Welcome to the warlords remake

[SnotlinG]

Continued working on the city functionallity for the last few days. No major news yet. Working on the diffrent options you have when conquerin a city and how/what information to send from the server to the client.

Also did some minor work to capture army/gold/events every turn, for the history reports.

[piranha]

The last days I have focused on rewriting the battle system that was half made before and with our own temporary propability calculator.
The new one works just like it does in original warlords. I got a lot of expertise information from the owner of http://www.warlorders.com a popular forum for warlord players.

There is also a heavy infantry in the game now. The list of units left to do is getting shorter and shorter.
There is some code left to rewrite on capture cities.

I will start making a new better map soon to have something that we can try the game on.

[SnotlinG]

Was away for a few days last week, but Im now back and have continued on the city functionality.
After Piranha updated the battlefunctions, I have worked to re-enable the citycapture functions, which is now working again.
Im also looking into attacks vs empty cities, which is working but the design is a bit wanting at the moment.
Also the the popup occupy-option window now comes up and when occupying the city you will be taken to the city info screen automatically

Next things in the pipeline is attacks vs cities who has defenders in the 3 other tiles, to get them updated correctly in the client after the attack. (the attack already works correctly on the server as well as on the battlepopup)
I Also need to look into the money-system, income every turn, upkeep costs, as well as stealing money when occupy. Also the options for sack, pillage and raze is left to do.

Edit: Surviving defenders in the other 3 citytiles now gets updated properly

[SnotlinG]

Have created the basic gold/income system now. Cities generate income every turn, which is added to your total amount of gold, also armies cost upkeep at the start of everyturn (before new armies are built).
If your total amount of gold goes to 0, your current production for that turn will be lost, and also the production in the cities who tried to produce this turn will be halted.

Will have a look on sack/pillage now and implement their effect in the game.
Also need to update that conquering a city will affect the gold of the 2 involved players

[SnotlinG]

For now I have skipped sack/pillage and implemented a "plunder" option instead. This destroys all production in the city, and gives the player half of the productioncost.
The reason for this is that units in our game are not sorted in cost-order when showing a city, it just shows the units in the order they where bought, so there is no guarantee the unit most to the right is the most valuable. Also when bying new units it is not possible to select the exact old unit that will be replaced with the new one, rather the unit most to the left is lost as the new one is added.
Maybe we will redesign this later on, but for now I dont see the big advantage with the two options instead of one more self-explaining one.

Still need to fix that a player conquering a city steals gold from its previous owner.

[SnotlinG]

Added the stealing of gold from the previous cityowner. The previous owner will lose Gold/Cities in gold when he/she loses the city. The player conquering the city will get Gold/(2*cities) in gold, i.e. half of the amount.

Also done some buggfixing in the unit buy-code and updated the info in the client so it displays Gold, Income and Upkeep now. Need to update the income and Gold in the client (already done on serverside) during the turn if the player buys new units or takes new cities...

Will fix the Raze option first though
Then I have to add cities to the mapeditor, so Piranha can add them properly when building the first beta-map.

I just figured out how to post images to the forum, so heres a preview of the beta version of the popup

[SnotlinG]

Just a quick update. I have completed the raze option so it is now possible to raze a city at capture.
After this I am now focusing on the mapeditor for a while to make it able to handle cities, generating random names & production capabilities. (this is already more or less complete)

Will also add so you can decide what cities will be capitals/starting citites, and make it possible to edit the random generated production of each city on your map before releasing it. This will take a few more days to complete, and then I will be able to turn focus back to the last in-game city stuff like vectoring, updating cityname etc... Also the minimap will be a big challenge

[SnotlinG]

Completed the neccesseray development on the mapeditor for adding cities (more work to refine the layout and maybe some nice-to-have functions will be done later). Unfortunately our current map happened to get wiped out during my work I´ll see if we can restore it from backups, otherwise we will just build a new one.

Now I need to start looking at the game-setup/generation phase, to get the cities created properly when starting the game. Now its not much left before we can run a beta-test-game

Screen of one of the citypopups in the mapeditor. Doesnt look like that much, but its alot of work behind the scenes


And since Piranha is a bit busy with other stuff the last days, I´ll take the liberty to post a small screen of his razed city grafics

[SnotlinG]

Unfortunately I have been busy by beeing sick the last days So havent been so much updates.
Anyway I have now completed parts of the initialize game functionality.

When initializing a new game the following happens:
The random starting city gets placed properly (i.e. randomized between in the mapeditor decided startingpositions),
Production gets randomized at the game initialization, i.e. diffrent prod between games on the same map. Starting cities also have randomized production, but they have a "good" class, i.e. they should always get something good.
Default fightorders gets setup for all players.
The starting unit is produced in every city, i.e. the best unit that city can produce that is.

Im skipping heroes for now, as we will program the functionality for them later on anyway.
The most important part left for me now before betatest is to add the ability to fight with (and capture cities) from the Neutral´s. I don´t think this should be very tough though

[piranha]

I've completed the rest of the units now. Some units could use some fine tuning but they are all in place now.

Yesterday I sorted out bugs and uncompleted details here and there. We will start a beta game for those who are interested. I will host it tomorrow (Sunday) I think it will be a 8 player game and as soon as there are 8 ppl in the game we will start it.

I will post on some forums when we have set it up.

This truly early beta test but for us it will be lot of fun to see the game that we have been working hard on in action.