Warzone has just been updated to version 5.29.0! This update adds a bunch of features that were voted on by the community in the new Features Request Forum. This blog post describes what’s changed, and also previews upcoming changes to clans.

This update is live now on the website and standalone apps. The update will come to the Android and iOS apps in the coming weeks.

Voted Features

Recently, Warzone added the new Feature Requests Forum where players can request Warzone features and vote on features requested by others.

Today’s update implements several of your suggestions, such as new premium colors, compensation for idle battles not starting, searching your templates when making tournaments, re-advertising open seats in open games, achievements for defeating players by country, and more! See the change log below to see a full list of changes. All of these features would not have been implemented if it wasn’t for your votes on the Feature Requests Forum, so thank you to everyone who voted, and keep the votes coming!

Upcoming Clan Changes

In a future update, clans and clan wars will receive their first major update since they launched. This update is designed to increase fairness in the competition, be easier to use, and increase the number of players who participate.

– Clan size limit will be increased from 40 to 50.
– Clan wars no longer limits clans to 40 players per season. There is no longer any limit, and any clanned player can participate in one clan war game per day if they choose to. The nickname of this update is “Clan Wars is for Everyone”
– Instead of tracking wins, clan wars will track clan war points, where one win is usually worth one clan war point, but there are some cases where a win might be worth less (see below).
– The maximum number of points that a clan can earn in one day is now 25, down from 40 which is what is possible today. This means, for a clan of 50 or fewer people, you only need 25 people in your clan participating every day to be eligible for the full 25 points (each win is 1 point). This will help more clans be competitive and ease the restrictions on forcing everyone to play every day. For example, if your clan has 30 members, then 5 people are “reserve seats” — they can sit out without harming the team. Best of all, it doesn’t need to be the same 5 every day, so you aren’t locked into a roster like before. This will make it much easier for more clans to compete.
– The maximum number of reserve seats is 25, and points-per-win will be reduced if more people play in a single day. This exists to help bigger clans and smaller clans compete on a fair playing field. For example, if your clan has 50 people and they all play Clan Wars in the same day, then each win is worth 0.5 points, since 25 divided by 50 is 0.5. This means there’s no penalty for having people play, but there’s no benefit either as it just reduces the win strength. If your clan has 75 people and 50 people play in a day, each win is worth also 0.5 points, since you have twice as many players participating as a smaller clan. If your clan has 40 people and they all play in a day, then each win is worth 0.625 points (25/40).
– Clan war seasons will always roll over at midnight GMT. This fixes an issue where, if a clan war season ended in the middle of the day, players in some time zones would be disadvantaged as they could miss the first day of the next season or the last day of the previous season.
– The clan war UI will be updated and overhauled to be easier to use, understand, and explain the new points system in detail.

More details about this will be forthcoming.

Full Change Log

– All: Added new premium colors available for purchase: Goldenrod, Cinnamon, Mahogany, and Rain Forest.
– All: Added links to the features you’ve voted on to profile pages.
– All: Added the option for map designers to exclude some bonuses from assigning territories their bonus color.
– All: When a territory has multiple bonuses assigned with colors, it now picks the bonus with the fewest territories for its stroke color instead of picking one arbitrarily.
– All: Added explanation for clan icon in the player popup, along with a link to the clan by clicking the icon.
– All: When a new mod goes live, it’s now announced in the global chat room.
– Unity: Forums now display the last poster and last post date on the right if the screen is wide enough to fit it.
– Unity: Refactored the way Idle integrates with the main Warzone app. It’s now a tab on the main menu. Removed the option to start up directly in Idle — instead, the app will always start on the main menu and idle can be selected in the lower right corner. Double-tap this tab to launch straight into your most recent level.
– Classic: When an open game expires, the blue box on the lobby now contains a “renew open seats” button for the game creator that will re-list the game on the Open Games tab.
– Classic: Added achievements for defeating a player from different countries or US states.
– Classic: When creating a tournament, you can now filter on templates by typing in their name.
– Classic: Custom scenario games with manual distribution now properly set armies on territories not picked to the value in the custom scenario.
– Classic: Opening a game from the open-games page that just started will now give you a message telling you that the game started without you, instead of leaving players on a fogged map.
– Classic: Cleaned up clock hover dialog so it lines up into columns and looks less messy in big games.
– Classic: Updated quickmatch tutorial to be more clear for new players.
– Classic: Added a balloon to promote the updated Export To YouTube feature. It will only appear once per device.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that could cause an error when clicking history’s “perspective” button when viewing a game from which you were removed by the host.
– Website: Fixed wrapping text on tournament forward invites page.
– Website: Fixed a bug that caused an error if a non-member kept checking the boxes of member-only mods when making a game.
– Idle: If you’re waiting for a battle to start and it doesn’t get enough players to start, you’ll now be awarded 10 battle points as a consolation prize for helping to try and start the battle.
– Idle: Empty mercenary camps are now hidden from the list when loading a level.
– Idle: Battles and challenges are now accessed by buttons on the path instead of tabs.
– Idle: Fixed the auto artifact swapper trying to swap out some artifacts as you’re activating them.

Fizzer AMA on Friday

This Friday, August 23rd 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.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.28.0! This update completely overhauls the video-generator.

This update is live now on the website and standalone clients. iOS and Android will skip this update and receive the next version, but they can use the new video generator immediately since it’s generated by the website.

New Video Generator

When you finish a multi-player game, Warzone has a “Export to YouTube” button. This button turns your game into a video and uploads it to YouTube.

Prior to this update, the videos that were generated were not very good. The old one simply rendered each turn of your game into an image and then assembled those images into a video.

Now with this update, the videos are fully rendered out in the game engine itself, showing every attack in its gory detail!

Here’s examples of what a new rendered videos can look like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhMb6XbzS2Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Sgeeyd0f8

As you can see, the videos now show the attacks, army numbers, army graph, maps in 3d, and also give the creator options to put text on top of the video, or even add spoken text.

To make it even better, the videos are made much faster to create — the videos above would have taken several minutes before, but instead they were each made in about 30 seconds!

You can render any finished multi-player game, completely for free. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Other Changes

– Classic: When levelling up gives you a new feature request vote, the level up dialog now tells you this.
– Classic: Fixed templates that contain deleted mods.
– Website: Fixed in-line images in feature request forum.
– Website: Fixed enter keypresses inserting newlines in addition to submitting chat messages.
– Website: Fixed defender kill-boxes appearing under the terrain in some 3d maps.
– All: Fixed clan war cache size.
– All: Fixed android push notifications.
– Idle: Idle Battles starting now notifies global chat.
– Unity: Fixed tournament names on multi-player tab.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.27.0! This blog post details everything that changed in this update. This update adds the Feature Request Forum, a new place to request features from Warzone!

This update is live now on the website, and will go live on the standalone apps, Android, and iOS in the coming week or two.

Feature Request Forum

Warzone now has a built-in method for players to request new features! By making a post on this new forum, you’re officially requesting that Warzone add your feature to the game. This can be anything from a major new feature to a small tweak. This is your way to influence what features Fizzer, the game’s creator, works on.

Players can also vote on features you’d most like to see implemented. Players have votes based on their level, with votes unlocking at level 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 62, 64, 66, and a bonus vote for members. You can place up to three votes for any one idea. Votes you cast are tied to your Warzone account and are public, so you can always see who voted on each individual feature request.

This forum is designed to replace the UserVoice site that’s been in place for many years. If you have votes in an item on UserVoice you still care about, you should create it on the Features Request Forum and vote on it there.

See the wiki for more details.

Fizzer AMA on Tuesday

Fizzer, the creator of Warzone, will be doing a livestream on twitch on Tuesday, July 9th! Feel free to pop in and ask any questions you may have, or hang out and learn more about the updates and future plans for Warzone. You can view it at twitch.tv/FizzerWL. It will begin at 11am. Use this link to see the time in your timezone or a countdown.

Other Changes

– All: The previously experimental Combined Player Strings feature is now the default. Also added some space between items when using it.
– Website: When on UJS pages, the browser’s “back” button now properly takes you back to the previous UJS page. Note that the browser’s “forward” button is still not supported in UJS pages.
– Website: On the experimental settings page, added a “keep alive” option that plays a blank wav file on loop whenever a game or socket is open, to prevent browsers from deactivating the tab.
– Website: When in 3d mode, things look less fuzzy and more crisp.
– Website: When in 3d mode, fixed seams that appeared in the background of some map textures.
– Website: The clan wars seasons list are now link-enabled so you can open them in new tabs.
– Website: The magnifying lenses next to player names, such as on a clan page, are now link-enabled so you can open them on new tabs.
– Website: When pressing the enter button on a input field, such as the attack/transfer dialog, it now responds on keyup instead of keydown. This fixes a bug where if you changed your armies immediately before pressing enter, it may not register the army change.
– Website: Fixed a bug that made account-less single-player classic progress not migrate to new account upon creation.
– Unity: Downvoted forum threads are now visible at the bottom, similar to how the website has always worked.
– Classic: Fixed the “AI” icon next to a player name getting stuck in the wrong state.
– Idle: Added a “Sync” button when playing idle on the website, located under your name in the upper right corner.
– Idle: Adjusted values of the active artifacts Discount Mine, Discount Army Camp, and Discount Hospital so that the high end values don’t go over 100% and therefore have meaning.
– Idle: Fixed the artifact swapper swapping in upgrading artifacts.
– Idle: Fixed the artifact swapper not swapping in discount army camps when upgrading super camp.
– Idle: Fixed hospitals showing infinity time to upgrade when reward reduces hospital upgrade time to zero while they’re already upgrading.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.26.1! This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website and standalone clients. The Android and iOS apps will receive this update in the coming week or two.

Auto Artifact Swapper

Warzone Idle has a new feature called the Automatic Artifact Swapper. This will automatically equip any passive artifacts you own to maximize the effect of every action you take.

For example, every time you click the button to upgrade an army camp, the Auto Artifact Swapper will automatically equip your best Army Camp Discount artifact so your purchase is discounted. Every time you try to conquer a territory, the swapper will automatically equip your best Hospital Boost artifact to maximize the effect of your hospitals.

This is designed to fix what I consider the most tedious part of playing Warzone Idle: Constantly having to swap artifacts to maximize their benefit. With the Auto Artifact Swapper, you get the benefit of your passive artifacts without having to ever manually equip them.

The Auto Artifact Swapper is available for purchase on the artifacts tab.

Filtered Games

It’s now possible to view a list of the games that you don’t qualify to join due to open seat prerequisites.

Game creators can define prerequisites on their games that players must satisfy to join, such as getting booted less than 5% of the time or being at least level 20. Prior to this update, players who didn’t satisfy the requirements would never see the game on their open games list, and have no way of knowing they were missing out on games.

Now, if you’re missing any games, there will be a button on the open games page that tells you how many games you’re missing out on. Clicking the button will show you all of the games, along with a summary of how many games are being filtered due to level, boot rate, membership, etc.

This is useful to help players understand the full scope of the open games list. Sometimes people who are a very low level or have a very high boot rate would see very few games on the list and assume that nobody was playing Warzone anymore. When in fact the truth was that simply nobody wanted to play with them.

Website buttons now work like a link

Some portions of the Warzone.com website are powered by a technology named UJS. In UJS pages, some of the buttons now work like a browser link, in that you can do things like right+click and select “open in a new tab” or “copy url”. For example, when browsing ladder games, you can open each game in a new tab instead whereas before only a normal left-click would work at all. This should be helpful in making the website work more like players expect.

Fizzer AMA on Monday

Fizzer, the creator of Warzone, will be doing a livestream on twitch on Monday, June 17th! Feel free to pop in and ask any questions you may have, or hang out and learn more about the updates and future plans for Warzone. You can view it at twitch.tv/FizzerWL. It will begin at 11am. Use this link to see the time in your timezone or a countdown.

Other Changes

– Website: Added a checkbox to enable the new experimental rendering target, babylonjs, at https://www.warzone.com/ChangeExperimentalSettings
– Website: Fixed inspector arrows sometimes getting stuck on screen.
– Website: Fixed tutorial balloon positions being slightly off.
– All: Deleted accounts that were in a clan now announce the deletion to the clan chat.
– All: Revised the way that the game displays player names and icons. For now, this has to be enabled at https://www.warzone.com/ChangeExperimentalSettings
– Classic: Cleaned up the players summary panel to allow names to fit better and be more clear. Also added an explanation for each icon into the player popup.
– Classic: When creating a multi-player game, if you load a template that’s not yours that’s all open seats (such as a quickmatch template), one of the open seats will be replaced with yourself for convenience.
– Classic: When creating a single-player game, if you load a multi-player template that’s all open seats (such as a quickmatch template), it now sets up the players correctly instead of being all AIs.
– Classic: When publishing a community level, the “try again” button no longer removes the publishing state.
– Classic: Optimized the speed of loading multi-player games.
– Classic: Added an explanation of how basic attacks work to the Analyze Attack dialog.
– Classic: Fixed the display of the Analyze Attack dialogs on very small screens.
– Classic: Fixed duplicate “Searching for opponents” text when waiting for a quickmatch game.
– Classic: Fixed the coin prize label at the top of a game’s page to ensure it doesn’t get truncated.
– Classic: Fixed single-player custom games not knowing your map rating.
– Classic: Fixed “standing not present” error.
– Idle: Fixed main menu thumbnails taking time to load. They’re now included in the app so they load instantly.
– Mods: Added the ability to set each player’s gold in the Server_StartGame hook.
– Mods: Fixed a bug with airlifting special units that are set to always visible.
– Mods: Fixed a bug in Unity’s Lua processing code that could make it fail to throw an error on invalid lua code missing an “end”
– Unity: Updated Unity version to 2022.3.33f1
– Unity: When viewing a forum thread, the forum name is now displayed at the top.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.26.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website and standalone clients. The Android and iOS apps will skip this update and receive update 5.26.1 when it’s available.

Sneak Preview of New Rendering Engine

Warzone can now be played in a new rendering engine on the website, babylonjs! To try out the preview, add &3d=true to the end of your querystring in your browser.

Here’s what it looks like:

This feature mirrors the 3D maps functionality familiar to iOS and Android users.

Though currently in preview mode and requiring manual querystring adjustment, this new rendering engine is a glimpse into the future. Since it’s new, I expect there to be bugs and issues, so if you try it I’d appreciate you letting me know what your experience was like!

Why support a new rendering engine?

1. Unified Code

   Previously, Warzone operated on two separate rendering engines — one for Unity, supporting both 2D and 3D, and another HTML-based engine exclusive to the website, limited to 2D. Now, the Warzone codebase is unified, with one set of rendering code that can be run either in Unity, Babylonjs, or even in other rendering engines if we decide to add a new one in the future. This isn’t a “port”, this is the exact same code running in two different engines. Unifying these into a singular codebase streamlines feature additions and bug fixes, reducing redundancy and testing overhead.

   Supporting a new rendering engine was a big change for Warzone, as lots of parts of the game had to be re-written or abstracted out so that they weren’t directly tied to the Unity APIs. This work will pay off big in the future, as it allows Warzone to be more flexible and give more options for the players. Now that the bulk of this work is done, expect to get more regular Warzone updates again for the foreseeable future.

2. 3d support for the website

   With this update, Warzone’s website users can now enjoy 3D maps, aligning their experience with that of mobile players. This gives the game a more modern look and feel. Map designers have had the option to include height/depth to their maps, as well as textures for the territories, but until now players playing on the website never got to see it. Consistency across platforms has always been one of Warzone’s core goals, ensuring seamless transitions between devices without sacrificing gameplay familiarity.

3. Mobile access through browser

   Today, if you’re on iOS or Android and you want to play a Warzone game, you must install the Warzone app. Eventually, this rendering target will enable players to play a Warzone game directly in their browser on a mobile device, without ever installing any apps.

   I know there are some people out there for which this is really important, since I hear from people trying to use the website to play games using their mobile device. Maybe they don’t like installing apps, maybe they don’t have permission on the device to install apps, or maybe they just want to try the game without the commitment of an app install. For whatever reason, I want Warzone to be as accessible as possible. Therefore, in a future update, we will eventually make the game playable directly in the browser of mobile devices. This is made possible by this new rendering engine, which runs the full iOS/Android app code but in the browser.

4. Support for new engines in the future

   As noted above, this abstraction allows Warzone to support new rendering engines in the future much more easily. This means if we want to add support for another rendering engine, or even move away from Unity on iOS/Android, we can do that. The goal is to provide the best possible experience for the user, so if we can find an engine that provides a better experience than Unity, I’d be interested in exploring that. It’s a very good thing to not be tied to a single platform.

Other Changes in this update

– Website: Fixed a bug where the attack/transfer dialog would close when enter was pressed even if the input box didn’t have focus.
– Website: Fixed a bug that made arrow keys not work properly when a text box has focus.
– Website: Fixed a bug that made the delete key not work properly when a text box has focus.
– Website: Fixed a bug on input boxes that allowed the enter key to insert a newline when they were supposed to only contain a single line.
– Website: Fixed placeholder text on mod input fields.
– Website: Fixed incompatibility with the “Disable Scroll Jacking” Chrome extension.
– Website: Fixed a bug with map SVG processing that could, in rare cases, make some objects appear wrong when a gradient was used in another object.
– Idle: If you try to sacrifice an artifact that’s currently being upgraded, the game now asks for confirmation that you’re sure you really want to do that.
– Idle: The draft indicator now waits a couple seconds before showing when first opening an idle level. This helps ensure it appears in the correct position and isn’t underneath the idle time dialog.
– Idle: Markets now show their name in the inspection panel.
– Idle: After clicking the draft icon, the draft label now stays above the territory instead of being in a fixed location on the screen.
– Idle: Fixed AP resets not granting super ascention starting AP.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that caused an error if mine or hospital discounts caused price to go negative.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause an error when using Update All along with auto dig.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause an error if you activated an artifact after swapping it out of the active artifacts area.
– Classic: When changing the map of a template set to Full Distributon, Random Warlords, or Random Cities, the distribution mode will no longer be reset to the map’s default distribution mode.
– Classic: Incomplete cards now have a small border to show their outline.
– Classic: Tournament setting pages now say “players per game” instead of “teams per game” in non-team tournaments.
– Classic: When ordering your commander into a large force, the warning message now instructs you that commanders are worth 7 armies to make it easier to understand.
– Classic: The settings panel summary now describes a bit more about what commanders are.
– Classic: Sped up auto-force-join for games with low boot times.
– Classic: Fixed the end-game-window for ladder games to say “When the game ended you were ranked” instead of “You are ranked” when looking at a game that ended more than an hour ago.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that made custom scenario tournaments set to Random Slots not be able to start.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that made the clock use hover instead of popping up a dialog in games with lots of eliminated/surrendered players.
– Classic: Fixed a bug where auto-commit would fail to use orders that wasted a reinforcement card.
– Classic: Fixed a bug in the map designer where checkboxes sometimes wouldn’t reset from their indeterminate state (“-“) when territory selection changes.
– Classic: Fixed what’s visible in a GameOrderEvent based on the game’s fog level. If no-fog, full gold modifications are now always visible. Card modifications are only visible based on the game’s card fog settings.
– Classic: Fixed having tons of turn separator lines in the chat without messages in between them when loading a game with lots of chat.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that caused an error when making a game if you entered a huge number into banked time gain box.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that made a special unit’s health sometimes not update after being attacked.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that made the “rate this map” button appear for testing maps.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that could make the clock hover dialog get stuck open if the game ended while you were hovering over the clock.
– Classic: Fixed a bug with “Finish versus AI” that made your gold in commerce games not start with the correct value.
– All: Deleted accounts are now removed from their clan if they’re in one.
– All: Forum thread watch notifications for clan forum threads are no longer sent to players that are no longer in that clan.
– All: Fixed the clan list so it now shows clans whose accounts sum to less than 1000 lifetime points.
– All: Fixed the clan list so it now shows freshly created clans.
– Unity: When viewing a forum thread or private mail thread, a new button at the top allows you to get the URL of the current discussion for sharing with others.
– Unity: Updated Unity version to 2022.3.25f1
– Unity: Fixed a bug that made arrows on the map not fade out properly.
– Unity: Fixed a bug that allowed voting on expired forum posts.
– Unity: Fixed purchasing areas of the app when no in-app-purchase provider (like Google Play) is available.
– Unity: Fixed multi-line input boxes shrinking text instead of scrolling it, in places such as when sending or replying to mail or forum posts, or reporting a bug.
– Unity: Fixed a visual bug that made the territory glow (highlight) have a small break it it on some objects.
– API: Added mod names to GameFeed API.
– API: ValidateInviteToken now returns all the reasons that a player can’t use a template, not just the first one.
– Mods: Fixed a bug when creating games with the free mod that indicated only members can be invited.
– Mods: Fixed a bug that caused a mod to crash on the website if it nested too many tables.
– Mods: Fixed the behavior of mods that created infinite orders in Server_AdvanceTurn_Order so they crash more gracefully.
– Mods: Fixed a bug that could make a game fail if a mod inserted an invalid player ID for a diplomacy card.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.25.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the website and standalone clients. The Android and iOS apps will receive this update in the coming week or two.

3d maps on by default

When using the Unity app (Android, iOS, or standalone client), 3d maps will now be on by default for small maps. 3d maps provide a better look and feel for the game.

Large maps (over 300 territories) will still default to 2d maps.

You can always override this behavior in the settings menu, to either be on for all maps or off for all maps.

As part of this change, the maps that are built-in to the iOS and Android apps also changed to be the 3d versions. Built-in maps exist in order to allow playing the game without an internet connection. The maps used by the early single-player levels of Classic or Idle are all built into the app so that they don’t need to be downloaded from the internet.

Quickmatch Template Unlock

Quickmatch now has a new setting that players can configure called “New templates are enabled by default”. This is on by default, but if you elect to turn it off, then anytime you unlock a new quickmatch template it will be disabled by default. You can always control what templates you’re willing to play by going to the Templates page and turning each one on or off (or even control some on for real-time games and others on for multi-day games). This setting just defines whether templates will be default to on or off when you unlock them for the first time. You can unlock new templates up the maximum of 40 by winning games, or new templates can be added into quickmatch based on the community’s voting which also causes them to unlock on your next win if you’ve already unlocked the template it replaced.

This setting is configured on the Quickmatch Templates page. You must have unlocked at least 10 templates in Quickmatch before this new checkbox will appear.

Unauthenticated Multi-Player Game Viewing

Multi-player games can now be viewed without being signed in, which is useful if you want to show off your finished game to a friend who doesn’t have a Warzone account.

This is a feature I’ve been wanting to add to the game since it started, 15 years ago!

A few other pages now also work while signed out, like the multi-player dashboard and the open games page.

Other Changes

– Classic: Ladder games now replenish 3 hours of banked boot time per day.
– Classic: Tweaked ladder rating parameters to make ratings climb slightly faster.
– Classic: Fixed arrows next to players on the ladder.
– Classic: Fixed the #1 ladder idle rewards (coins and custom colors were awarded, but other rewards sometimes weren’t)
– Classic: Fixed ladder/clan war reward conflicts so the best one is used instead of the most recent one.
– Classic: Fixed new chat messages not appearing when spectating a multi-player game.
– Classic: Fixed deleted accounts not being removed from ladders.
– Classic: Fixed typo on ladder page.
– Classic: Fixed custom special units with negative combat orders that absorb damage.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that would break a game if the host didn’t invite themselves initially, but then swapped themselves in along with AIs after all other players had accepted.
– Classic: Fixed allowing spying on neutral multiple times in the same turn.
– Classic: Fixed coin transactions so they explain more detail in where they came from, such as ladder/raffle/clan wars.
– Unity: Updated Unity version to 2021.3.27
– All: The clan war seasons page now shows the most recent season on top.
– Website: Fixed a bug with mods that could make a handler get invoked when not necessary.
– Idle: Fixed mortar loading time saying “1 hour” even if reduced due to a modifier.
– Idle: Fixed the scrollbar in the Recipe Stats dialog so it doesn’t overlap content.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.24.1! This is a small update with fixes to several bugs and making other small improvements to the game. This blog post describes what’s changed.

This update is live now on the Warzone website at https://www.warzone.com as well as in the Standalone Client. The Android and iOS apps will receive this update within the next week or two.

Ladder Boot Times

I took a look at how the ladders have been performing since the recent ladder refresh in 5.24.0, where the boot times were adjusted to use banked time, among other changes. If I take all recent ladder games, group them by week, and plot the percentage of those games that ended by boot, I can see that the percentage of games that end by boot is down significantly in the last two weeks since the ladder refresh:

That’s a good thing!

Nevertheless, there have been calls from the community for higher boot times, so I will convert 12 hours of banked time into fixed time. This will go live for all ladder games created after the 5.24.1 update — it won’t affect games that were already created.

I know some players have been calling for the boot times to be returned to a full 3 days for every turn, but I just don’t think it’s fun to have to wait three full days between every turn of a game. I’ve heard this from players over the years too — it’s generated a lot of complaints whenever someone gets stuck in a game where their opponent is waiting a full three days between every turn. And I agree — it’s simply not fun, and I’m not willing to put out a game I wouldn’t recommend playing. Three days is fine on occasion, but it shouldn’t take that long for every single turn every single time. If you really need three days for every turn, you can always make your own Warzone games and set the boot time to whatever you want, but if you want to play the official Warzone ladders then do so when you can commit to taking your turn at least 5 times per week.

Other Changes

– Classic: Updated ladder rewards to encompass more players.
– Classic: Ladder pages now show the name of the template so you don’t have to click the button to see what it is.
– Classic: Seasonal ladder pages now show the start and end date.
– Classic: Fixed ladder removing players on auto-commit.
– Classic: Fixed ladder “…” row to only appear when there’s a legit jump in players.
– Classic: Fixed the boot percentage displayed on profile. It now properly takes into account games where a player was booted multiple times, or a game where they were booted into an AI, or a game where they were booted but their team won.
– Classic: Fixed randomized slots in community levels.
– Classic: Fixed single-player “try again” button on levels with randomized slots.
– Classic: Fixed the performance of the ladder page for very active players by showing a sample of their rating/rank history instead of all of it.
– Classic: Fixed deleted accounts not being removed from active games.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause the daily door dialog to get stuck open if you can’t use the power that was granted.
– Idle: Fixed 100% hospital upgrade time reduction.
– Idle: Fixed “No session 2” error.
– Idle: Fixed the armies/money hover rapidly appearing and disappearing when holding a smaller device in landscape mode.
– Website: Fixed numpad “.” button.
– Website: Fixed map of the week text “1 votes” -> “1 vote”
– Website: Fixed excessive decimal places on graphs.
– Website: Removed note about moved links under the community tab.
– Mods: Special units with a negative combat order will now fight before armies on that territory.
– Mods: Added WL.TickCount() for measuring the passage of time accurately.
– Mods: Fixed a bug that made a generic error if GetTurn was called with an invalid turn number. Now it simply calls you back with nil.
– Mods: Fixed Game.Orders returning orders for the previous turn if called right after a turn advanced.
– API: Fixed Query Game API on custom scenario games.

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.24.0! This update has a major ladder refresh, improvements to custom scenarios, and more.

This update is live now on the website and the standalone client. The Android/iOS app should receive this update within a week or two.

Ladder Refresh

Warzone’s ladders are getting a major overhaul! Warzone’s ladders are competitive arenas where players compete for the top rank. Warzone has four ladders: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and a seasonal ladder that changes its template each 60 days.

The ladders are unlocked by leveling up or by purchasing the Mega Strategy Pack. Once unlocked, you can join them on the website by going to Multi Player -> Ladders, or through the app by clicking Ladders on the multi-player tab.

See the previous blog posts for details about what’s changed in the ladder refresh.

Slot Picking

When joining an open game that uses a custom scenario, you’ll now get an option to pick which slot you’d like to join instead of being given a random one. This makes for a much better experience for those joining diplomacy games.

Mega Games can now use Custom Scenarios

Mega Games are games that involve more than the usual 40 player limit and can go all the way up to 400 players. Prior to this update, mega games could not use custom scenarios, but starting today they can! However, the catch is they can only do so using the new Randomized Slots setting.

Randomized Slots is a feature that game creators can enable when creating games using a custom scenario. When enabled, the game will not show slots at all at game creation time or in the lobby, and instead will assign every player a random slot when the game starts. This feature is primarilly added for mega games, but it can be used in any custom scenario game.

Misc Added Features

– Classic: Added the ability to sort friends by how recently they’ve been online.
– Classic: Added the ability to view who is online when forwarding tournament invites.
– Classic: Added the ability to view who is online when searching for players by name.
– Classic: Added the ability to turn off the chat dialog in the app settings. Also increased the threshold for when the chat dialog will open.
– Classic: When hovering over the clock in the upper right corner, it now explains which timer is the turn timer and which is the banked timer.
– Unity: When inviting players to a tournament, added the ability to sort players by several different things instead of only offering sort by name.
– Website: Added “critical sounds” volume control to app settings menu so the volume of the turn advance sound can now be adjusted.
– All: When inviting players to your clan, a green circle now shows accounts that are online.

Other

– Website: Moved Ladders, Tournaments, and Clan Wars links from Community to Multi-Player.
– Website: Inviting players to a tournament now uses UJS so that it gets the new features added to this page.
– Website: Fixed P and M hotkeys for zooming (short for plus and minus)
– Website: Fixed size of the yellow highlight in the attack/transfer dialog so it doesn’t get super huge when few armies are attacking.
– Website: Fixed yellow “0” not being shown when attacking with a commander and 0 armies.
– All: Fully removed Facebook and Apple sign in options (all players were notified months ago). If you lost access to your account, use the “Forgot password” option with your e-mail address. If you never set up an email on your account, contact Warzone at https://www.warzone.com/Contact
– Unity: Added the ability to report players directly from the app instead of having to be redirected to the website.
– Unity: Fixed “map not in memory” error that could rarely come up when creating games.
– Classic: Fixed allowing nudging someone right after adding them to a game.
– Classic: Fixed a bug with quickmatch where templates could forget your checked state if they were voted out, then you updated a different template, then they were voted back in.
– Classic: Fixed mega games getting laggy when the clock is updating every second.
– Classic: Fixed tournament creation so it doesn’t give negative player counts anymore when dragging sliders too far to the right.
– Classic: Fixed green online circle so it’s visible on players with the green color.
– Classic: Fixed orders not saving after being set by a mod.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that allowed wunderwaffe to pass negative armies as an attack.
– Idle: Fixed “dismiss all” button so it doesn’t re-appear after balloons are closed.
– Idle: Fixed a bug when conquering the last territory of the map that could make bonus icons not disappear.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that made auto dig not correctly record its progress during a long absense.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could cause errors when money/s is negative.
– Mods: Mods can now use the “#” operator to get the length of a Warzone-provided dictionary, like Map.Territories.
– Mods: Fixed UI.IsDestroyed() so it’s now aware of objects created by previous script invocations.
– Mods: Improved error message received if an invalid color string is provided.
– API: The GameIDFeed API now only returns games in the last 30 days for the 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders.

Ask Fizzer Anything

Fizzer will be doing an ask-me-anything session on twitch where you can ask any questions you have! This will take place on Saturday, May 13th, at 11am PDT. See this link for the time in your timezone or a countdown. If you aren’t able to make it but still want your question answered, you can post your question in this forum thread and you can watch the replay after the event.

The previously mentioned ladder refresh now has a planned release date: Tuesday, May 9th! (Tomorrow as of the time of this writing). This will go live along with update 5.24.0, which also contains a bunch of other non-ladder goodies.

It’s important to stress that this is the planned date — if anything goes wrong during deployment it could be delayed. But this is the date I will attempt to launch the new ladder system.

Based on community feedback, the move order of the ladders will stay at cyclic and will not be changed to no-luck, and the announced boot times are increasing by 1 day banked time.

The 1v1 ladder will change its map to Modified Medium Earth Board map, which is functionally identical but just looks prettier.

Each of the ladders will also now have a unique color that can be unlocked by reaching rank #1 (same logic as the trophy award). Once unlocked, the color can be used forever. Past winners of ladders will not get the new unique color, only those who qualify after the refresh.

Season LII of the seasonal ladder will launch within a day or so of the ladder refresh. It will be the first season with the new rewards. The template will be Guiroma. (as picked by Beren as usual.)

Hope you’re excited as I am!

Warzone’s ladders will soon receive a refresh, marking the first time this has happened since they were introduced back in 2011!

Warzone has four ladders: The 1v1 ladder, 2v2 ladder, 3v3 ladder, and the seasonal ladders. They are designed to be competitive arenas where players can compete with each other at the highest level.

The ladder refresh is designed to keep the spirit of what the ladders have always been, while making them more accessible, more fun, and fixing some of their rough edges. This blog post gives an overview of what will be changing about the ladders in the next update.

New Rating System

The 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders will change to use the TrueSkill rating system. Ratings in these ladders will now update immediately after the end of any ladder game instead of having to wait hours to see your new rating as you do today. The effect of each ladder game on your rating is shown in the end-game dialog for each game, as well as showing your new rank which will also update immediately.

This also means that games won’t “expire” anymore. Your rating will only change when you finish a game. Ratings will be a much more permanent thing — if you leave the ladder and come back later, your rating will be exactly where it was when you left, regardless of how long you were gone.

Ratings will now start at 100 instead of 0. As part of this refresh, the ratings and ranks of all players on these three ladders will be reset back to the starting point of 100. All players in these ladders were notified about this weeks ago, so this should hopefully not be a surprise to anyone who is affected by it. Everyone will still maintain their history, such as their best ranks and the graphs that show rating history.

Games will also be created more quickly so you won’t have to wait as long to get a game.

Rewards

Today, the ladders only give out points as rewards because that’s all that was available to give out back in 2011. With this new update, all of the ladders will give a variety of rewards, such as coins, idle powers, artifacts, etc. Everyone participating will get rewards, but the rewards will get bigger the better you perform. Over 30,000 coins will be given out every week to ladder players, so the highest ranked players will certainly be rewarded for their skill.

There are two ways to earn rewards: Holding a high rank and achieving a new league (see below.) The rank rewards are given out every Sunday to all players who have been in the ladder for the entire week prior. In other words, if you leave the ladder and re-join during the week, you won’t be eligible for that week’s reward. This incentivises players to stay in the ladder long-term, rather than doing “runs” as was the case in the old ladder.

The gold trophies that can be earned for being #1 will also only be earned if you stay in the ladder for entire week prior to the rewards being given out on Sunday.

Leagues

The 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 ladders will now have leagues, such as Bronze, Silver, Gold, and more. You can achieve a league by raising your rating to specific thresholds. When you enter a new league, you’ll be notified via the end-game window on that game, and you’ll also receive rewards the first time you enter each league. The rewards start weak for Bronze but get more significant as you rise up through the different leagues.

App integration

All of the ladder UI will now be available in the iOS and Android app, instead of only being available on the website as it is today. This means that you can join and leave the ladders via the app, as well as view leaderboards and ladder games and such.

Ladders are the last major feature that has never been integrated into the app, and having app/website parity has been one of Warzone’s long-standing goals. We’ve seen the list of website-only features shrink and shrink over the years, so it’s very satisfying to finally see the last major feature finally get checked off this list!

Team Ladders

The 2v2 and 3v3 ladders today require you to join as a team with your friends. In the new ladders, you will have the option to join individually, in which case you’ll be matched up with other players who also joined individually to play as a team.

In today’s ladder, only the team as a whole has a rating, but in the new ladder each player will have their own rating. This is made possible by TrueSkill which natively supports having a team game where players on each team have different ratings.

It will still be possible to join as a team with your friends, but unlike today’s ladder, your rating won’t start over at 0 every time you switch teammates. Instead your rating is your personal rating which won’t go away just because a teammate changed.

The ladders will try to only match individual teams versus other individual teams, and fixed teams with other fixed teams, but if it can’t be done it will be possible (but should be rare) for a fixed team to be matched with an individual team.

Booting

Today, ladders use a 3-day boot time. This made sense back in 2011, but today we have internet-connected phones and the game is much more accessible. Therefore, boot times for all ladders are being reduced. The 1v1 ladders will use a one-day boot with an additional day of banked time (for a total of 2 days). The team ladders will also use a one-day base boot, but give three days of banked time (for a total of 4 days, which is actually higher than now) to help with teammate coordination. Join ladders when you’re ready to play, not to stall.

In addition, if any player is booted from a ladder, they will be immediately removed from that ladder. This is especially important for team ladders, where a boot can hurt your team. Booting should be rare in ladders as they’re considered the highest level of play.

Seasonal Ladder

The seasonal ladder isn’t receiving as many changes as the other three, but there are a couple small things changing.

First, the seasonal ladder will go back to 60-day seasons like it used to be before it was increased to 75 days.

Second, there will no longer be big gaps in between seasons, as the next season will always be started about a day after the previous season ends.

Third, rewards are being updated, but will only be given out at the end of the season based on your final rank (no weekly rewards or leagues).

For some time, Beren Erchamion has been in charge of picking seasonal ladder templates via community vote. This will still be the case after the refresh, but now that the seasonal ladder is on a more strict schedule, if he fails to pick a template in time it will fall back to Fizzer’s pick.

Template Changes

The templates are staying mostly the same as today. The 3v3 map will switch to the Europe Remake map, which is functionally identical but just looks slightly prettier. The boot times are being reduced (as outlined above).

I am considering changing the ladders to use Pure Skill, since I don’t think that the highest level of play should involve the use of randomness. This would just mean changing the move order from Cyclic to No-luck Cyclic, to eliminate the starting coin flip of who gets first pick. I’m interested to hear community feedback on this change.

Notifications

Finally, the notifications that the ladders send are now much more useful, letting you know what rewards you’ve earned (or how to earn rewards if you didn’t qualify for any), congratulating the top players of the ladder, and announcing what templates will be next in the seasonal ladder.

Conclusion

The new ladders will go live when 5.24.0 is released, which should hopefully be in the next week or two. Hope to see you on the battlefield!