WarLight can now be played on Google Hangouts! Using your webcams and microphones, this allows you to replicate the board-game experience of having everyone in the same room, without actually needing to be there.

It’s completely free, so give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Technical Details

WarLight on Google Hangouts is a slightly scaled back version of WarLight. It supports most game settings, but it’s missing the member-only ones. It can only be used for real-time games, obviously. It supports 8 maps.

This works completely independently from the WarLight.net website. This means you can’t play your WarLight.net games from Google Hangouts, and wins don’t count towards your profile. Its primary goal is to serve as an introduction to WarLight.

Season V will take place on the Battle Islands V map!

This is a slightly bigger map than Medium Earth, plus having fewer wastelands means there will be more room to work with than what we’re used to in Strategic 1v1. The wastelands will be size 15 instead of 10, however. We’ll keep the no-luck settings from last season since they proved to be popular. Next season will probably go back to normal luck.

As a twist, and to offset the larger map, this season will also feature Reconnaissance cards. These are the cards that let you spy on a single territory as well as all adjacent territories for a turn. Choose where you spy wisely!

You can begin practicing in the new settings using this template: multi-player, single-player.

The season will begin on the 21st at midnight GMT (effectively the 20th for those in negative timezones). Good luck!

Whoops! Last night’s Android release had a bug that caused the map to not re-draw correctly when anti-aliasing was enabled. This caused army numbers to not update and other visual artifacts.

I just released an update that fixes this. To fix the issue, you can either disable anti-aliasing in the Settings menu or install the latest version from the wiki which fixes it properly.

Thanks to everyone who reported it!

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.3! This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Linking Territories/Bonuses

It’s now possible to send other players links of territories/bonuses through chat! By holding down the control or shift keys on your keyboard while clicking a territory, its name will be inserted into the chat window:

When another player gets this message, they can click on the territory or bonus name, and the game will show them where it is on their map. This is great for coordinating within teams, especially on maps that players might not be familiar with.

In team games, use the Control key to insert the territory or bonus into team chat, and the shift key to insert it into public chat. In non-team games, you can use either control or shift. For private chat, you can use either button, just make sure that the private chat window is the only thing open so that the game knows where to put it.

Game creators auto-join

When creating a game, WarLight no longer requires you to manually join your own game. This helps alleviate a point of confusion that’s sometimes felt by new players when they don’t realize they need to explicitly tell WarLight they want to join their own game. It was a bit silly since they already told WarLight that they want themselves in the game on the invite screen.

The exception to this is when players don’t get their color. In this case, WarLight will prompt them for their alternative color right after creating the game, and join them to the game once they select their color.

Start Game button and the Auto-start setting

Also related to the auto-join feature comes two new features: In the game lobby, there’s now a “Start Game” button that’s usable by the game creator, and there’s a new setting at game creation named “automatically start once all players join.”

Up until now, all WarLight games have always automatically started once all players join it and all open seats are filled. Now, game creators can override this behavior, and make the game wait until they click the new Start Game button. This useful for team games where the game creator wants to ensure that the teams are even before starting the game.

The Start Game button can also be used before everyone has joined. This will start the game right away, even if there are non-accepted players or unfilled open seats. Using it in this way isn’t really a new feature, it’s just a shortcut to using the add/remove players button and removing all non-accepted players and all open seats.

Displayed Turn Number

The meaning behind the turn number that’s displayed in the upper-left corner has changed. Previously, this number displayed the number of turns that had passed in the game, not the turn number that was being built. This is a bit counter-intuitive to some players, so it’s being changed to represent the latter.

All this means is that it’s now one higher than before. For example, it will show “Turn 1” when a game first starts, and “Turn 2” once one turn has passed.

Misc Changes

– Added icons to buttons and orders.
– Added a new open prerequisite, “prevent WarLight members from joining”. This is useful for creating free-membership tournaments.
– Minor updates were made to Small Earth, Earth, Medium Earth, Double Earth, and Double Medium Earth maps. No changes affected gameplay, this was just for fixing a few small visual problems and renaming a couple territories and one bonus.

Android Changes

Players running WarLight on their Android devices can install this new version via the usual method.

An anti-aliasing feature was added to the mobile client. This smooths out the map and helps it look better, particularly on low-resolution devices or when zoomed out. This defaults on and at 2x, but it can be turned off or increased to 4x in the settings.

If you try anti-aliasing, please let me know how well it works for you, along with what type of device you’re using. Anti-aliasing requires more memory from your device, so if you encounter any slowdowns from the previous release you can try turning it off in the settings.

Other changes follow:

– When the orders list is extended, the map now centers the action in the center of the visible area instead of the center of the screen.
– The screen now waits 3 seconds to dim after animations stop playing instead of dimming immediately.
– Bonus link numbers are now rendered at a higher resolution
– Added settings for invite list mode and e-mail visibility.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.2! This is a major update to the mobile client and a minor update to the website.

Website Changes

The biggest change everyone will notice are that the deploy/attack/confirmation links have been replaced with icons. I never liked the look of the blue underlined links that used to be there, and introducing icons to represent the three phases is useful for the mobile client since it won’t have enough room to display the words in some places.

Here are all of the other changes made to the website in this update:
– When inserting territory/bonus names into the chat box via the shift/ctrl hotkey, the caret now moves to the end of the line.
– Creating a game from a map’s page now skips the map selection step and goes straight to the customize settings step.
– Adjusted the tense of text that’s displayed in the orders list to be consistent. Future tense while you’re building your turn, and past tense when you’re watching a turn play out.
– When instant surrender is enabled, the player popup no longer shows text about who has accepted their surrender.
– Added a link to the map page from the map previewer.
– Added a scrollbar to the single-player level screen for small resolution screens.
– Added a scrollbar to the map design screen for maps with long descriptions.
– The orders, players, and selection areas of the game screen are no longer transparent. The selection panel is now hidden when nothing is selected.
– Fixed a bug that made the number of teams default to 0 when copying a team game’s settings.
– Fixed a bug that occurred when your internet connection died while trying to load a tournament.
– Fixed a bug that made the attack/transfer dialog default to -1 if you tried to issue an attack from a territory with 0 armies.
– Fixed a bug that caused the following settings to not save in single-player saved games: rounding mode, transfer/attack only, percentage attacks.

Mobile Client

When the mobile client was first announced, it was originally stated to be targeted at phones, with a tablet version coming out later. I’ve since changed my mind on this. I’ve decided to combine the tablet and phone functionality onto one release. Now, both phones and tablets will be supported when the mobile client is done.

The last time that registrations were open for iOS devices, it was only open to iPhones and iPod touches. Now that iPads are officially on the radar, members with iPads are welcome to sign up for the alpha preview via this link (EDIT: Link removed – thanks to everyone who signed up!). If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you’re welcome to sign up too.

This release of the mobile client brings a bunch of improvements for tablets. Notably, the map no longer gets completely obscured by the attack/transfer dialog, and instead it pops up in a small window like the browser version does. Other tablet-related improvements have already been seen in previous releases, such as the orders list being able to co-exist on the map screen instead of being accessed by the menu.

Players running WarLight on their Android devices can install this new version via the usual method.

Here’s the full list of changes in this release:

– Added the ability to view game settings.
– Updated the look to match WarLight’s theme.
– Large-screen devices now have three buttons in the lower-right allowing them to switch between deploy, attack, and confirmation phases.
– The orders list no longer defaults extended on large-screen devices.
– The orders list now shrinks the map down if you open it while zoomed all the way out. This allows tablets to play with the full-screen map with the orders list up.
– While the deployment slider is up, the selected territory is now indicated on the map so it’s easy to remember which territory the slider is affecting.
– Increased the sensitivity of opening the orders list so it shouldn’t happen by accident anymore.
– Maps now scale their army numbers up along with other on-map items and bonus links. Maps default to a 20% scale up, but map creators can control this value and some maps are higher.
– Very large-screen devices now include a back button and the game title on the game screen.
– The settings panel can now change your e-mail address, password and name. You can also activate vacations.
– Fixed a bug that made Vote To End selectable when it shouldn’t have been possible.
– Fixed a bug that caused some maps to have an invisible stroke on some parts of some territories.
– Fixed a bug that made private messages you send not show up on your own screen.
– The hardware menu button can now be used as a substitute to clicking the on-screen Menu button.
– The Back button now works properly for pop-ups.
– The game now works on devices that don’t support gl blend modes.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.1. This was just a tiny update to fix a few bugs.

Here’s what changed:

– Fixed a bug that caused the boot time in real-time games to always be highlighted.
– Fixed a bug that caused the boot time highlights to compare with “less than or equal” when the text says “less than”
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you typed fractional numbers into some of the highlight boxes.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you had the same game open in multiple browsers. If you committed orders in browser A, then tried to re-do them in browser B, you’d get an error message.

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.

A new version of WarLight for Android is now available! Members can install this onto their phone or tablet via the usual way.

This release contains a bunch of additions, which brings the mobile client even closer to parity with the browser-based version.

Here’s the full list of changes in this release:

– You can now view your teammate’s orders. Select Menu -> View Players -> select your teammate -> View Teammate Orders.
– Added the receive card dialog. After watching a turn, if you received cards, the game now tells you which cards you got.
– Added “Inspect map” to the game menu, which allows you to see a territory’s connections, bonuses, etc. This is similar to the “More info” link in the web client.
– Added private chat support. Select Menu -> View Players -> select a player -> Send Private Message
– Added the ability to nudge and boot players. Select Nudge/Boot from the game menu.
– Added more settings to the Settings screen such as the ability to change your color and the ability to enable or disable settings such as receive card dialog, attack teammates warning, and skip begin click.
– Added turn indicators to chat.
– Added the ability to view player’s taglines and the small version of player’s profile pics. Viewing full profiles will come in a later release.
– Added the ability to report a player. Select Menu -> View Players -> select the player -> Report
– Added the ability to vote to end games.
– Territories now flash when you deploy to them, issue an attack to or from them, or play a card on them. This helps give feedback that you did something, which is especially helpful when your finger is covering the army number or you have sound disabled.
– The orders list now defaults to extended on large devices such as the iPad and tablets.
– Fixed spacing issues with the chat screen and re-arranged a few things.

WarLight has just been upgraded to 1.13.3! This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

This update contains a lot of additions and improvements to the iPhone and Android clients. The website received a few improvements and bugfixes as well.

Website Changes

– The Map page now has links to start both single and multi-player games using that map.
– The vacations page now shows how many vacations you’ve used this year and how many remain.
– Loading a finished auto-save single-player game now causes it to record the win on your profile. This is useful if you lost internet connection when it tried to record the win the first time.
– Made a small change to the camera so it doesn’t move as often when trying to focus on territories near the edge of the map.
– Added a horizontal scroll bar to the map preview so distributions with long names can be seen entirely.
– The sign-in page now defaults the “keep me signed in” box to checked. This helps prevent session timeout problems.
– Fixed a bug that could cause private messages to duplicate if you hit enter multiple times.
– Fixed a bug that made the “Okay” button of the attack/transfer dialog not work if you first tried to issue an attack of 0 orders.
– Fixed a bug that would cause the “team chat pending” flag to stay stuck on if you declined a game without reading team chat, were removed by the host before you could read the team chat, or if the host swapped you from a team with unread team chat to a team with no team chat at all.
– Fixed a bug that could cause the “team chat pending” flag to stay stuck on if the player’s internet connection was unreliable.
– Fixed a bug that could cause the attack/transfer dialog to think you clicked the okay button when you actually clicked elsewhere.
– Fixed a bug that could cause an error message when changing a development map to testing if it had a newly-created issue preventing it from being changed.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you tried to add someone to your invite list after your session had timed out.

Android Changes

This update contains a lot of improvements and bugfixes for the Android version. As usual, members can install it via the Android Installation wiki page.

– You can now re-arrange orders in the orders list. Simply drag the little up/down arrows.
– The orders list now slides in and out when tapping the widget in the upper-right. You can choose to either tap or slide it out.
– You can now tap orders in the orders list to select them, which also makes the camera focus on them just like in the web client.
– You can now double-tap on an order in the orders list to bring up extra information about it. This shows the same information that the web client shows when hovering your mouse over the order.
– You can now surrender and un-surrender via the game menu.
– Added the Players button to the game menu, which shows the data that the web client normally shows in the lower-right corner. This also allows you to accept and un-accept surrenders.
– Added the teammate warning, which causes the app to ask you if you want to attack or transfer to your teammates if it’s enabled in the Settings tab.
– Added the diplomacy warning, which causes the app to let you know when you try to issue an attack to a player that you can’t attack due to the diplomacy card.
– Improved layout on large-screen devices, such as tablets and iPads. More work is still needed, but it’s better than it was.
– Your device’s screen will no longer fade or go to sleep while game animations are playing.
– The army numbers no longer look as pixellated.
– The automatic zoom now zooms you in slightly further.
– Overhauled the lobby’s players list so it’s more presentable, and now also shows if you’ve blacklisted a player as the web client’s lobby does.
– Fixed numerous bugs that occurred when there was both pending public chat and pending team chat, and you read one type without reading the other.
– Fixed a bug with the camera movements that caused it to wobble a bit.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error when tapping the “No cards” label in some cases.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you locked and unlocked your phone while looking at a game.
– Fixed a bug that caused the map to jump around while deploying at very specific zoom levels.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you typed messages longer than 1024 characters.

Congratulations to Rubik87 for winning Season III! Rubik87 has now won two of the three seasons – very impressive!

Season IV settings

Season IV will be a luck-less version of the Strategic 1v1 template. Its settings can be accessed by this template: multi-player / single-player.

This template’s settings are the same as Strategic 1v1 with the following exceptions:

• Rounding mode is set to Straight Round (see previous blog post if you don’t know what this is)
• Luck modifier is set to 0%
• Move Order is set to cyclic

With these settings, there’s no luck involved in combat at all. It’s a good idea to learn your kill tables so you know what to predict when sending your armies out. Here’s some of the more important ones:

• 3v2 always wins, leaves a 2 on the catptured territory
• 4v2 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
• 6v4 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
• 2v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
• 1v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
• 1v1 always loses (kills 0 and loses 1)

Ranking Changes

A couple tweaks have been made to the ranking system from Season III.

The biggest change has to do with the way players are matched up. In Season III, players were given games against players with similar ratings to them. This ends up making players move very slowly up or down the ladder once they get established.

To counter this, the matchmaking algorithm will now look at your win/loss record in that season in addition to your rating. Your rating will be adjusted by 80 points for each win/loss over/under an even record ((wins – losses) * 80). This adjusted rating isn’t displayed anywhere, rather it’s used when determining who you’ll be matched against. This will help players who get a late start to the season but win a lot of their early games, helping them get matched against tougher opponents until they start losing.

When thinking about this change, it’s important to remember that the rating itself is already affected by your win/loss record. Therefore, it’s not fair to say that your win/loss record wasn’t taken into account for matchmaking in Season III. It’s fair to say that it’s weighted more heavily for matchmaking in Season IV.

The other change that’s being made has to do with the way that low-games penalty is applied. It’s always been the case that finishing a season with fewer than 20 games gives you a penalty of 40 points per game. This rule exists to ensure players can’t cheat by joining a season very late and getting a couple high-ranking wins to walk away with the #1 rank (or a very high rank.)

In Season III, this was implemented by simply adding 40 points for each finished game, win or loss, up to 20. This has the unintended side-effect of making players who finish games faster get a temporarily higher rating than players who finish them slower. Since your rating is used for matchmaking, this in essence was a penalty to slower players. This is being corrected for Season IV – the points will be added as each game is created, not when they’re finished.