This post continues revealing new features in Phase 21. Read Part 1 if you haven’t.

Real-time games get a clock!

Another addition in Phase 21 is a timer that counts down in the top-right corner of the screen:

The timer counts down to the boot time configured for the game, so it’s always clear how much time you have before you risk being booted. The timer will continue to run even after submitting your orders, that way you know if you have enough time to re-do them if you notice a mistake.

While the clock is a small addition, just increasing awareness of the boot timer should go a long ways towards reducing the number of times players are booted unexpectedly.

Blockade Card

Phase 21 will bring the addition of the blockade card, which you can think of as a less effective abandon card. The blockade card works much like the abandon card, except the blockade card happens at the end of your turn instead of the beginning. This means any attacks, airlifts, or other actions happen before the territory changes into a neutral and increases its armies.

The advantage of using the blockade card in lieu of the abandon card in your games means that, on offense, you won’t have to worry about your large stacks getting devastated. Since the blockades happen after attacks, your offensive stacks can freely move around without hitting any unexpected neutrals.

The blockade card is great for people who like the abandon card’s ability to block off pathways around the map, but don’t like the abandon card’s ability to decimate opposing armies. Since the latter strategy is so powerful, it means that in some cases, abandon cards would mostly be used as a way to take armies away from your opponent by abandoning the spot they were about to attack. This meant that there were few abandon cards left over to create blockades.

The blockade card is a little more difficult to use than the abandon card. When playing a blockade card, it’s very important to ensure you still own the territory you’re blockading at the end of your turn. If you lose the territory you played the card on, the card will have no effect and you don’t get the card back. Therefore, it’s recommended that you play this on territories that you know you won’t lose, such as those that don’t touch an opponent or that are sufficiently defended.

Even though Phase 21 is mostly about open games, the blockade card was thrown in since it was fairly easy to add. It should be a great addition, and I think it’s far better suited for 1 v 1 matches than the abandon card is. In a 1 v 1 match, the ability to take your opponents armies away with a well-predicted abandon is extremely powerful. This puts a lot of emphasis on predicting where your opponent will attack, which I don’t like. I’m going to make a big 1 v 1 tournament using the blockade card to test this out – post a reply if you’d like to be invited.

Automatic Games

Wrapping up the last big feature of Phase 21 is automatic games. This is an experimental feature designed to help new players have fun with multi-player right off the bat. WarLight will automatically create games made up of open seats, and ensure new ones are created whenever the existing ones fill up. This means there will always be a game available for new players to join.

This also demonstrates part of the reason why the Open Games tab was created (covered in part 1). Since there will always be at least one open game, it doesn’t make sense to advertise them on the top of the My Games tab like they were before.

For the initial release, there will only be three automatic games. These were picked to give the feature the best chance of success – if these work out well, more may be created in future releases. If they don’t work out well, they may be removed.

Two of them are Strategic 1 v 1 games – one real-time, and one multi-day. 1 v 1 games should work well for automatic games since they’ll fill up and start fast and collusion isn’t possible. The third is a multi-day newbie game, which uses open seat prerequisites to ensure that only new players can join. Since veterans are kept out, the skill level should be more appropriate, helping new players to ween themselves onto multi-player.

It’s an open game extravaganza! First, business:

WarLight will be going down on Wednesday, December 15th at 1am PST (9am GMT) for up to an hour. Please plan accordingly for any fast games that may get interrupted during this 1-hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to Beta Phase 21. Once the deployment is complete, you can view all of the changes on the Change History page.

Open Seat Prerequisites

Once Phase 21 is live, WarLight will allow game creators to specify prerequisites that players must meet in order to join open seats in their games.

Here are some examples of prerequisites game creators could specify:

– Players must get booted in fewer than 10% of their games.
– Players must have completed at least 10 games.
– Players must have an average move speed of less than 1 hour.
– Players must have been a WarLight member for at least 30 days. (no newbies)
– Players must have been a WarLight member for fewer than 30 days. (newbies only)

Players that don’t meet the requirements you set won’t even see your game, and therefore won’t be allowed to join it. This will help players get matched up with the kind of players they’re looking for.

Separation of real-time games and multi-day games

Until now, WarLight multi-player games have been mostly geared towards play-by-email speed of play. These kind of games usually play one or two turns per day and play out over the course of a few weeks. However, some people prefer a more rapid style of play, where games are played in real-time.

Both styles of play are supported by WarLight, but there is room for improvement in the current model. For example, new WarLight players often have a hard time distinguishing between these two types of games. Veterans know to check the boot time when evaluating whether or not to join a game, and the low-boot-time warning certainly helps, but these are cumbersome to discover as a new player.

Most players have an expectation for how fast multi-player games will move before they enter. Either they are used to single-player games which play out quickly and therefore expect real-time multi-player games, or they see the e-mail notification feature and expect a multi-day game. Sometimes, new players get into a game that isn’t the speed they expect. This causes a bad experience for everyone involved – either they get booted if they’re waiting on an e-mail of a real-time game, or they whine about the turn not advancing when people don’t play immediately in a multi-day game.

After Phase 21, WarLight will categorize games into one of these two categories. This will help set expectations for new players. When players create a new game, they will actually be asked whether it is real-time or multi-day:

This will constrain the boot times that can be used, and also help players pick the correct type on the new open games tab.

Open Games Tab

The little advertisement on top of the My Games tab will be replaced with a dedicated tab to open games:

The first time a player navigates to this tab, WarLight will give a short explanation of what real-time and multi-day games are and ask them which they seek. This will ensure that players always get the speed of game they’re expecting, and should cut down on some of the boot issues players run into in open games.

The My Games advertisement worked well for drawing players attention to an open game, but it wasn’t very usable since it didn’t show any settings about that game and wasn’t practical when there were lots of open games. Further, the whole idea of not appearing when there were no open games created a lot of confusion. When there were no open games, it was impossible for new players to understand how to go about joining open games – this was a very frequent pain point. Further yet, open seat prerequisites make calculating your open games a more time-consuming operation, and it doesn’t make sense to do this on every refresh of the My Games tab.

More features in part 2 of this blog post!

One of the new features that was introduced yesterday was Banking Boot Times. This feature replaced the old Sliding Boot Times feature. While they act fairly similarly, Banking Boot Times gives more control and should be much easier to understand.

The problems with Sliding Boot Times

Let’s start by understanding what the problems were with Sliding Boot Times. Sliding Boot Times averaged out a player’s play speed for the last 10 turns, and then compared this average with the boot time to determine if a player was bootable.

One problem with this approach is that it could cause a long delay if a quick player stopped playing. For example, if the boot time is set to 24 hours, and a player takes their first 10 turns quickly (say, within an hour) then they would not be bootable for over 10 days! While it’s good to reward a player who plays quickly, giving them 10 days in a 24 hour game is too much.

This naturally leads to making your boot timers lower than they would be without Sliding Boot Times. For example, if you set an 7 hour Sliding Boot Time, this makes the maximum boot time becomes 67 hours. This is more reasonable, although still a tad high. But the bigger problem with this strategy is revealed in the early turns of the game. If the game happens to start right as someone is going to bed, they’ll be bootable before they wake up. A 7 hour Sliding Boot Time works in the long run, but is too low for the early turns.

To combat this, Sliding Boot Times gave extra leeway for the first ten turns of the game. Basically, it “filled in” any missing data points with half of the boot time. While this solves the above issue, it also created a lot of confusion around the feature as players often saw early boot times that were significantly higher than they expected.

The solution

I thought for a while about how to solve these problems. Some good ideas were suggested on the forums, but I also wanted to make sure that the system was drop-dead simple to understand. I wanted to avoid anything with complex math formulas, since I want players to always feel like they know exactly what is going on (principle of least surprise). This is one place I failed when I first made Sliding Boot Times.

Banking Boot Times solves both of these issues. When banking boot times is enabled, whenever you take a turn under the boot time, you “bank” some of that time. You can then spend some of this banked time to go over the boot time in subsequent turns. The game creator can also configure what percentage of the difference that players bank.

Let’s look at an example. For now, let’s assume the game creator configured it to bank 100% of the time. If the boot time is set to 24 hours, and Sally takes her turn after 20 hours, she’ll bank 4 hours. This means that, for the next turn, she could wait until 28 hours have passed before she’ll become bootable. Any time she waits over 24 hours, she eats into her bank. So if she takes 27 hours on the next turn, she uses three of her banked hours and her bank is reduced to one hour.

You can always see how much time a player has banked by opening the nudge/boot dialog and clicking the “speed” link.

The game creator can configure what percentage of the difference is banked on each turn. For example, if the game creator sets the amount banked to 25%, then Sally would have only banked 1 hour instead of the 4.

Since players gain banked time at a reduced rate, and spend it at the full rate, this makes the swings in maximum boot time much smaller. This solves the first problem stated above. Game creators can use this to configure exactly how much swing in the minimum / maximum boot times they want to allow. Doing this made the early-game leeway provided by Sliding Boot Times unnecessary, so that’s gone completely. This solves the second problem stated above.

One way at looking at this is that Banking Boot Times configured at 0% is the same as not having the feature on at all. On the flipside, Banking Boot Times configured at 100% is the same as the old Sliding Boot Times feature (minus the early-game leeway). Since you now have the ability to specify the percentage, you can decide how much you really want your boot times to be affected.

Also, note that any games that previously used Sliding Boot Times were converted to games using Banking Boot Times at a 50% bank rate.

I’m open to any opinions about what you think about the feature, or how you’d like to see it improved. Let me know!

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.