Currently there is no way to give orders to new units FORMed during
the turn, or units acquired via BRIBE or TERRORIZE.
There is also a proposal, which is likely to be implemented, to limit NP
use to FORM, and not to use them for skills.
Long ago I extended the ability of the order mechanism (on Joshua
Kronengold's prompting) to allow orders to be submitted for units which
are not yet controlled. However, this code was never enabled.
Atlantis had a mechanism whereby one used some marker in place of
the entity number for new units, i.e. NEW1, NEW2. This could be
done in Olympia, but there are some issues which make it an awkward
mechanism.
I propose the following:
Remove NP's entirely. The whole idea of NP's is gone.
Instead, each player has a list of Unformed nobles.
For instance, a player who used to have 7 NP's would now see:
Unformed nobles: 1012 2314 3327 3376 3395 4132 4810
The FORM command takes the number of one of the unformed nobles
as an argument.
Orders may be queued at any time for an unformed noble. When
the unit comes into existence, it will execute those orders.
Additionally, orders may be queued by a player for any unit
in the game. If the player acquires control of that unit,
such as through BRIBE or TERRORIZE, then the unit will execute
those orders.
-- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@shadow.com>