Wastelands

Wastelands are neutral territories with a high amount of armies, compared to the rest of the map. These effectively become "dead" territories that won't get taken down. This serves to change the gameplay around. For example, if a wasteland appears at a choke-point it could drastically change the way the game plays out in that region of the map. It is each player's job to interpret how the wasteland will impact the game and to adjust their strategy accordingly.

Since bonuses with large wastelands are generally undesirable for capturing, sometimes the entire bonus is said to be a wasteland or to be wastelanded.

There are three possible ways to form wastelands.

Randomly distributed wastelands

When a game creator adds wastelands in the settings to their game, WarLight will randomly distribute neutrals around before populating the rest of the map. Typically, the game creator will specify a very large size for the wastelands.

The game creator can control the number of wastelands that will be distributed as well as the size of the wastelands. In rare cases, WarLight will generate fewer wastelands than requested since it must ensure that there is enough room for all players to get at least one territory to start with.

Wastelands created by players

Wastelands can also be created by players, but, as wastelands are by definition neutral, they have to become neutral territories.

This most often happens by using the Abandon card or the Blockade card. These cards will not only make a single territory neutral, but they will also multiply the armies on the territory by a predefined factor. You can use this on a choke-point to protect your territories on the other side. The downside is that you won't be able to deploy armies on the wasteland.

Players can also create wastelands by getting booted or surrendering (while not turning into an AI). All their territories will turn neutral, but the number of armies on each territory will remain. That can either be a bad or a good thing for another player. The bad thing is that the territories that had large numbers of armies on them (typically the ones at the front) will become very hard to capture, they will become wastelands. The good side is that once you enter the inner lands of the booted/surrendered player, the territories will often have one army on them each. On most games, this is fewer than the neutral territories that have never been captured before, as they are typically two armies each. However, these territories are not considered wastelands.

Wastelands created by the host in a custom scenario

The least common type: if the host is a member (or if he is making a game on a map he made himself), he can create a custom scenario for the game. He will be able to tell for all territories who they will belong to at the start of the game, and how many armies they start with. If they choose to make a neutral territory start with a lot of armies, this will be a wasteland. With these custom wastelands, the host can do all kinds of things. He can make two teams start on the opposite sides of a "wall" of wastelands, or he can make certain parts of the map unreachable, by surrounding them with wastelands.