WarLight will be going down on Saturday, April 30th at 1am PDT (8am GMT) for up to 30 minutes. Please plan accordingly for any fast games or single player games that may get interrupted during this 30-minute window.
During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to v1.03.0. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing. This is a smaller release than normal, as I’m simultaneously working on a bigger release that won’t be done for a while.
Cyclic Move Order
Members have a new setting they can set on their games: the Move Order. This setting controls the sequence that orders are carried out within each turn. The default is set to Random, which is how all the games work today — i.e. you never know if your first attack will happen before or after your opponents, since it’s determined randomly for each turn.
If this setting is changed to Cycle, then players will take turns getting first move. In this mode, you can figure out whether or not your first attack will happen before or after your opponent’s first attack. The first turn of a game is randomized just as it would be in the random move order that we’re all used to, but subsequent turns just cycle through that same order. For example: ABCD becomes BCDA for the next turn, followed by CDAB, and finally DABC before starting back at ABCD.
This is mostly designed for 1 v 1 games, in which one player to get first move on all evened numbered turns while the other player gets first move on all of the odd numbered turns.
One twist is that you can’t see the cycle for the game anywhere. You must deduce it by observing the sequence that attack orders happen in. This means that if you see an opponent attack happen before your first attack, then you know the cycle and will be able to know whether or not your first attack will happen before your opponent’s first attack.
This setting will be considered for the ladders in the future.
Gold Stars
Gold Stars are now awarded for each of the single-player levels if you can complete them in low turn times. These don’t do anything except look pretty, but they give you something else to shoot for when going through the single player levels. Stars are awarded for completing:
– Level 1 in 6 turns
– Level 2 in 14 or fewer turns
– Level 3 in 19 or fewer turns
– Europe challenge in 18 or fewer turns
– Crazy challenge in 22 or fewer turns
– Insane challenge in 28 or fewer turns
Map Feedback
In an effort to increase the quality of maps, players can now submit feedback on maps directly to the map creators. This is a great way to report any bugs you find in a map, or just to let a map creator know that you really enjoy their map.
To do this, from the game screen, click the Settings button, View Map, Send Feedback. This can also be done on the Create Game screen if you click Preview Map and then Send Feedback.
New Strategic 2 v 2 Settings
As mentioned in the previous blog post, the settings for the 2 v 2 ladder are being tweaked so that players now start with two territories each instead of one.
Ladder History
In this release, WarLight will begin keeping a history of each player/team’s ladder rating and rank changes over time. This means WarLight will be able to show a graph of your rank/rating, or helpful indicators showing whether players have been rising or falling.
While these features aren’t coming in this release, at least it will be tracking history so that when these features are eventually added, they’ll have data going back to now.
Misc Changes
– Player’s profiles now show what percentage of their games are real-time versus multi-day.
– When spectating a game that’s finished, the “Watch turn” phase will now be skipped automatically.
– Added a player’s best ladder rank to their profile page.
– Ladder player’s best rank is now shown even after they leave the ladder.
– The ladder’s rank-changed email now only sends a maximum of once per day.
– The ladder matchmaking algorithm has been tweaked to help pair you with players you have not played before.
– All tournaments must now be multi-day.
– When viewing a forum thread, the forum name is now displayed in the “Go back” link above it.
– The top-left corner label now says “Game start” in place of “Turn 0”
– Players are now given an alert if they try to submit an order delay card as their last order, since it would be a waste of the card.
– WarLight now uses a CDN to reduce bandwidth costs.
– Fixed a bug that occurs when a player you’re spying on gets a territory gifted to them.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Chat text box to not appear when joining an open tournament.
– Fixed a bug that caused open tournaments you created to show “Unread Chat Messages”
– Fixed a bug that, when creating a game, caused the auto-boot drop down to stay disabled if you go back and disable banking boot times.
Awesome additions! I have some questions.
For cyclical orders, what happens if Player A uses an order delay card first order on the turn where you have first move, does Player A sacrifice their turn to get first move that turn and Player B has the potential to get 2 first moves?
Subsequently, if it’s Player A’s first move, and Player B plays an Order priority, does it override it as usual? If thats the case, does player B get two first moves then?
On Gold Stars — Really cool! Except for the fact that I’ll only be getting 3 🙁
I’m 2 off for Level 3, 1 off for Europe, and 1 off for Insane. Looks like I’m going to have to retry the Single Player Levels to get those coveted Gold Stars.
For the addition of Real-Time and Multi showing up in the profile, is there an option to keep them together as my profile will probably turn into a lengthy page.
Thanks!
Delay and priority cards still work, but they don’t alter the cycle. Say player A is moving first on even turns and B on odd turns. If A plays a delay card on an even turn, their orders will be delayed but the next odd turn will still be a normal odd turn where player B moves first.
The profile change unfortunately isn’t broken out by the type (i.e. 1v1, 2v2, etc.), it’s just showing a single percentage at the top that shows what percentage of your games are real-time and multi-day. This was put in since it was a simple addition since that data was already available. I’d like to do more in the future, but it would be a bigger job.
ah, I guess I just misunderstood the change then. Thanks!
I noticed another change: if you’re on the Muliplayer screen and you click the Multiplayer tab, it now refreshes the screen, which I had always wished it would do.
How about making the gold stars show up on your profile page? Otherwise, I don’t really see any point.
Oh I totally thought they would go on your profile page originally. I guess putting them on your single player page is nice…but I think having on the profile page right next to the game would be good.
As always: Thanks for the continous time and energy you put into this great game.
Can you give us a hint on what goodies the big update you are working on will bring us? More Diplomacy settings? Peace treaties? Alliance options? Pleeeease? 🙂