Congratulations to Rubik87 for winning Season III! Rubik87 has now won two of the three seasons – very impressive!

Season IV settings

Season IV will be a luck-less version of the Strategic 1v1 template. Its settings can be accessed by this template: multi-player / single-player.

This template’s settings are the same as Strategic 1v1 with the following exceptions:

• Rounding mode is set to Straight Round (see previous blog post if you don’t know what this is)
• Luck modifier is set to 0%
• Move Order is set to cyclic

With these settings, there’s no luck involved in combat at all. It’s a good idea to learn your kill tables so you know what to predict when sending your armies out. Here’s some of the more important ones:

• 3v2 always wins, leaves a 2 on the catptured territory
• 4v2 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
• 6v4 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
• 2v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
• 1v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
• 1v1 always loses (kills 0 and loses 1)

Ranking Changes

A couple tweaks have been made to the ranking system from Season III.

The biggest change has to do with the way players are matched up. In Season III, players were given games against players with similar ratings to them. This ends up making players move very slowly up or down the ladder once they get established.

To counter this, the matchmaking algorithm will now look at your win/loss record in that season in addition to your rating. Your rating will be adjusted by 80 points for each win/loss over/under an even record ((wins – losses) * 80). This adjusted rating isn’t displayed anywhere, rather it’s used when determining who you’ll be matched against. This will help players who get a late start to the season but win a lot of their early games, helping them get matched against tougher opponents until they start losing.

When thinking about this change, it’s important to remember that the rating itself is already affected by your win/loss record. Therefore, it’s not fair to say that your win/loss record wasn’t taken into account for matchmaking in Season III. It’s fair to say that it’s weighted more heavily for matchmaking in Season IV.

The other change that’s being made has to do with the way that low-games penalty is applied. It’s always been the case that finishing a season with fewer than 20 games gives you a penalty of 40 points per game. This rule exists to ensure players can’t cheat by joining a season very late and getting a couple high-ranking wins to walk away with the #1 rank (or a very high rank.)

In Season III, this was implemented by simply adding 40 points for each finished game, win or loss, up to 20. This has the unintended side-effect of making players who finish games faster get a temporarily higher rating than players who finish them slower. Since your rating is used for matchmaking, this in essence was a penalty to slower players. This is being corrected for Season IV – the points will be added as each game is created, not when they’re finished.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.13.2! This blog post describes what’s changed.

Rounding Mode

WarLight now allows members to control the way that rounding works in combat. When creating a game, members can choose between either Weighted Random or Straight Round.

Weighted Random is the way that all WarLight games have worked up until this point. In this mode, if a combat calculation has a remainder, say 4.3, WarLight will round it up to five 30% of the time, and round it down to four 70% of the time.

Straight Round is a new setting. In this mode, WarLight will always round remainders to the closest number. For example, 4.3 will always round down to four. This is great for those who don’t like random factors in their games.

By combining Straight Round along with a 0% luck modifier, you can remove all luck from the WarLight combat system. Under these settings, you will always know whether an attack will succeed or fail. The combat analyzer shows this best; every point will show a 0% chance to win or a 100% chance to win:

When combined with cyclic move order, fixed cards, and no wastelands, it’s now possible to remove almost all luck from a WarLight game. The only random factor that can’t be removed is the initial seed to the cyclic move order. That means that, if configured properly, you can play a WarLight game that has literally only one random event throughout the entire game.

Chat Room

The same chat room that’s been abuzz on the forums lately now has its own dedicated sub-tab under the Community tab. Drop by if you fancy a conversation.

New Forum Formatting

The forums now allow players to format their posts using BBCode instead of Markdown. This has a few benefits and a few drawbacks, but in the end it was a necessary change for security purposes.

One issue with the old system is that posters would often accidentally activate a feature. For example, in Markdown, starting a line with a pound sign (#) indicated it was a header. This often took players by surprise. BBCode makes the forum formatting much more explicit, so it’s unlikely this kind of accident will happen.

Another issue with the old system became apparent whenever someone would make a list of links. Markdown would only making every other link clickable. The new system will properly make all links clickable.

Misc Changes

– Players who are inactive for more than 20 days are now automatically removed from ladders. They will be sent an e-mail notifying them of this event.
– The automatic zooming now zooms 20% less far in.
– Changed the way that Flash authenticates with the website to a more secure method.
– Fixed a bug that occurred when you clicked a map review’s edit button multiple times.
– Fixed a bug with the lobby that made the headers be mis-aligned over the player names.
– Fixed a bug that could make your income go negative when negative sanctions took it over 2 billion. Instead, your income will just be 0, which still isn’t correct but at least it will no longer break the game.
– Fixed a bug that made the browser hang if you tried to graph a game’s statistics before the first turn completed.
– Fixed a bug that gave an error if you tried to use the Statistics panel during territory distribution.
– Fixed a bug with the in-game map browser that caused maps to show the wrong page when changing filters.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you clicked “okay” in the attack/transfer dialog and pressed enter immediately after.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you sent a message over 1024 characters to tournament chat.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message when loading history on games that had turns where no players entered an order.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error message if you clicked re-do orders but then all opponents committed orders and the game refreshed before you clicked confirm.

A new version of WarLight for Android is now available! The installation instructions are the same as normal. You can find them on the wiki.

Here’s what’s new:

• The app should now work on Ice Cream Sandwich devices.
• The orders list now slides out over the map instead of being accessed via the menu. The ability to select and re-sequence orders will come in a later release. For now you can only view and delete them.
• Cards now have pictures, and a lot of the card UI was touched up.
• Automatic zooming, similar to the Flash version.
• Double-tapping the map now zooms in and out.
• Game menu is now grouped into sub-sections.
• Team and Public chat are now separate items on the menu, and now flash when new chat is pending.
• Fixed a bug that caused cards with 0 pieces to show on the cards list.
• Changing an attack’s mode (attack/transfer, attack only, transfer only) now cycles between the three instead of popping up another menu.
• Screens that allow you to select a player now show the player’s color.
• Fixed a bug that caused the title of the Cards screen to be wrong sometimes.
• Fixed sizing of many items throughout the app, as well as alignment of text in many places.
• The magnifying glasses no longer get obscured by the history buttons.
• Volume buttons now adjust the app’s volume more reliably.
• Numerous other bug fixes throughout the app.

Please e-mail me at fizzer@warlight.net with feedback!

WarLight has just been upgraded to 1.13.0! Most of my time is being spent on the mobile client these days (mobile update coming soon!), however this release does contain a few fixes and improvements to the browser version.

This blog post describes the changes that were made.

Automatic Zooming

In addition to being able to pan the map around when zoomed in, WarLight will now also zoom the map in and out to ensure that the order you’re watching or selected is always appropriately visible on the screen.

This eliminates a couple annoyances that used to exist. For example, if you were zoomed in and an airlift order plays, the map would pan over to the center of the airlift. If you’re zoomed in too far, you would only see the center of the airlift and couldn’t see either the source or the destination. Another example is attacks that wrap around the map – you would just see one side of the attack and wouldn’t be able to see the other.

Now, WarLight will zoom out for that attack or airlift so that you can see the entire order, then automatically zoom back in for the next order.

This is especially useful for the extremely large maps or low-resolution screens. On these maps, often the first thing players do after pulling up a game is zoom in. Now the game takes care of this for you when you click Watch Turn.

If you prefer to control the zoom yourself, you can disable this by clicking Configure Camera on the Settings tab. Change it to “Pan only” to go back to the previous behavior.

Card Visibility Change

A relatively minor change was made to the information that is shown when a card you can’t see gets played. First, some background. There are two settings that control the visibility of opponent’s cards:

• Card Playing: This controls whether or not you can see the cards your opponent plays if it would otherwise be invisible. For example, if they play an abandon card on a territory you can see, they can always see the card being played. However, if they play an abandon card on a territory that you can’t see, this setting determines whether or not it’s shown to you.
• Card Holdings and Receiving: This controls whether or not you can see what cards your opponent receives each turn as well as what cards they hold in their hand.

The change being made only affects games where you can see the cards your opponent is holding and receiving, but cannot see cards they play. In this configuration, it used to be possible for the history to show misleading information. This is best explained with an example.

Let’s say you’re in a game that includes the abandon card and uses normal fog. Say the game is on turn 10, and your opponent received an abandon card on turn 7, and played it on turn 8. They played it on a territory you could not see, and therefore history does not show you that the card was played at all.

Now, since you can see the cards they hold in their hand, if you look at the cards panel the game will correctly show that they do not have an abandon card. This part was always showed correct information.

The problem was that if you looked in history at turn 9, it showed that the opponent did have an abandon card, which was incorrect. This happens because history can see all of cards your opponent received, however it couldn’t see them playing the card. Therefore, it thought the card was still in their hand.

To fix this, the game now injects events into the orders list whenever your opponent plays a card that you can’t see. You still can’t see any information about the card being played (such as what territory was abandoned), the only thing you get to know is when the card was played. The event will simply say “Soandso played an abandon card in the fog.”

With this fix now in place, history will always show what cards the player has correctly.

Misc Changes

– Map lists are now paginated.
– Partially-completed cards now start splitting themselves at the top instead of the right.
– Fixed a few issues with the in-game graphs. The vertical values now always line up, spacing was added around the edges, and fixed tooltips that appear at the bottom of the graph.
– Fixed a bug with the My Games page that caused inconsistencies when sorting by game name when the game names started with numbers or symbols.
– Fixed a bug which allowed players to decline and re-join to get around the 6-person non-member limit.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error in single-player if the player hammered the Z hotkey multiple times in a row.

For the next two weeks, WarLight is accepting applications for players who want to help test the WarLight app for iPhone or iPod touch.

The app isn’t done, however it works well enough to take your turn in multi-player games. For a full list of of the features that aren’t implemented yet, see Mobile Client on the wiki.

Due to Apple’s restrictions, the number of players that can be accepted is very limited. Only WarLight members may apply.

Click here to apply. (EDIT: Link taken down, thanks to everyone who applied). This link will stay up until May 7th.

This app does work on iPads, however the focus of this release is to test iPhones and iPod touches. If you want to apply with your iPad, you may do. However, iPhones will get priority, and iPad users will only be chosen if there’s space left over.

Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

WarLight was just upgraded to version 1.12.2.

Attack dialog tweaks

To further improve the work done in the previous release, the way that the attack/transfer dialog detects double-clicks has been tweaked again. Double-clicking to attack with all armies should work more reliably now, especially when issuing attacks near the top of the screen.

Further, the way the hot-spots discussed in the last blog post work was changed so that they’re only active when your cursor starts over them. This means more than one hot-spot will never be active at the same time, and none will be active when your cursor starts over the Okay button.

Let me know if this works better or worse than before!

Filesize Fix

Due to some strange issue, a change I made to the WarLight preloader in the previous release caused the filesize to jump from 1.7mb to 2.4mb.

I reverted the preloader change in this release, so this should bring the size back down and speed up the loading time of the Flash file.

WarLight was just updated to version 1.12.1. This release contains a bunch of small improvements and minor bug fixes.

Arrow clicking

When issuing attacks, WarLight now registers clicks on the arrow itself instead of just the destination territory.

This makes it easier to issue attacks that wrap around the map when zoomed in. Note that this only works when the arrow is over water — clicking a territory always has precedence over clicking an arrow.

Attack Dialog Position

The way that the attack/transfer dialog positions itself has been changed so that it never appears in a location that will be off the screen.

The reason it appeared off-screen is because it made sure it always positioned itself so that your mouse cursor was over the “Okay” button. This allows for simply double-clicking when you want to attack with all available armies, which is what you want to do most of the time. This is my favorite kind of UI paradigm since it requires no training. There’s no text in WarLight telling players that they can double-click to attack with all armies, it’s just something players intuitively pick up once they realize their cursor always starts over the “Okay” button.

This release contains an experimental system to both keep the dialog on the screen and also make sure that the double-click feature continues to work. The dialog now contains three invisible hot-spots in the corners. Clicking any of these spots is the equivalent to clicking the “Okay” button. They’re show as blue circles in this image:

WarLight tries to open this dialog with your cursor over the Okay button, but if it isn’t possible it will open it so your cursor is directly centered in one of these hot spots. This ensures that double-clicking still attacks as normal, but it also allows the dialog to always appear on the screen.

Let me know what you think of this!

Nudge Timer

Players can now only be nudged if they haven’t taken their turn in a game for 24 hours, instead of the old value of 30 minutes. This means players that play their turns once every 24 hours won’t be able to be nudged at all.

When nudging was introduced way back in 2008, WarLight didn’t differentiate between multi-day and real-time games. Therefore, a nudge duration of 30 minutes was chosen as a compromise between fast games and slow games. This decision ended up not working for either format, since 30 minutes is way too long for a real-time game and far too short for a multi-day game.

Nudge, in its current implementation, doesn’t really work in real-time games at all since players aren’t checking their e-mail. At some point, I’d like to make nudge work differently, such as putting a message on the My Games page or playing a unique sound.

Misc Changes

– Map pages now place the map’s name in the page’s title.
– Added an explanation to the history dialog to help new players understand it.
– Clicking on the seasonal ladder from the Dashboard now takes you to that season instead of the list of seasons.
– Minor text changes were made on the map page. Removed the text “so far” after “x players found this review helpful” and changed “First went public on” to “Went public on”
– Fixed a bug that was preventing the Flash file from being resized down too small vertically.
– Fixed a bug that broke the question-mark link next to a game creator’s Personal Message.
– Fixed a bug in the map designer that caused bonuses to sometimes become unclickable.
– Fixed a bug that in rare cases caused the deployment slider to not close when a game ended.

Congrats to PaniX on winning Season II! It really came right down to the wire, but PaniX pulled into the lead at the last second. Nice work on a 17-3 season!

Season III will be the first ladder to feature a map other than Medium Earth. Season III will be played on the East Asia & Oceania map!

One of the biggest fundamental differences from Medium Earth is that this map doesn’t wrap around the sides. That means the map effectively has a middle, sides, and corners. Even though it has 8 fewer territories than Medium Earth, this can make it feel larger.

Season III will begin this Friday, April 13th, at midnight GMT. If you were part of Season II, you’re automatically signed up for Season III. If you left Season II, you’ll need to re-join the seasonal ladder to take part in Season III.

You can use this template to see the exact settings: multi-player, single-player.

Good luck!

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.12.0! This blog post contains a list of what’s changed.

Map Ratings

The number of public WarLight maps has exploded over the last year! This is a good thing, but it also means that it’s becoming difficult when browsing maps to find a map you really like.

Starting today, players can now elect to rate maps after they’ve played a game on them. These ratings will then produce an average map rating which can be used to help find highly rated maps.

Whenever a game finishes, players will see a new button in the upper-left that allows them to rate the map used in that game:

Clicking this will give you a choice of between 1 and 5 stars, where the stars have a meaning as follows:

• 1 star: This map is not recommended.
• 2 stars: This map is okay.
• 3 stars: This map is good.
• 4 stars: This map is great.
• 5 stars: This map is amazing!

The ability to rate a map is only available to players who have actually played a game to completion on the map. This helps prevent drive-by ratings, where someone looks at a map for a couple seconds and makes up their mind without even trying it. By not allowing drive-by ratings, the hope is that the map’s average rating will be more influenced by the people who like that type of map.

If you want to start rating maps you’ve played before this rating system existed, just go to your My Games page, set the filter to “All Games”, click a finished game, and you’ll find the “Rate This Map” button in the upper-left corner.

The button will let you know if you’ve already rated that map, so you can also just continue playing WarLight normally and use the “Rate This Map” button when it comes up naturally.

Players can change or remove their rating at any time, which is important for cases where the map creator fixes up their map and players want to reward them for doing so.

Map Reviews

In addition to ratings, players can also write reviews of maps. Players can use this to share their feedback on a map in a public setting, such as to make suggestions, point out bugs or flaws in the map, or to share interesting game settings to use with the map.

Map creators have the ability to write a response to every review. If they fix a bug pointed out in a review, or just want to thank the player for their nice feedback, their response will be displayed right next to the review.

Just like with ratings, players and map creators can edit or delete their reviews/responses at any time, so they can always be kept up-to-date as the map evolves.

In addition, reviews can be up-voted and down-voted by players based on the usefulness of the review. This helps the most useful reviews bubble to the top and gain the most visibility.

Favorite Maps

WarLight now supports marking maps as a favorite. This allows you to build up a list of maps you want the ability to refer to often.

Additionally, players can select up to three maps to display on their profile as their favorites. These don’t have to be the same as their private favorites list.

This originated from a feature that map creators often requested. They wanted a way to show off the maps that they’ve made on their profile, which previously was not possible.

Rather than just blindly adding every map that someone made to their profile, I decided it would be better players had the option of choosing which of their maps they wanted to show off. Sometimes players will make maps for other players, or maybe have a map they aren’t as proud of that they don’t really want to show off. Some players just have made too many maps to list them all, so it’s natural to make a page to allow selecting of which maps to show.

But then I figured, why restrict this just to maps you made? Instead, players can now pick any map they’d like to show on their profile. If you’re a map creator and want to show off your own maps, you can now do so. If you’re not a map creator, you can use this to show players which maps you enjoy the most.

Map Page

All of a map’s ratings and reviews are viewable on the new maps page.

This page existed before, but it’s now a first-class citizen with its own sub-tab off of the Home tab. It’s also gained filtering and sorting functionality, and generally performs much better than the Flash map browser so it’s the preferred way of browsing maps.

Both this page and the Flash map browser gained a few new filtering and sorting options. Of course, they can sort by the map’s average rating (maps must receive 10 ratings before their average is considered valid.) They can also sort by how new the map is, or filter down to just maps added in the last 30 days, which makes it easy to find new maps beyond the two the dashboard shows.

The Flash map browser can also sort by your personal rating, filter down to maps you’ve favorited, or filter out maps that you’ve rated two stars or below.

Website Navigation Changes

A few pages under the Home and Community tabs were moved around. This isn’t something I like to do often, as re-training yourself where to click to find pages is always painful.

However, there were a few things about the old format I didn’t like. The Community tab was under-used, as the main reason anybody went there was just to get to the forum. The Dashboard is meant to be the central hub of the WarLight community, and yet it wasn’t even under the Community tab! Further, the Home page was overloaded, and going to warlight.net and clicking Home took you to different places which is strange. Further yet, the landing page under Community was practically useless, and the links that were there kept getting missed by players. Additionally there was a disconnect I never liked between the dashboard and the forum. The dashboard is where many players go to check for the latest forum posts, yet they weren’t even located under the same primary tab.

In this new design, the Home tab’s goal is to be mostly static information and things for players just getting started with WarLight. The Community tab’s goal is to be things that players that have been playing for a while will want to access more frequently, such as the dashboard, forum, and ladder pages.

Misc Changes

– Map creators can now edit the descriptions of their maps even after they’re public.
– It’s now possible to report a player through a link at the bottom of their profile. As a result, players no longer need to be in a game with someone to report them.
– Fixed a bug that caused the sub-tab images to be off by a pixel in Firefox.
– Fixed a bug when loading a template that used a custom scenario that could cause players to default to the wrong slot.
– Fixed a bug that occurred when loading a multi-player template in single-player that had “AIs surrender when one human remains” enabled.
– Fixed an error that occurred if players entered a number greater than 2.1 billion for “maximum number of cards you can hold without playing any”
– Fixed a bug in the create game wizard that made the auto-boot drop down change back to “Never” when clicking previous and then next.
– Fixed a bug that caused territories to not be brought to the front when selected via the “more info” link.

WarLight was just updaded to 1.11.1. The primary purpose of this release was to upgrade the version of PostgreSQL that powers the database from 8 to 9.

In addition to the database upgrade, a few bugs were fixed:

– Fixed a bug that caused failed attacks by percentage to consider an incorrect number of armies used.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you were looking at a game while the host deleted it.
– Fixed a bug with BayeseloLog that occurred when players used non-ascii characters in their name.
– Fixed a bug that could cause an error on the Open Games tab.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error when browsing history in rare circumstances.
– Fixed a bug that made tournament’s forward invites button give errors when you weren’t in the tournament.
– Added the general invite url back onto the Invitation Network page.