Warzone Blog

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.36.0! This update begins a UI styling refresh, and also adds other features and other improvements to the game and app. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website at warzone.com and on the standalone clients. This update will come to the Android and iOS apps in the coming week or two.

Style Refresh

This update kicks off a UI styling refresh that aims to make the game look nicer. This update specifically focuses on the Multi-Player tab of the main menu in the Unity app, however some of the changes made for this page also affect other pages throughout the game.

This page was chosen since I felt it had the most room for improvement. Here’s a before-and-after, showing how the style was updated for this page:

In future updates, more pages will get style refreshes. Let me know what you think!

Private Game Chat Improvements

When opening a list of players to private chat with, it now shows a small icon if you’ve talked to that player before. This is especially helpful in large games where you can’t remember which players you were chatting with in the past.

Additionally, it sorts the players you’ve chatted with to the top of the list, and also colors the buttons to each player’s color.

Double-tap Inspect Information Dialog

A change has been made to the way that inspecting territories in Warzone Classic works. Inspection mode is when you select the magnifying lens in the top left corner and then click a territory or bonus, or when clicking a territory/bonus while viewing history or after committing.

With this update, when inspecting territories/bonuses, a single tap now shows you the arrows and a double-tap pops up the info dialog.

This makes it easier to inspect territory connections without the info dialog getting in the way. When you actually need it, tap twice.

Monday AMA

This Monday, May 19th at 11am PDT, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other Changes

• All: Increased chat raffle sizes.
• All: Raffle bot now spews random Warzone facts after every raffle.
• Classic: In no-fog commerce games, the amount of gold held by each player is now shown in the players panel. It could be seen before anyway by inspecting the orders list.
• Classic: Non-members can now join mega games with mods even if the game creator does not use the “non-members can join” checkbox.
• Classic: Inflation-adjusted price of yearly membership to $19.99. This only affects new subscriptions — existing subscriptions will continue their subscription at the lower price.
• Classic: Fixed copy-game-at-turn in cyclic move order games so it maintains the move order at that turn.
• Classic: Fixed “FindPlayer could not find player” error in single player games.
• Classic: Fixed clan wars page on very narrow screens.
• Classic: Fixed the error message when two players join the same slot of a custom-scenario invite-by-code game.
• Classic: Fixed “Finish vs AI” feature on games with lots of special units.
• Classic: Fixed tournament prizes not showing in game settings dialog.
• Idle: When super ascending, idle now remembers which artifacts you chose to keep, and pre-selects those artifacts on your next super ascend. This reduces the number of clicks for players who super ascend often.
• Idle: When clicking “Territories” to see all territories in a bonus, it now says how many of them you control and sorts ones you’re missing at the top of the list.
• Idle: Fixed advancement buttons not being enabled if you had the advancement tab open prior to winning a level.
• Idle: Fixed sync issues between devices.
• Idle: Fixed the “change ad benefit” button being visible in battles and challenge levels.
• Unity: When viewing a discussion topic like a forum post or feature request, in addition to up-voting or down-voting you can now also un-vote back to neutral.
• Website: Merged javascript files for increased performance and reliability.
• Website: Fixed zoom buttons on tournament pages.
• Babylon: Fixed page coming up black after transitioning from lobby to a game.
• Mods: Transferring or airlifting a special unit to a teammate now updates the unit’s owner.
• Mods: Added new tags: Special Units, Cards, Random.
• Mods: Fixed not being able to assign owner of a special unit to neutral.
• Mods: Fixed deployment not updating properly if a mod changed orders from Client_GameOrderCreated
• Mods: Fixed Feature.png not showing correctly while mod was in development.
• API: The GameFeed API now returns the x/y coordinates of each territory in a map.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.35.0! This update adds new features and makes improvements to the game. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website at warzone.com and on the standalone clients. This update will come to the Android and iOS apps in the coming week or two.

Idle Premium

Warzone Idle has a new purchasable upgrade that gives a whole slew of new features and enhancements to Idle:

• Ad-watching benefits are permanently enabled. You’ll never have to watch an advertisement again! The ad-watch benefits are additional army camp production, additional smelter speed, additional crafter speed, or additional ore production.
  One of these four benefits will always be enabled for premium customers, and you can switch between the four at any time instantly. They’ll also work on platforms that don’t support ads, like the website and standalone client.
• Free coin wheel spin every day, without ever watching an advertisement and without needing to win a Warzone Classic game! Like the above benefit, this also enables the coin wheel on platforms without ads like the website and standalone client.
• You get a tank in your idle levels! You’ll see your tank appear on the territory you start on in the level. The tank can move to an adjacent territory once per hour, and whenever it moves onto an unconquered territory it instantly conquers that territory at zero army cost. This is a great way to take down those stubborn big territories.
  You can also queue up tank movement so it can move on its own while you’re idle. Time warping can help you move the tank even faster.
  You can also name your tank, to give it a personal charm as it tears your enemy to shreds.
• +12 hours max idle time
• Hospitals upgrade 100 times faster
• Mortars load instantly
• Your artifact dig crews can dig for artifacts 20% faster
• +2000 free Warzone coins (one-time)
• +5 of EVERY Warzone Power (one-time)
• Access to the Standalone Client for the ultimate play experience on Windows, Mac, or Linux

Idle Premium is available for $9/month. Check it out at warzone.com/Idle/Premium!

Mod Browser

Warzone Classic now has a completely revamped page for browsing through Warzone mods! The new mod browser can be seen at warzone.com/Mods or by going to Multi Player -> Create Game -> Change Mods.

The new mod browser can filter, sort, and search through mods. You can filter on tags, whether mods support tournaments/mega games, or you can search for mods by name or by creator. You can also sort mods, for example if you want to see newly released mods or newly updated mods.

Mod creators can also now put an icon next to their mod to help show it off.

Each mod has a view button that brings you to a new mod page, which presents the mod’s details in a much more cleanly than the old mod info dialog did, and also lets mod authors show a larger image to show off their mod.

Mods in Mega Games

Mega games (games with 41-400 players), now support some mods! This has been a common request from the players, so I’m pleased to finally allow it.

Note that the mod list is initially limited only to mods that show great performance (execution speed). The reasoning for this is to ensure that mega games don’t crash or time out, as if mods try to iterate over all territories or all players too much they can hit the timeout limit which would break the game. Breaking a game with 400 players is something I need to work hard to avoid as that would be a bad experience for everyone involved. Therefore, we need to be careful about which mods we enable for mega games. At this initial release, the mods usable in mega games are:

• AI’s don’t play cards
• AI’s don’t deploy
• Bomb Card+
• Buy Cards
• Essentials
• Gift Armies 2
• Late Gifts
• Private Notes
• Randomized Wastelands
• Read Game Settings
• Safe Start
• Spaced Out Starts
• Transport Only Airlift
• Where Am I?

These were chosen by first looking at the most popular mods that are used in games with lots of players, and then filtering out mods that were very slow in those games. More mods will be added once we have more data on how well mods perform in mega games.

Quickmatch Ratings Start at 100

Quickmatch ratings now start at 100 instead of 0. This applies to new players entering Quickmatch for the first time, or whenever a new template unlocks.

The goal of this change is to help matchmaking match players more appropriately. Prior to this update, since ratings can’t go below 0, very bad players or players that get booted frequently can end up staying at or near 0 for a long time. Then new Warzone players end up being more likely to get matched up against a player who will just get booted, which isn’t a great new player experience.

By having the initial rating be higher than the minimum rating, this creates separation between new players and bad players.

Sunday AMA

This Sunday, April 20th at 11am PDT, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other Changes

• All: Obsolete achievements are now marked as obsolete in their descriptions. Obsolete achievements are old ones which aren’t required to get to 100% and won’t ever show up in Available Achievements. Being marked more explicitly helps avoid player confusion on why they see achievements on other people’s profiles that don’t show up on their Available Achievements section.
• Idle: The auto artifact swapper will now swap in Mercenary Discount artifacts when opening the mercenary dialog, instead of waiting until the purchase was done, so you get the discounted cost shown to you.
• Idle: More syncing and performance improvements.
• Mods: Territory annotations now show in a faded form on the map when the order is not selected.
• Mods: Fixed a bug that caused an error if a mod sent a custom message without having a custom message handler, and at least one other mod in the game did have a custom message handler.
• Mods: Fixed annotation font sizes.
• Mods: Fixed guids so they’re consistently converted to strings on different platforms.
• Mods: Fixed multi-attack games assuming no special units exist if commanders were turned off.
• Classic: The settings dialog now explains the icons in more detail, such as explaining what rounding modes are.
• Classic: Fixed a bug that prevented copying games with random teams.
• Classic: Fixed coin details in the settings dialog in games with prizes but no entry fees.
• Classic: Fixed “redo orders is null” error.
• Website: Added a border to tooltips.
• Website: Fixed slight alignment issue in the analyze no-luck attack dialog.
• Website: Fixed attack/transfer dialog not using the newly entered army number if you clicked before releasing the army number key.
• Website: Fixed memory leaks.
• Standalone: Fixed a bug that caused errors on Linux.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.34.1! This update fixes a bunch of bugs, upgrades some software, and adds some new features. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the Warzone website. This update will roll out to the standalone client, iOS, and Android more slowly than normal because it upgrades the version of Unity.

Changes

• Idle: Completely overhauled the way Warzone Idle syncs with the server, with the goal to make idle syncing issues a thing of the past. The goal of this overhaul is to completely fix issues people have had when they switch their idle from one device to another or when playing idle on multiple devices at a time.
• Idle: Clan/ladder active rewards now show their expiration date in the modifiers dialog.
• Idle: The modifier dialog now indicates how many super ascends you have for each super ascend effect.
• Idle: Fixed the artifact swapper so it doesn’t cause an error when it tries to equip a higher rarity artifact than one you already have equipped.
• All: Fixed “x players queued” number when viewing started clan war timeslots that contained free wins.
• All: Fixed templates that are changed to different maps from showing up on the original map’s popular template page.
• All: Fixed clan war free wins not showing up right away in the current day’s point estimate.
• All: Fixed profile pages showing fractional boot percentages.
• Classic: The settings dialog now combines base boot time and banked boot time into one item instead of separating them.
• Classic: Trying to make a copy of a game you aren’t in now prompts to confirm you know that you won’t be in the copy.
• Classic: Improved the look of the “you must use cards” label.
• Classic: Slightly reduced the size of the hourglass icon on the top bar.
• Unity: Your device will no longer auto-sleep when waiting for a quickmatch game to start, clan war timeslot to start, or idle battle to start.
• Unity: Updated Unity version from 2022.3.33f1 to 6000.0.43f1.
• Unity: Fixed not being able to change your player color while IAP was unavailable.
• Website: The map page now sets its url in the address bar.
• Website: If you’re a member, www.warzone.com/Membership now shows the expiration date of your membership.
• Website: Fixed input boxes so they can vertically scroll, such as when replying to a feature request.
• Babylon: Fixed the map scrolling when you dragged the mouse out of a dialog and onto the map, like the deployment slider.
• Babylon: Fixed a bug that caused an error when loading a game where a custom special unit was involved in an attack.
• Babylon: Fixed getting an improper error message when trying to access a map that isn’t tessellated yet
• Mods: Added territory annotations to GameOrderEvent, GameOrderCustom, and GameOrderPlayCardCustom. They can now display messages on top of territories on the map when those orders are selected.
• Mods: Added Client_CreateGame hook so that mods can validate settings before a game is created by the player.
• Mods: Added JumpToActionSpotOpt to GameOrderCustom and GameOrderPlayCardCustom just like GameOrderEvent already had.
• Mods: Added MinWidth / MinHeight parameters for layout elements. MinWidth cannot be greater than 60.
• Mods: Added Alignment property to Labels to allow for aligning text both vertically and horizontally.
• Mods: Added ability for custom cards with durations to set their expire timing, either start-of-turn or end-of-turn.
• Mods: Fixed a bug that caused stack traces to not show up in mod errors in some cases in Unity.
• Mods: Fixed fog mods on No-Fog games from giving errors.
• Mods: Fixed skipping of deploy orders in Client_GameOrderCreated making the deployment status report incorrectly.
• Mods: Fixed copying a game that used a mod that used the Server_Created hook.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.34.0! This update adds new features and improvements. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website at warzone.com and on the standalone clients. This update will come to the Android and iOS apps in the coming week or two.

Copy Game At Turn

Warzone members can now create a multi-player game based off of an existing multi-player game at a specific turn. This is a long-time feature request, so I’m pleased to finally make it a reality!

To access this feature, open the settings menu for any finished multi-player game and click the template button. If you’re a member, there will be a new button that says “copy game from a specific turn”. Click that button, enter a turn number, and a new game will be created where all territories, cards, and gold (if commerce game) of the new game will start at the state of the turn number you entered.

This is useful if you want to create a “what if” scenario — try playing out the game from the same state with the same players but making different orders.

Another use can be to rewind time for a friendly game. For example, if a player accidentally gets booted, the players can vote-to-end the game, create a new replacement game from a few turns ago, then everyone can join it and resume from the earlier turn.

New Quickmatch Template

Prior to this update, Quickmatch was limited to 40 templates, which are determined based on player’s votes. When you play Quickmatch you’ll unlock votes that can be used to influence which templates are available in Quickmatch.

With this update, the number of templates allowed in Quickmatch has been increased from 40 to 41. This 41st template is special — instead of picking the template with the 41st most votes as usual, it instead picks a random template between 41 and 60. This template then gets locked in for a week, after which it will pick a new one for the next week. It uses a weighted random based on the number of votes the template has, so if template A has twice as many votes as template B, then template A is twice as likely to be chosen.

The goal with this is to showcase more templates to Quickmatch players and help ensure that the template list does not get stale. If you like the template that gets picked, you can vote for it, and if enough people do that it will make its way into the top 40 so it won’t get replaced when its week is up.

This is not intended to be a permanent change but rather it’s an experiment. I still have yet to determine the best method for Quickmatch voting. Let me know what you think!

Improved Settings Dialog

The “summary dialog” and “full settings dialog” have now merged into a single dialog, now just called the “settings dialog.” It’s also been cleaned up a bunch and re-organized to be more cohesive and clear for both new and experienced players to read and understand. Commonly-used fields, such as the link to the game, are now easier to find for new players.

The settings dialog starts off in a shortened form and still has a “view full settings” button to expand it to see all the nitty gritty details, like before. However, now, once you click “view full settings” this will be remembered on your local device, so the next time you open the settings dialog for any game it will default to the expanded mode. For experienced players who always want the full settings, this saves you a click every time you open the settings dialog.

Hotkey for Picks

When viewing history of a manual distribution game, you can use the “view picks” button to view what each player selected. With this update, if you’re on a device a keyboard such as a PC, you can now also use the number keys on your keyboard to more easily switch between the picks instead of having to click the button. The “0” hotkey will clear all picks so you can see the map cleanly.

This uses the same hotkeys as switching perspectives, so it should be very intuitive.

Other Changes

• Classic: Future Clan Rumble games are no longer practice games and therefore now award points/achievements. They also let you hold more cards and gift cards were removed.
• Classic: Increased size of legend in youtube-exported videos.
• Classic: Fixed a bug that could make army numbers appear wrong if you changed a player’s color while watching a turn play out.
• Classic: Fixed income breakdown from including deployed armies when you select it from the lower-right players list.
• All: Slightly lowered font size of “average game length” labels.
• All: When searching the forum, the input box now focuses by default to save you a click.
• All: Map pages now specify at which level they unlock.
• All: Minimum territory count for maps going public is now 20 instead of 30.
• All: Fixed “x players queued” number when viewing started clan war timeslots that contained free wins.
• All: Fixed sorting by resolved date in the feature request forum.
• Standalone: Fixed tooltips appearing while map is animating into position.
• Website: Fixed browser url briefly showing an invalid url when clicking the Idle button.
• Website: Fixed /Notifications/ reload loop.
• Website: Fixed some mods not having their UI laid out properly.
• Babylon: Added 3d mode as an official setting on the website under Account Settings.
• Babylon: Fixed error message that’s displayed if WebGL is disabled in your browser so it explains that you need to enable WebGL.
• Babylon: Fixed more army number overlap issues in attack animations.
• Mods: Mods can now create radio buttons.
• Mods: Lua errors in the browser now give stack traces with line numbers in the mod-crashed dialog.
• Mods: Client_PresentPlayCardUI now gives mods the ability to close the cards dialog.
• Mods: GameOrderEvents that modify fog now say so in the event’s tooltip.
• Mods: If the auto booter can’t boot a player in a game due to a broken mod for 5 days straight, the game will now automatically end.
• Mods: Fixed Client_GameOrderCreated not being able to read territory picks in manual distribution games.
• Mods: Fixed WL.enumtype.ToString() functions.
• Mods: Fixed Client_PresentPlayCardUI not registering Mod and UI hooks if it was called before other client hooks.
• Mods: Fixed an error if you set number of card pieces to 0 or negative.
• Mods: Fixed GameOrderAirliftResult.Results throwing an error instead of returning nil when there are no results yet.
• Mods: Fixed allowing GameOrderAttackTransferResult.ActualArmies to be set to a negative number.
• Mods: Fixed “can’t transfer to a neutral” error that occurred when a mod resurrected a failed transfer.
• API: In the SetMapDetails API, specifying a color is now optional when making a bonus.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.33.0! This update adds a new clan competition called Clan Rumble as well as a bunch of other improvements. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website at warzone.com and on the standalone clients. This update will come to the Android and iOS apps in the coming week or two.

Clan Rumble

A new on-going clan competition kicks off with this update which is called Clan Rumble! Clan Rumble is a mega game with up to 400 players that any clanned player may join, up to a maximum of 5 players from each clan.

Clan-mates will be automatically teamed together when the game starts.

The winning team will win 3000 coins and glory for their clan!

You can join the first one at this link. The game will start in 4 days, even if it’s not full, so join soon! The next game in the series will be created 60 days after this one starts. Good luck!

Custom Fog

Mod creators now have the ability to control the fog levels of individual territories in Warzone Classic games. Mods have a lot of flexibility in what they can do, as they can either increase or decrease visibility of territories, and choose exactly which players the changes apply to (even teammates can have different visibility if mod authors choose to do so).

I’ve published an example mod to show how it can be used call the Smoke Bomb Card mod. When you play a Smoke Bomb, you can target a territory, and for the next turn that territory and all adjacent territories will be fogged for all players. It’s kind of like a reverse reconnaissance card.

This has been a frequent request from the mod making community, so I’m excited to see what they create!

Ask Fizzer Anything

This Monday, February 17th at 11am PST, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other Changes

• Classic: Mega games that are in-progress now show the number of active players on the My Games page, in the format “active players / total players”
• Classic: Seasonal ladder length increased from 60 to 65 days.
• Classic: When exporting a game to YouTube, it now includes a legend showing each player’s name and color in the top right corner.
• Classic: When you get auto-committed in a multi-day game, you’ll now get a popup the next time you open the game explaining that you were auto-committed. This helps new players understand what is going on, such as why all of their armies may not have been deployed.
• Classic: Fixed armies/turn figure displayed for overridden bonuses in bonus popup after clicking “View map” in the settings dialog.
• Classic: Fixed overlapping army numbers in youtube-exported videos.
• Classic: Fixed names sometimes being blank in 3v3s in youtube-exported videos.
• Classic: Fixed the AI trying to move its commander even if it doesn’t control the territory the commander is on (which can happen with mods)
• Mods: Fixed a bug that could make a generic warzone error instead of a mod failed error if you tried to set a property on a destroyed object (for example, Button’s SetInteractable)
• Mods: Added GameStanding.IncomeMods so that mods can override incomes on the first turn of a game.
• All: When exporting a game to YouTube while at your youtube-video-upload limit, you now get a friendly message explaining that you’re at your limit.
• All: The “open groups” page no longer filters groups you’re already in.
• All: Retired map of the week.
• Unity: Fixed allowing multiple idle tabs if you set your default open screen to idle.
• Idle: Fixed Army Camp Boost artifact so it now affects draft size when swapped in with the Auto Artifact Swapper.
• Idle: Fixed purchasing a rare artifact from saying it was epic.
• Website: Fixed the “hide lottery game” button from showing on the Filtered Open Games page.
• Babylon: Major performance improvements
• Babylon: Fixed overlapping attack arrow visual glitch.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.32.0! This update adds a whole bunch of features that were requested by the community on the Feature Request forum. In fact it’s a new record for number of feature requests being completed in one update. This blog post describes what’s changed.

5.32.0 is live now on the Warzone website and the standalone clients. This update will be coming to iOS and Android in the coming week or two.

Custom Cards

It’s now possible for mods to add custom cards to a game. The goal is to make custom cards integrate seamlessly into the game just as if they were a built-in card. Mods get full control over what the cards will do, so get ready for some wild ideas from the modding community!

• Custom cards show up the cards dialog right alongside all the other cards for the game.
• Mods can upload their own image to define what the card looks like in the cards dialog.
• Mods get complete control exactly what happens when the card is played. They can optionally present UI and ask the player for more details about the card. (like blockade and many other cards do)
• Custom cards are distributed just like any other card — for capturing a territory. Or a mod can override this and distribute them however they’d like.
• Custom cards can configured by the game creator just like any other cards (number of pieces, minimum pieces per turn, etc.) Or mods can override this and configure them however they’d like to.

I can’t wait to see what the modding community will come up with. The possibilities are endless!

Maps Page Shows Popular Templates

When viewing a map’s information page, Warzone now shows the 5 most popular templates that have been played using that map. This is a helpful way to discover templates you might enjoy.

Additionally, map pages show an approximate number of multi-player games that have been played on each map, to help players gauge the map’s popularity.

Mini Cards Update While Watching

When watching a Warzone classic turn play, the small card icons that appear on the top of the screen now accurately reflect the point in time you’re watching, rather than always reflecting the latest state of the game. This is helpful to avoid spoilers. Prior to this update, you could tell if you got a card piece during a turn before watching the turn.

Show Selected Orders on Mobile

When watching a Warzone classic turn play with the orders list collapsed (as is common on mobile), the currently playing order’s text will now be shown in the upper right corner. This is helpful for knowing what is going on while watching a turn, for example if a player is eliminated, you’ll now get a chance to see the name of the player who is eliminated rather than just hearing the elimination sound and not knowing what the sound meant.

Average Template Durations

In Clan Wars and Quickmatch, the duration of real-time multi-player games is now measured and displayed alongside the template. For example it may say that Small Earth Auto Dist takes X minutes on average to play whereas Strategic 1v1 takes Y minutes on average.

These numbers are automatically calculated from actual games played on that template. Data will only be shown if Warzone has at least 300 games to sample, to ensure its accuracy.

Numbered Attacks

When you make more than 30 attacks in a Warzone classic game, the orders panel in the upper right now displays numbers next to each one (1, 2, 3, etc.). This is helpful for coordinating with teammates in large games, such as if you want to tell them that your attack to Brazil is your 22nd attack, you no longer need to manually count them.

Mobile Start-up Screen

iOS and Android users can now configure in the settings what screen they’d like to see the app default to when they first open it. They can choose from single-player, multi-player, or idle.

This is an enhanced version of the old setting that used to exist, and it’s now back by popular demand! This new version is better though, since the old version only allowed toggling between multi-player and idle, and the old one defaulted to idle.

Idle Dig Sites

When opening the Dig Sites dialog in Warzone Idle, it now shows additional details about each dig site so you get an idea of what rarity options you’ll have before opening the dig site. This helps you find the dig site you’d like to when you’re on a large level with lots of dig sites.

Hide Inactive Graphs

When using the graphs in the statistics dialog, a new checkbox lets you hide all inactive players. For large games, this can be very helpful in filtering down the graph to the most relevant games as it can be time-consuming to un-check each inactive player by hand.

New Mod Hooks

Mods now have options to hook into the client whenever a player enters an order, or whenever a player commits their turn. This gives mods additional opportunities to create better user experiences than before.

Ask Fizzer Anything

This Monday, January 20th at 11am PST, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other

• Classic: Open games now display a small “O” next to the player’s name in the player popup dialog if that player joined the game via an open seat. This now makes it possible to know if a player was directly invited to a game or if it was an open game after the game started.
• Classic: In the statistics graphs, moved the “check/uncheck all” and “group teams” buttons to their own row so that the dialog is more usable on small screens.
• Classic: When watching a turn in a commerce game, it now skips the “received gold” order.
• Classic: The seasonal ladder’s boot time was adjusted. 12 hours was moved from base time to banked time, to help ensure games finish before the end of the season.
• Classic: Fixed the color of the box on the multi-player page of very dark player colors, such as Smoky Black, so the icon on top of the box is always visible.
• Classic: Fixed a bug when joining a game in the lobby that could present a blank list of colors to choose from.
• All: Added ability to upvote/downvote group forum posts and threads.
• All: Added ability to watch group forum threads.
• All: Clan war free win behavior reverted to pre-5.31.
• All: When listing players in a group with more than 50 members, it now pages the players to keep the page running fast.
• All: Fixed a bug that could make pending groups get duplicated in the list.
• All: Fixed groups announcing when a moderator revokes a pending invite.
• Unity: Fixed a bug that made forum links open in browser instead of the app.
• Unity: Fixed a bug that made “plays from” get duplicated on profile pages.
• Website: The map page was converted to use UJS.
• Website: Fixed full setting labels being left-aligned instead of right-aligned.
• API: Added clan wars API.
• API: Fixed the CreateGame allowing templates with the “non members can use mods” flag.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.31.0! This update adds a new major feature called groups, as well as a bunch of smaller features and improvements. This blog post describes what’s changed.

5.31.0 is live now on the Warzone website, and this update will be coming to iOS, Android, and the Standalone clients in the coming week or two.

Groups

Warzone Groups are kind of like a clan in that they allow players to chat and socialize together. However, unlike clans, you can be in multiple groups at a time, groups have no size limit, and groups are completely free.

When you create or join a group, you’ll get access to the chat room for that group, which will appear right next to the Global and Clan chat rooms that exist today. You also get access to a private forum that only members of that group can access.

You can access groups on the Warzone website under the Community drop-down, or on the mobile app by clicking the head button in the top right corner. Here, any player can join or create a group for free.

When you make a group, you’ll be the owner of that group. You can promote any player to be a moderator of the group, or even promote players to be a group owner alongside yourself.

When you make a group, you give the group a name, pick a color for it, and specify a few other creation settings. The groups settings can be changed at any time in the future (even its name) by a group owner or moderator.

Groups can either be open, meaning that any player can browse and join it via the Open Groups button, or closed, meaning players have to be invited to the group to be allowed in. Any moderator or owner can invite players to a group. Warzone makes it easy to invite players by name, from your friends list, from a clan, or from any player’s profile page. If you invite a player to join your group, they’ll get a notification in via the envelope button in the upper right with an option to accept or decline the group invite (assuming they’re running app version 5.31.0 or newer, which is required to interact with groups).

If a group owner leaves the group, another player will be picked to be the new owner. If there are any moderators, they’ll get picked first, otherwise a random player in the group will be picked as the new owner. This way, groups always have an owner.

Why use Groups?

Groups can be used for many purposes, such as:

• Friends that want to keep in touch even if they’re not in the same clan
• Players that enjoy the same type of games, such as diplomacy games
• Players that want to talk about specific features, such as map creation or mod development
• Players that are in a game together and want to discuss the game, such as a team that formed in a diplomacy game
• Players that want to have real-time discussion about Warzone’s regulated topics such as politics

The possibilities are endless. Ultimately it will be up to you, the Warzone community, to determine how groups are used. This update is just the first step in groups, and I hope to see them evolve over time. Feel free to use the Feature Requests forum to request new group features as you see them. The idea for groups themselves was a feature request posted to this forum!

What about Discord?

I know many players already use Discord for this purpose, and that’s totally fine. If Discord is working for you, please continue using it. Warzone’s chat room will never be better than Discord, but I know some people don’t like or aren’t able to install a separate app, don’t like switching between apps, or they like the integration that comes with being able to open the Warzone profile of every person they interact with.

Free Idle Arena Wins

If you start searching for an arena opponent, but no game is started after about a minute, you’ll now win the arena and get the reward without playing a game. This helps reward people who are trying to find matches but aren’t able to.

No-Split Delete Button

When playing Warzone Classic games in no-split mode, there’s now a “delete” button in the attack/transfer dialog. This makes it much easier to delete attacks if you’ve changed your mind, since previously you had to search for that order in the orders list to delete it.

Forum Search

The forums now have a search feature! It’s a pretty basic search, but it’s better than nothing. When viewing a forum you’ll now see a search button added to the top that lets you type in a search term and return forum threads that contain your search term.

Clan Wars improvements

Clan wars is now slightly more generous in giving out free wins. Previously, players only got free wins if none of their clan-mates queued on the same template in the same timeslot. Now, players will get a free win even if their clan-mates are queued on the same template. It is limited to one free win per clan per template in each timeslot.

When viewing the list of timeslots in a clan war, Warzone now properly sorts the latest timeslots to the top.

When viewing all clan war games, Warzone now properly sorts the free wins under the day in which they occurred.

Viewing Cards

In a Warzone classic game, when using the “View Opponent’s cards” button, Warzone now shows you all cards on one page instead of making you click a button next to each opponent’s name to look at their cards one at a time. This makes it much easier to view at a glance what is going on with everyone’s cards.

Ask Fizzer Anything

This Monday, December 23rd at 11am PST, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other Changes

• Classic: In the no-luck analyze dialog, the number you selected is now highlighted green.
• Classic: Added a “Game Start” line in the chat so it’s easy to see what chat was sent before the game started versus after.
• Classic: Fixed the turn numbers displayed in chat, they were displaying 1 too high before.
• Classic: Fixed the “random slots” game creation option so it can’t be used along with “let players pick territories” since that combination could result in errors when starting a game. Now, the random slots option is presented as a third distribution option when custom scenarios are checked, and the options were re-worded to make them clearer. To make this page cleaner, the custom scenario option was also moved to the top of the page, since the text below it depends on what is selected for custom scenario.
• Classic: Fixed invite-by-code games not allowing more than 24 players to join.
• Classic: Fixed deleted accounts showing up on quickmatch leaderboard.
• Classic: Fixed showing your current ladder rating in the end-game dialog of seasonal ladder games (it used to say “unknown”)
• All: Fixed forum post creation allowing players to type in more characters into the subject than the subject allows.
• Idle: Fixed challenges not showing as completed until the page was refreshed.
• Website: Fixed large images in feature request forum so they’re now sized down to the width of the page to be fully visible. Only fixed for posts created/edited after this update.
• Website: Fixed a bug that sometimes made the fog texture not appear in Firefox.
• Unity: Updated the Idle icon on the main menu so its style matches the others around it.
• Unity: Fixed back button/gesture causing all tabs to go back instead of just the current tab.
• Unity: Fixed showing too many decimal points when editing ladder data to show on your profile.
• Mods: Added support for modded templates to the CreateGame API
• Mods: Added proper support for neutral special units.
• Mods: Fixed GameOrderCustom.TurnPhase not correctly persisting in multi-player.
• Mods: Fixed lua global state not persisting in some cases on the website.

As voted on by the community, we have two new templates being added to clan wars. Those two new templates are Strategic Greece and Volcano Island!

These will be added to the clan wars rotation immediately,

The highest-voted template was French Brawl, which was the last popular template that’s already included in clan wars, but as a result of its votes landing it in the top 3, it means it won’t be removed and will remain.

Clan wars players were polled and allowed to rank ten templates in the order they most desired them. 335 players responded to the poll, 98 clicked the “I don’t care” option, leaving 237 ballots.

Instant Runoff Voting Results

We then used an instant-runoff voting method to ensure everyone’s votes were counted. Here is the results of the instant-runoff voting algorithm:

10 candidates: Kabix, Biomes, Landria, Europe3v3, FrenchBrawl, VolcanoIsland, FoglessFighting, StrategicGreece, AseridithIslands, MacedoniaNoSplit
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 55 Kabix = 33 Europe3v3 = 28 Biomes = 28 StrategicGreece = 22 VolcanoIsland = 18 Landria = 17 AseridithIslands = 14 MacedoniaNoSplit = 14 FoglessFighting = 8
FoglessFighting is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 56 Kabix = 34 Europe3v3 = 28 Biomes = 28 StrategicGreece = 23 VolcanoIsland = 21 Landria = 17 AseridithIslands = 15 MacedoniaNoSplit = 15
AseridithIslands is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 56 Biomes = 35 Kabix = 34 Europe3v3 = 28 StrategicGreece = 27 VolcanoIsland = 23 Landria = 18 MacedoniaNoSplit = 16
MacedoniaNoSplit is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 57 Kabix = 36 Biomes = 36 Europe3v3 = 30 StrategicGreece = 30 VolcanoIsland = 27 Landria = 21
Landria is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 60 Biomes = 42 Kabix = 37 Europe3v3 = 33 StrategicGreece = 33 VolcanoIsland = 32
VolcanoIsland is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 70 Biomes = 49 Kabix = 42 StrategicGreece = 41 Europe3v3 = 35
Europe3v3 is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 79 Biomes = 59 Kabix = 54 StrategicGreece = 45
StrategicGreece is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 105 Biomes = 70 Kabix = 62
Kabix is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: FrenchBrawl = 140 Biomes = 97
FrenchBrawl won!
Number of remaining votes for each template: Kabix = 37 Biomes = 37 Europe3v3 = 34 StrategicGreece = 29 VolcanoIsland = 25 Landria = 23 AseridithIslands = 20 MacedoniaNoSplit = 17 FoglessFighting = 15
FoglessFighting is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Kabix = 39 Biomes = 39 Europe3v3 = 34 StrategicGreece = 34 VolcanoIsland = 28 Landria = 23 AseridithIslands = 21 MacedoniaNoSplit = 19
MacedoniaNoSplit is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Kabix = 42 Biomes = 41 StrategicGreece = 38 Europe3v3 = 36 VolcanoIsland = 33 Landria = 25 AseridithIslands = 22
AseridithIslands is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 51 Kabix = 43 StrategicGreece = 43 VolcanoIsland = 36 Europe3v3 = 36 Landria = 28
Landria is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 61 StrategicGreece = 47 Kabix = 45 VolcanoIsland = 44 Europe3v3 = 40
Europe3v3 is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 72 Kabix = 59 StrategicGreece = 58 VolcanoIsland = 48
VolcanoIsland is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 94 StrategicGreece = 77 Kabix = 66
Kabix is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: StrategicGreece = 119 Biomes = 118
StrategicGreece won!
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 42 Kabix = 40 Europe3v3 = 37 VolcanoIsland = 34 Landria = 26 AseridithIslands = 22 MacedoniaNoSplit = 20 FoglessFighting = 16
FoglessFighting is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 44 Kabix = 42 VolcanoIsland = 39 Europe3v3 = 37 Landria = 28 MacedoniaNoSplit = 24 AseridithIslands = 23
AseridithIslands is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 55 VolcanoIsland = 44 Kabix = 44 Europe3v3 = 37 Landria = 31 MacedoniaNoSplit = 26
MacedoniaNoSplit is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 59 VolcanoIsland = 55 Kabix = 47 Europe3v3 = 39 Landria = 37
Landria is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 73 VolcanoIsland = 69 Kabix = 50 Europe3v3 = 45
Europe3v3 is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: Biomes = 89 VolcanoIsland = 80 Kabix = 68
Kabix is eliminated. Re-distributing its votes
Number of remaining votes for each template: VolcanoIsland = 123 Biomes = 114
VolcanoIsland won!
Final winners: FrenchBrawl, StrategicGreece, VolcanoIsland

Clan Vote Counts

Here’s how many people from each clan voted: Harmony = 29, Myth Busters = 22, Optimum = 20, The Last Alliance = 19, Prime = 18, Danger Close = 9, After_Dark = 9, {101st} = 9, Icelandic Turtles = 8, HAWKS = 8, Huns = 7, [V.I.W] Very Important Weirdos = 6, Polish Eagles = 5, M’Hunters = 5, knyte club = 5, Ving = 4, MASTER Clan = 4, Undisputed = 4, KILL ‘EM ALL = 4, Cats = 3, Clan Italia = 3, Partisans = 3, SPARTA = 2, Nestlings = 2, Lions = 2, Flunky Fizzers = 2, Roman Wolves = 1, Varangian Guard = 1, The sleepers = 1, Elephants = 1, OG = 1, CORP = 1, ZUGZWANG = 1, [Blitz] = 1, 7th Heaven = 1, Vikinger = 1, Red Rum = 1, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics = 1, KingKong = 1, Road to Harmony = 1, German Warlords = 1, Lu Fredd = 1, Brothers in Arms = 1, Orcas = 1, Fifth Column Confederation = 1, The Poon Squad = 1, The Connoisseurs = 1, Celtica = 1

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.30.1! This update fixes a few bugs and makes other minor improvements to the game. This blog post describes what’s changed.

The update is live now on the website. The iOS, Android, and Standalone apps will skip this update and receive these features in the next update.

Changes

• All: Clan pages now only show the best clan war ranks instead of showing every season.
• All: Profile pages now show the name of the country flag.
• All: Resolved feature requests now announce in global chat.
• All: Fixed clicking “View” on a discussion item taking you to the last page. If you’re viewing a forum post or feature request, it makes more logical sense to take you to the first page so you can see the initial post and have context on what it’s about.
• All: Fixed clan wars not awarding you a reward that was earned by your clan before you were a contributor.
• All: Fixed a bug on the common games page where team games versus AI would show the teams incorrectly.
• All: Fixed “Deleted has deleted their account” clan message.
• Idle: The auto artifact swapper now swaps in army camp boost artifacts when drafting.
• Idle: The auto artifact swapper no longer swaps in hospital-related artifacts when you have no hospitals.
• Idle: Fixed a bug that could make the Dig Sites button not appear when loading your level after switching devices.
• Idle: Fixed a bug with idle battles caused by switching devices during a battle.
• Website: Added support for panning the map with touchscreens.
• Website: Fixed a bug that could make tapping territories with a touchscreen unreliable.
• Website: Fixed a bug in 3d mode with touchscreens that could make the map not respond after interacting with UI.
• Website: Fixed a bug that could cause an error when players used certain extended unicode characters as part of their name.
• Website: Fixed loading a server saved game while signed out causing a reload loop.
• Website: Fixed the back button on a feature request page going to home page instead of forum page.
• Classic: Fixed airlift army number not changing its color if you changed a player’s color while looking at an airlift order.
• Classic: Fixed a bug that could cause an error if you insert too large a value into the time-to-get-booted field.
• Classic: Fixed mods allowing creating neutral special units.
• Unity: Fixed idle’s “tap again to open level” message being present when no levels are present in some cases.
• Android: Fixed notifications requiring two taps to open.
• API: The CreateGame API now allows inviting AI players to games.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.30.0! This update brings the biggest refresh to Clan Wars since its launch! These changes are now going live with Season 56, which will begin at midnight GMT. This blog post describes what’s changed.

The update is live now on the website and standalone clients. The update will go live on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.

Please Suggest new Clan War Templates

Soon, we’ll hold a poll to see what templates players would like to see added to Clan Wars. If you’d like to suggest a template to be included on the poll, please post it in this thread.

As part of this 5.30 update, Warzone now supports a ranked-choice polling system, so once the official poll is created players will be able to rank the templates in the order they most prefer them. Once poll results are in, we’ll use an instant-runoff voting style to choose which templates to add. I’ll create the poll once the iOS and Android apps are released, so that app users can vote too.

New Clan Wars UI

The user interface to clan wars has been simplified and received new features!
– The leading clans are now shown directly on the clan wars main page. You’ll always know who’s winning without having to dig into the map page.
– A new “recent games” button lets you view all the games that happened in clan wars recently, regardless of which clan they belonged to.
– A new “view all timeslots” button lets you view all of the timeslots that went into a season, so you can easily see what templates players are matching for or what templates were available.
– Each clan can easily now be viewed right off the main page, allowing you to see their recent games and list of players without having to dig into the map page.
– All of the new calculations, like win strength (described below), are clearly shown on a clan’s games list for each day’s worth of games.

Matchmaking Change

The algorithm that Warzone uses to match players within a timeslot is improving. Previously, Warzone used a top-down matchmaking system which would always match the clans with the highest war rating first. Now, Warzone will start by matching clans with the most players queued to that timeslot first, and match them to the clan with the closest rated opponent available.

Based on my experiments, this decreases the likelihood that players will end up without a game by about 20%. Further, the match quality improved slightly, making this algorithm a solid improvement.

Thanks to Doctor K for suggesting this new algorithm, and to FiveSmith for helping me find a bug in my experiments.

Clan Size Increases to 50

All clans that were previously limited to 40 players can now hold up to 50 players! This also applies to new clans created from this point forward. Any clan seeking new players can use the Open Clans feature to bring themselves up to 50 if they’d like to.

Removed Clan Wars Cap

Prior to this update, clans were limited to a 40-player roster for each clan war season. This cap is gone, and now any clanned player can always participate in a clan war game every day.

End-of-day Processing

At midnight GMT, clan wars processes the previous day’s worth of games. During this end-of-day processing, several things happen:
– Rewards are given out, based on the number of wins each clan got. See the rewards screen for details.
– Each clan’s win strength is calculated (see below)
– Each clan’s points are calculated. Points = number of wins * win strength
– Territories on the clan war map are awarded based on the number of points scored
– If all territories on the map are conquered, the season ends and a new season begins

You’ll be able to see which day each clan war game finished in, as the new UI shows off in a clan’s games where the day ended with all the details about the calculations that went into that day.

Seasons now always end at midnight

Clan war seasons will now always end at midnight in the GMT timezone. This is important for fairness. Prior to this update, seasons ended immediately when the last territory was given out on the clan war map. This had notable downsides, such as the later timeslots in a day could be a new season, which players could miss out on if they weren’t awake during the hours of that last timeslot. Having the season aligned with the day schedule eliminates this issue.

Win Strength

Prior to this update, clans who were competing for maximum clan war wins were encouraged to get 40 players playing every day. Some clans found this difficult, so to make that easier, that number is now being reduced to 25. Further, since clans aren’t locked into a roster, it doesn’t even have to be the same 25 players each day like before. This drastically increases the flexibility for clans who are competing for the top ranks.

All clans, regardless of size, can earn up to a theoretical 25 points each day.

Here’s how the win strength is calculated for a single day:
For a clan with 25 or fewer players, the win strength will always be 100%, meaning each win will always be worth 1 point.
For a clan with 25-50 players, where 25 or fewer players participate in clan wars in a day, the win strength will always be 100%.
For a clan with 25-50 players, where more than 25 players participate in a day, the win strength will be calculated as: 25 / NumberOfParticipators
For a legacy uncapped clan with more than 50 players, where (ClanSize – 25) or fewer players participate in a day, win strength is calculated as 25 / (ClanSize – 25). This means that they want (ClanSize – 25) players in their clan to compete to achieve the maximum daily score of 25.

(Note: Just like prior to this update, a “win” in a 2v2 template is actually two wins, since two players won a game that day, but I’m leaving that part out of the above calculations for simplicity)

Estimated points

The official win strength of each clan won’t be known until the end-of-day processing. However, to help show more accurate rankings, the clan wars ranking page will estimate the current day’s win strength and points and add these points into their displayed total. This prevents having to wait until the end of the day to see where your clan stands.

Clicking into a clan’s page will make it clear how many points its showing are real and how many are part of the estimate.

In-season rewards

Previously, rewards were earned mid-season based on the number of territories you conquered on the clan war map. Now, mid-season rewards are earned simply by the number of wins your clan achieves. This makes it easier to understand, and also ensures you can still earn rewards even after all territories on the map are awarded to clans near the end of a season.

The rewards now last 3 weeks instead of 2, and also have increased effects.

Make sure to claim your rewards in a timely fashion, as if you don’t claim them, they’ll expire a month after the season ends.

Monday AMA

This Monday, October 28th at 11am PDT, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have, or if you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording containing your answer after it’s over.

Other Changes

• Classic: Removed the export-to-youtube-is-new balloon.
• Classic: Fixed a bug when watching deploys/attacks that could cause them to appear at the wrong scale for 1 frame in some circumstances.