Announcing Beta Phase 20

Hurray for new features! First, business:

WarLight will be going down on Thursday, November 25th at 6am PST (2pm GMT) for up to 2 hours. Please plan accordingly for any fast games that may get interrupted during this 2-hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to Beta Phase 20. Once the deployment is complete, you can view all of the changes on the Change History page.

What’s in Phase 20, you ask? Well, here’s a sneak preview…

AI replaces booted/surrendered players

You asked for it, you got it! The #1 voted feature on the UserVoice forum is finally here! Game creators get two new options:

– Players turn into AI controlled players when booted
– Players turn into AI controlled players when surrendered

Game creators can choose one or both of these. These are useful for a few scenarios. For example, in big FFA games, an early surrendered player previously meant that adjacent players now had an advantage. Not only do they not have to worry about that player invading them or continuing to grow, but sometimes they can easily sweep through and gain new land. When AIs replace surrendered players, this somewhat negates this advantage. Of course, AIs are unpredictable (and almost never better than a human player), so it may also cause some fun chaos :)

Also, it’s important to note that the AI really does take the place of the player that it replaced. This means that if the AI somehow ends up winning, that player gets credited for a win. This is useful in another scenario, the one where you’re cruising over the planet and on the verge of winning, but – oh no! – your power goes out or you can’t stay to finish out the game. No problem! If your opponent boots you, they’d still need to beat your AI replacement. If you really were on the verge of winning, your AI will finish the game out for you with ease, which we’ll all appreciate when it means we can move to the next round of a tournament.

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about that other pesky UserVoice item, “AI replaces booted players. Game is over when AI is the only opponent.” Sometimes you don’t want to have to finish off the AI manually. For you, game creators have yet another new setting:

– AI players surrender when only one human remains.

When this is enabled, the AIs will pop up surrender boxes as soon as the game gets down to only one human player (or one human team in team games). The remaining human can choose to have fun slaughtering them, or just accept the surrenders and end the game right away.

But wait! There’s more…

Instant-surrender option

Of the features that aren’t in the game yet, this is the most-asked-for small feature in the history of WarLight. Some people really don’t like having to wait for their surrender to be accepted. Well, good news! You can now configure your games to have surrenders happen instantly, without needing to be accepted by anybody.

There’s a few other new nuggets in this release too that will remain surprises for now.

2 thoughts on “Announcing Beta Phase 20”

  1. COLORS: I love your site so far. However, I was born with color blindness. I cannot “see” green light. Therefore, it is EXTREMELY difficult for me to make out borders and also differentiate between neutral and aqua or teal colored gamers.
    I ask that some consideration be given to revamp the colors to make the shades more unique.

    Thank you.

    1. Unfortunately trying to find 24 unique colors that can easily be differentiated is next to impossible, even for non-color blind people. One of my good friends is also color blind and plays WarLight a lot, so we’ve talked about this extensively. He gets by just by clicking the territories is reading who controls it on the left side.

      In the future I hope to add patterns of some kind to the territories instead of just colors. I hope this will help.

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