SF Leader Guide

Content:

Introduction
General guidelines
Volunteering to lead a SF
Before the wheel
The plan
During the SF
After the SF
Last Notes
Thanks to

Who needs to read this guide?

People who don’t feel comfortable with leading a SF yet.

General guidelines

When asking things from the planner, try to be patient and polite (you should always be patient and polite!), (s)he’s probably quite busy planning the wheel and might take a while to answer.

Here are some useful things to tell the planner when you are volunteering: your rank, your amount of MPs (only if different from the rest of main), times when you’re available (or times when you’re not), if you’re not in main but close: the city you are in, possibility to rank up through training (might or might not be needed).
When it comes to ranking up, it's also wise to let the SF leader know if you're likely to rank up during SFs, especially when wheels are involved. This might mean the difference between being able to get a taxi back to main and getting left behind.

Before the wheel

Make sure you get the plan well ahead so you can ask questions about it if you’re not clear. Usually the plan will include which SFs you are allowed to join before you have to set up your own. If it does not, assume that you’re not allowed to join any until you are able to ask the planner.

The plan

Plans can be rather cryptic, so I’ll try to give a short explanation of all the things that might be in it.
First of all, the plan will tell you what city you’re supposed to hit, what city you’re supposed to set up in and what name your SF is supposed to have (usually SF #..). Additionally it might instruct you on the amount of MPs the people in the SF can have. If people ask you why, or you wonder why yourself: this is always done to protect the people in the SF. For instance: the SF might be hitting a village, in which case there can be no taxi back and all people with 1MP would get stuck in that village till the next tick (which will cause them to miss a bunch of SFs and probably will cause them to get behind cause the main will most likely move during the wheel as well).
If you’ve been assigned a SF that requires the people in it to have a certain amount of MPs (or to not have a certain amount), then you might have to burn their MP. There are two ways of doing this, either by merging your army into a separate army which will take care of the burning, or by assigning 2ic to someone with the desired amount of MP and having him pass on 2ic to the people that need to be burned. This last technique is referred to as 2ic burning. It requires you to keep giving 2ic to one person so he can keep passing it to other people. How does this technique work? When you assign 2ic (or pass it along) the amount of MPs of the person you assign it to will be reset to at most the amount of the person doing the assigning. If the person you are assigning it to already has less MPs, (s)he’ll just keep that (e.g. you can’t give people more MPs with this trick, you can only take MPs away this way).
If for some reason burning is not an option (anymore) then you can also kick a person with the wrong amount of MP from your army. Only kick people as a last resort. Also try to message them when you have so they’ll know why they have been kicked and won’t be pissed at you after.
If you're interested in how the planning actually works, visit A guide to wheeling.

During the wheel

If the wheel has started, it is very important that you PAY ATTENTION. Being on IRC (with your highlights on) can be very useful, but it is in no way necessary as long as you're paying close attention ingame. Always respond to questions or instructions quickly, time is often of the essence.
Unless you’re told to hit at a specific time (or to wait for a specific event) you can hit as soon as you think you have enough people in the SF.
Before you hit, check the border, if it’s empty then you can safely hit, if it’s not, spy the city at least once to check how many enemy officers are in the city you need to take. If in doubt whether you should still hit, ask the planner.
NOTE: In Asia-TLK there are 3MP hits, if you’re doing one like that, do not rely on the border and always spy.

After the SF

When you've successfully hit the city, it's time for the aftermath. If you were required to taxi people back, set up your taxi (do this as soon as possible, preferrably before you even look at the battlereport, there will be plenty of time for that while you're waiting for people to join your taxi). When everyone is in your taxi (that is everyone that actually requires the taxi, people that have MP themselves can move back themselves as well), move back to the correct city and join the main army or a holding army. Do not wait indefinitely for slow joiners, when in doubt what to do with them, ask the planner. Never join a SF directly. People that join a taxi back might want to go offline after, joining them into a SF will make sure they get left behind.

Last notes

Each SF planner has his or her own style. Some planners will take a lot of the stuff in this guide out of your hands and will do it themselves. Other planners let their SF leaders figure things out for themselves a bit more. Whatever type of planner you got, this guide should help you to figure out what to do. Ultimately, it's always the planners responsibility that the plan gets executed well, so if in doubt always ask him/her.

Thanks to

The_Dice for the initial idea, and most of the actual content.
Mavketl for proofreading the draft and adding some more ideas.