WarLight has just been updated to version 3.10.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

Twitch.tv integration

Whenever someone is streaming WarLight on twitch.tv, a link to their stream will automatically be advertised at the top of WarLight’s website (just to the right of the Help button.) If you see a stream advertised here, drop on in and say hi!

To kick off the feature, I will be doing an AMA (ask-me-anything) stream where I field your questions. After that, TheWarLightMaster is hosting a live-streamed tournament.

If you’re interested in streaming WarLight on Twitch and want your stream advertised here, just make sure you enter the game exactly as “WarLight” and also make sure that the “Inappropriate for younger audiences” check-box is not checked. (Edit: For now, also add ” – WarLight” to the end of your stream name. Twitch’s search seems a little finicky. This requirement should be removed in a future update.) It should appear within a few minutes.

History Overhaul

The UI behind the History feature has been overhauled! When viewing history, the UI now is embedded in the left side of the screen instead of in a pop-up window so that it never obscures the map.

It also now selects all orders by default so you can more easily see what occurred on a turn. This makes it easier to click through a game and see what occurred at a glance rather than clicking through orders individually.

When viewing the history of a finished game with fog, you can now view the game from a fogged perspective of a single player. Simply select a player’s name from the list, and you’ll see only the territories they could see at that point in the game.

When playing history, orders are now concealed until they are played much like they are when watching a new turn. This helps avoid spoilers from appearing in the orders list during live-streams.

Recent Games Page

The new Recent Games page, located under the Community tab, lets members see games by any players that were completed in the last 24 hours. One goal of this page is for live-streamers that want to look for interesting games to find and review.

The page has an algorithm to try and rank how interesting games are. For example, it ranks games with high ladder ranks more highly than games without, coin/tournament/ladder games higher, and lottery games lower.

In-progress real-time games now always show up in the My Games section

If you change your My Games filter away from the default, you may notice that in-progress real-time games always show up, even if they don’t match the filter. This should help players who play a mix of multi-day and real-time games, as it makes it easier to find the real-time games you’re in without having to switch back to the default filter.

Other Changes

– The Past Games page now sorts by the date the game ended.
– Your templates are now sorted by how recently you used them to create a multi-player game.
– The ability to override bonuses has been moved to a high level, and some level rewards were re-arranged to make room for it.
– The bomb card now shows a faded “Bomb” over the territory, like the abandon and blockade cards do.
– Ads are automatically disabled when purchasing a membership instead of requiring users to uncheck a box.
– Live-streamers can now create open tournaments for free for the use of live-streaming. Visit https://www.warlight.net/RequestLivestreamPermission to request this.
– Removed links to the old My Games and Open Games pages. They can still be accessed by url for now: https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?MyGames=1 https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?OpenGames=1

WarLight has just been updated to version 3.09.0! This update makes the Bomb Card available to members, and adds an experimental sockets feature.

Bomb Card

The Bomb Card can now be used in general games by members!

The Bomb Card allows you to target an enemy or neutral territory and kill half of the armies on that territory. You can target any territory that’s adjacent to one of your own territories.

If the number of armies is odd, the remaining armies on the territory will round down. So targeting a territory with 5 armies will leave 2, and targeting a territory with 1 army will leave 0. The Bomb Card does not change the ownership of the territory, even when reducing it to 0. Bombs take place after deployments, but before attacks (and also before abandons/airlifts).

Since it kills half of the armies on a territory, it’s most effective when your opponent builds a single large stack of armies. Therefore, when your opponent has a Bomb Card, you should try to keep your armies into separate smaller stacks when possible to reduce its effectiveness. This can have a big impact on a game’s strategy!

If you’re a member, you can create games with the bomb card immediately!

Sockets (experimental)

WarLight now offers an experimental feature to speed up the refresh speed of games.

First, let’s review how games refresh today. While in a game, you can click the Menu button to reveal a Refresh button. Below this refresh button, there’s a green bar that fills up. Once it fills up, the button is silently clicked and your client asks the server if anything has changed in that game. Because of this, there can be a 5-20 second delay between when something happens in a game and when it appears in your browser (such as the game advancing to the next turn, someone chatting, or committing orders.)

In this update, we’ve added the ability to create a two-way link between your client and the server. Whenever something happens in a game, the server will actually tell your client about what happened, so it appears on your screen immediately. This completely eliminates the delay, and also eliminates the need to click the Refresh button manually.

To enable sockets, check the box on this page: https://www.warlight.net/ChangeSockets. Let me know if it works for you or not!

WarLight has just been updated to version 3.08.1! This is a small update which makes a few enhancements and fixes a few bugs. Here’s what’s changed:

– The “defeat a player of level X” achievements have been extended. You can now get achievements for defeating a player of levels up to 63 (previously, they stopped at 52).
– Player’s profiles now show the percentage of achievements they have unlocked. This percent just counts achievements, not trophies (you can get to 100% without any trophies).
– When customizing settings, there’s now a “Pure Skill” tab that makes it easier to design settings that WarLight considers pure skill.
– The real-time ladder now gives 8 minutes of banked time instead of 5, to make up for the lobby no longer being present.
– The map-of-the-week auto game now uses more lengthy boot times.
– The Create Coin Game page now displays links to existing coin auto games.
– Added coin balance as dollars in parenthesis next to it.
– Fixed a bug in games with banking boot times that made that made the auto-booter not boot a player when another player was auto-booted earlier that same turn.
– Fixed a bug that sometimes considered single-player levels won after 0 turns.
– Fixed a bug in the display of the “First turn speed” column of the Players menu. It was adding an extra 0 after the decimal, for example it listed 3.4 seconds at 3.04.
– Fixed a bug that made the rematch button error out with “Invalid teams” if used on a team game where someone declined.
– Fixed a bug with tournament chat timestamps that that made it apply your timezone offset twice, causing the times to appear incorrectly.

WarLight has just been updated to version 3.08.0! This update adds the Bomb Card to coin games, and adds the ability to play coin games at low-wagers.

Bomb Card

For the first time since 2010, WarLight now has a new card!

The Bomb Card allows you to target an enemy or neutral territory and kill half of the armies on that territory. You can target any territory that’s adjacent to one of your own territories.

If the number of armies is odd, the remaining armies on the territory will round down. So targeting a territory with 5 armies will leave 2, and targeting a territory with 1 army will leave 0. The Bomb Card does not change the ownership of the territory, even when reducing it to 0. Bombs take place after deployments, but before attacks (and also before abandons/airlifts).

Since it kills half of the armies on a territory, it’s most effective when your opponent builds a single large stack of armies. Therefore, when your opponent has a Bomb Card, you should try to keep your armies into separate smaller stacks when possible to reduce its effectiveness. This can have a big impact on a game’s strategy!

The Bomb Card is initially available in coin games, but in a future update it will become available for members to use in all games. Check it out today, in either the Small Earth 1v1 coin game, the Earth 1v1 coin game, or the Four Castles FFA coin game!

Show Armies Killed without Analyze

In no-luck games, the attack/transfer dialog now shows how many armies will be killed:

This allows you to easily drag the slider up and down to more easily determine how many armies to attack with, without having to keep checking Analyze.

5 and 10 coin games

For those who want to experiment with coin games, but at a lower amount, WarLight now offers coin games that only cost 5 to 10 coins to join! These games can be found on the Coins tab, or under the Promoted Games section of the multi-player dashboard. These games are only available to players who hold a coin balance of 1,000 or fewer coins.

No more lobby for Ladders and Tournaments

It’s no longer necessary to click Join Game for ladder or tournament games unless you must choose a color. Games where all player’s colors (or alternate colors) are available will just skip the lobby completely.

Misc Changes

– The “Fast” boot option for multi-day games now means 1 day 10 hours (34 hours) instead of 25 hours.
– Updated the minimum version of Flash required to 11.1.
– The “show more promoted games” link has been replaced with a horizontal listing of the templates available. You can click to expand each template.
– If you join an open tournament, it will now state next to it that you have joined it in the Open Tournaments section.
– Added member icons on the leaderboard and tournament players tab.
– In tournament chat, moved the tooltip that displays the message sent date from the message text to just the name of the chatting player.
– Fixed a bug that allowed scenario distributions to be considered pure skill templates, even when they were not evenly matched.
– Fixed a bug that caused the “territory limit” setting to be hidden in games that use custom scenarios.
– Fixed a bug that caused open tournaments to show “Unread chat” immediately after you joined, even if you had read the chat.
– Fixed a bug that allowed you to close the “Begin” dialog with escape.

I just started a Youtube series called 10-Second WarLight games. The idea is to take an entire WarLight game, full of alliances, truces, betrayal and deceit, and condense it down to a 10-second video for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some examples:

Check out all of the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYVtCzKbwqpCCf4I1gfw1Gw/videos.

Which one is your favorite? Be sure to like the ones that are good, so they bubble to the top! More are coming — you can also subscribe if you want notifications when new ones are added.

WarLight was just updated to version 3.07.2! This update improves tournaments a bit more and fixes a few bugs.

Free Public Tournament Creation

It’s now possible to create a public tournament for free when the Open Tournaments list is empty.

The idea behind this is that there should always be at least one tournament available for joining. Instead of creating an auto-tournament like we do for open games, we decided instead to essentially allow the community to create the auto tournament for us. This is better since an auto tournament would have the same settings every time and quickly get boring, whereas the community is great at coming up with new and interesting settings.

You can do this any time the Open Tournaments section is empty. Simply click Create Tournament, Public Tournament, Single Elimination, and note the new option that appears labelled “Entry Fee and Prize, Free to Create”. This will only show up when there are no open tournaments.

Tournaments created with this mode may use any pure-skill settings, must be single-elimination and cannot involve more than 32 players.

Other Changes

– Tournament games now show an icon on the multi-player dashboard that links to the tournament.
– Coin tournament games now show their names in yellow and with a coin icon on the multi-player dashboard.
– Creating real-time tournaments now gives the creator a recommended minimum start date.
– Fixed a bug that made blacklisted players sometimes not show a “B” on the Open Games section of the multi-player dashboard.
– Fixed a bug that made the force-join button appear too early in games with boot times less than 5 minutes.

WarLight has just been updated to version 3.07.1! This update overhauls the cost of coin tournaments and makes a bunch of other small improvements to the site.

Coin Tournament Cost

Based on your feedback, we are changing the cost structure of coin tournaments. The new cost system is much simpler, and causes a drastic reduction in the cost to create large/expensive tournaments.

Here is a table that defines the basic cost structure now for a single-elimination tournament:

Players	Entry fee	Creation cost	Prizes
8	50	110	408
16	40	150	632
32	35	250	1096
64	20	350	1304
128	12	500	1628
256	8	600	2118

Creators also have the option to make their tournament more lucrative by increasing the entry fee by any amount up to 50 coins. Unlike before, this won’t increase the creation cost — they stay fixed.

Other Changes

– Force join time is now never shorter than 5 minutes. This means if you play in a ladder or tournament that uses boot times shorter than 5 minutes, such as the real-time ladder, you won’t be able to be force-joined until the game has existed for 5 minutes.
– Increased the tournament invite limits from 8 times the number of players maxing at 1000, to 13 times the number of players maxing at 2000.
– Off-topic forum posts are no longer shown on the multi-player dashboard.
– Renamed the “Dashboard” page to simply Community, since it’s the default page you see when you click Community. This avoids it being confused with the multi-player dashboard.
– Renamed the single-player main menu page to Level Select.
– The coin leaderboard now goes dark for the final 48 hours instead of the final 24.
– Tournaments now show who created them on the My Tournaments page.
– The cost to create a tournament is now repeated on the final step.
– All players must now validate their email address after reaching level 10.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Manage Friends List page to time out.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Open Tournaments section to show a “+ show more” link when there were no more.
– Fixed a bug that made real-time tournaments advertise their start date incorrectly.
– Fixed a bug that made inviting to a tournament by clan show players who had been invited to that clan but not accepted.
– Fixed a bug that made the footer overlap the content on the clan forum page.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if entering a non-integer into the bulk remove friends tool.

Please let us know what you think!

Yesterday, visitors to WarLight.net may have seen some phantom chat messages appear in their games. There were ten messages that could have appeared:

• Have you heard about the Nuke Card?
• Have you heard about the Time Travel Card coming in the next update?
• Why did you start in that spot, I would have started on the other side.
• Did you hear that?
• Which do you like more, the nuke or time travel card?
• What is your favorite map?
• Huh, Why not?
• I think green or blue was the one! *wink*
• What are you thinking about right now?
• Another day, another game. How about you?

A message would only appear when a game was first loaded, only 25% of the time, and only if there was not any other pending chat in that game. A random message from the list above was chosen. When a message appeared, it only appeared on your local computer — nobody else could see it, and if you refreshed your browser it would not appear again.

Now that April 1st is over, the phantom messages will no longer appear. All messages you see are real messages that were typed by a person.

Happy April fools!

WarLight has just been updated to version 3.07.0! This update adds the ability to play coin tournaments, as well as overhauls a lot of the existing tournament system.

Coin Tournaments

It’s now possible to create and join tournaments that give coin rewards. Coins, for those who are new to WarLight, are redeemable for cash, so this means that you can make real money from WarLight tournaments! Each coin is worth $0.01 USD, and most tournaments will cost only 6 coins to join (6 cents). This gives opportunities for huge winnings! Winning coins from tournaments also counts towards the coin leaderboard, which can help vault you to even more winnings!

Coin tournaments can be created by players, so this also marks the first time we’re allowing players to choose their own settings for coin play. The only restriction is that you must use pure-skill settings since there cannot be randomness in coin games for legal reasons.

Coin tournaments can be single-elimination or double-elimination. Single-elimination tournaments will give 70% of their reward to first place and 30% to second place. Double-elimination tournaments give 65% of their reward to first place, 28% of their reward to second place, and 7% of their reward to third place.

When creating open tournaments, creators have the choice of three modes to use:

1. Entry fee and prize: In this mode, everyone who joins the tournament is charged an entry fee (usually 6 coins). These tournaments have the largest jackpots. Pure-skill settings must be used.
2. Free with prize: In this mode, anyone can join the tournament for free. Coin prizes are still given out, but they will be smaller than the above type. Pure-skill settings must be used.
3. Free without prize: In this mode, anyone can join the tournament for free, and no prizes are given out. We want all open tournaments to have a coin reward to make them exciting, so we hope this option is not used often. This mode only exists for people who really want to use non-pure-skill settings for some reason, and legally we cannot give a coin reward when non-pure-skill settings are used.

Tournament creators also have an option to create tournaments with even bigger than normal jackpots. They can do this by upping the “coin multiplier setting”. For example, setting the multiplier to 2 causes all coin numbers for that tournament to double. For example, the entry fee goes from 6 to 12 and the jackpots are all doubled as well. This is the only case where tournaments will cost more than 6 coins to enter.

In a team coin tournament, the winnings will be split evenly between all members of that team.

Our goal is for most open tournaments have a coin reward, as tournaments should be exciting events that really get your adrenaline pumping. To facilitate this, the tournament creator puts up part of the reward when creating the tournament. It’s easy to experiment and see what the tournament creation options are, simply visit the Create Tournament page, select Public Tournament and you can drag the sliders around and see how it affects the rewards.

New Tournament UI

The tournament pages have all been re-written from scratch, which brings new features and capabilities. Many improvements have been made, so give it a whirl and let me know what you think! Here’s a brief summary of some of the new features:

• In team tournaments, you can hover over a team’s name to see a list of all the players in that team.
• The new tournament pages are pure html/javascript instead of Flash. This means the pages load faster, they’re accessible from your mobile devices through your browser app, you can do things like right-click on a link and select “Open in new tab”, allow Ctrl+F for searching, and copy/paste by selecting works.
• In Round Robin tournaments, the line that connects two players will be shaded green on the winner’s side and red on the loser’s. This makes it easy to see if someone has been winning or losing a lot by how much green/red is near them.
• The Players tab shows how many wins and losses each player has, even for in-progress tournaments.
• When inviting players to a tournament, you can search for people by name, even if they’re not on your friends list. It also allows you to invite based on clan.

Real-time Tournaments

Prior to this update, it was very difficult to get a real-time tournament off the ground. This is a shame, since there are a lots of players who love playing real-time games.

With this update, real-time tournaments are now scheduled for a specific day and time when they are created. They will automatically start at that time if enough players have joined. If not enough players have joined, the tournament will wait 30 minutes to see if enough players join. If 30 minutes pass and the tournament still is not full, it will be cancelled. If a coin tournament is cancelled, any entry fees paid by people who joined it will be refunded.

Misc Changes

– “Fast” for multi-day games now means 25 hours instead of 24. This allows people who play around the same time every day to participate in these games.

I’ve been working on updating the Tournaments section of WarLight. Here’s a sneak peek at a prototype of a single-elimination tournament page:

Here are a few of the highlights:

• The borders you see in this screenshot are resizable, or can be clicked to be collapsed completely. This is a way to give more space for the tournament bracket when you need it, and it’s far more flexible than the current “hide players list” button.
• Clan tags are now shown next to players, and players link to their profile pages
• In team tournaments, you can hover over a team’s name to see a list of all the players in that team
• The page is coded entirely in html/javascript (no Flash). This means you can do things like right-click on a link and select “Open in new tab”, which isn’t possible today. It also means the page will load faster, allow Ctrl+F for searching, copy/paste by selecting, etc.
• In Round Robin tournaments, the line that connects two players will be shaded green on the winner’s side and red on the loser’s. This makes it easy to see if someone has been winning or losing a lot by how much green/red is near them
• The Players tab shows how many wins and losses each player has, even for in-progress tournaments. This makes it easier to see how a tournament is going while it’s in progress, especially round-robins.
• When inviting players to a tournament, you can search for people by name, even if they’re not on your friends list. It also allows you to invite based on clan.

What do you think?