that you can go do.  Touch them to see what you need to do next.
4. Active tile: In general, you should always touch the ground tile that you want to use instead of the activity icon above it.  For example, if you want to activate the Field in this screenshot, you should touch where the "4" is, and NOT where the scissor-icon is.  This is true for construction as well as for units in battle.
5. Minimize: Touch here to minimize the controls at the bottom of the screen
6. Construction: Touch here to access all the things you can build
7. Move: Touch here to enter the Move interface where you can move anything you've built, rotate tiles, and delete (sell) items.
• It's always free to move anything, and you can move things even while they're being built
• You can delete trees.  As far as I can tell, they don't serve any purpose and just take up space.
8. Friends: Touch here to see your friends or campaign characters.  This is how you go to visit other lands.
9. PvP: Touch here to engage in player-vs-player matchmaking.  Will put you into battle with random players of the same level as yourself.  I don't really know how this works yet.
10. Armies: Touch here to see all the units you have, garrisons that are in bunkers, or armies in other lands.  Remember that if you Raid or Occupy a friend's Outpost, you'll need to retrieve your armies here when they're done.  It takes some time for them to return.  If you don't claim them here, they'll be unavailable until you do.
11. Nanopods: These cost real money and are extremely valuable, I recommend you don't spend them until the campaign requires them.  There's a campaign mission that requires 75 nanopods.  The easiest free method to get nanopods is by using tapjoy.com.  Access it from your iDevice and follow the directions.
12. Resources: Touch here to cycle through all your resources and how much you have of each.
13. Demand: Touch here to see what your workers want.  Doesn't really come into play all that often, it's more useful to look for the blue arrows when choosing what goods to make.