WarLight has just been upgraded to 1.14.0! This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Game Settings Highlight

The in-game settings panel now has the ability to highlight notable settings. This has been one of the most requested features on the WarLight UserVoice forum: highlight non-standard game settings.

This is useful for multiple reasons. First, it helps reduce the amount of time it take to read and digest the settings of a game by drawing your attention to the settings that you care about the most. Second, it also helps new players who aren’t yet experienced enough with WarLight to know what all of the different settings mean. These players can be alerted to the ones they might want to pay the closest attention to.

For example, this is how the overriden bonuses section might look for a game with a few bonuses overridden:

By default, settings are highlighted if any of the following criteria are met:

• If an overridden bonuses value is raised or lowered by more than 5 armies
• If multi-attack is enabled
• If the sanction card’s percentage is negative
• If offensive or defensive kill rate is non-standard
• If the direct boot or vote-to-boot time is very low
• If vacations are not honored
• If a custom scenario is used
• If the fog level is higher than normal fog
• If the army cap is enabled

Players can change these criteria to suit their own preferences by clicking on the Settings tab at the top, then selecting the Settings Highlight sub-tab.

For example, players who prefer playing in low-luck games can configure the settings panel to highlight the luck modifier anytime it’s higher than they prefer. Just check this box and set your desired threshhold:

If there are any settings that you’d like to highlight that currently aren’t possible, please create an idea for it on the UserVoice forum.

In addition to getting highlight functionality, the layout of the settings panel has also been re-designed to use a scroll-bar.

Prior to this update, the settings panel tried to display all game settings on the screen at once. This worked well when WarLight had fewer settings, but as the number of settings increase it will eventually became very large. The panel was already too big to fit on the screen of players with low-resolution monitors, and it was a frequent complaint as it isn’t immediately obvious how to scroll around when it’s size is larger than your screen. This update added three more settings, the previous update added one, and many more are planned for the future. Clearly, trying to fit all settings onto the screen was not a scalable solution.

This update changes the settings panel to use a scroll-bar, which is a much more nautral way to view the settings than moving a big panel around.

Percentage Attacks

Game creators can now choose whether or not they want to allow issuing attacks by percentage in their game.

Normally when you issue an attack or transfer, you tell WarLight how many armies you want to attack or transfer. Under the advanced pull-down, you can change it to percentage mode, which allows you to specify the percentage of armies you want to attack with.

The primary motivation for originally adding percentage attacks to WarLight was for multi-attack games. For multi-attack games, it is recommended that players allow percentage attacks, but outside of multi-attack games percentage attacks aren’t useful too often.

Attack-Only and Transfer-Only

Game creators can now choose whether or not they want to allow issuing attack-only or transfer-only orders. The primary motivation for allowing these settings to be disabled is to make the game more approachable for new players.

Misc Changes

– Territories now flash when you issue an attack to or from them or play a card on them.
– Increased the length of game and tournament descriptions from 1024 to 2048 characters.
– Swapped the Facebook like button on the home page to the new WarLight Facebook page, at facebook.com/warlight.net
– The forum now recognizes URLs between parenthesis as links. For example, you can now write “WarLight (http://warlight.net) is a great game” and the URL will be clickable.
– On the settings panel, the following settings were moved from the core section to the army section: multi-attack, move order, and fog.
– Added a confirmation to starting a vacation.
– The luck values of attacks are now only shown if the army counts on both the source and destination territories are visible to you.
– The mini-profile popups on the tournament page no longer appear off the bottom of the screen.
– Fixed a bug that made the mousewheel scroll the lower-right players summary too fast.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you started to play a card with UI, but entered history or viewing your teammate’s orders before finishing playing the card.