Welcome to the warlords remake

[SnotlinG]

Added a change to city defence. Each city now has a citywall-level which controls the citys defence strength.
Basically it goes like this:
citywall level 8 = defence strength 3
citywall level 6-7 = defence strength 2
citywall level 3-6 = defence strength 1
citywall level 0-2 = defence strength 0

Every time a city is conquered it will lose 1 point of citywall level.
The costs are currently 50, 100, 200 and 400 for upgrading. And the upgrade is happening directly. I was thinking of adding a buildtime for the upgrade, but its probably not a good idea as well as a lot of work to implement it

I have not yet Added functionality for citywalllevel startingvalues, but most likely I´ll let the starting cities start at level 7 per default and randomize the neutral cities a bit. Possibly we will add options in the hosting for controling this. Or maybe some kind of randomize for starting cities also (but giving all the players the same level)

Its a bit slow going, but I also found a bunch of bugs regarding hero leveling at the same time as conquering a new city as well as a bug for endturn-sync-phase of city updates, so I guess thats good also

After this is done, the next thing in pipeline for me is the possibility to set your fightorder, i.e. in what order your units will do battle...

[SnotlinG]

Some misc updates,

# Found & finally fixed a serious bug that has been causing issues with grouping functionality and also affecting the armydata as well as affecting upkeep costs. I hope this is the last I will see of this bug, its been quite though to track down

# Now allowing whitespaces in city-names and hero-names

# Fixed citywalls in initgame. So far its pretty basic. All player startingcities will start with lvl7, all neutrals will start with level 3-7 (randomized).

# Started to catch the options sent by the hosted game during game initialization, like cities allowed to produce allies etc, not done yet though.

# Built some better error messages, if you try to move a unit when its not your turn you will now get a popup-message. Same goes for a variety of other things that you could try to do for diffrent reasons.
- Still has some work left to do on the out-of-sync message

fightorder is still in the pipeline...

[piranha]

I've been working on the battle functions now for a while.

New unit specials are:
+ vs flying units
Cancel terrain bonus
Critical strike
Naval battles
Negative city bonus

At the moment all land units are capped at STR 4 when fighing on water. The hero will keep his strength if there is a flying unit in the stack.
We haven't decided 100% how to treat bonuses in naval battles.

We can now have several type of dices. The current one (20 sides) and a 24 sided dice (this dice will bring more randomness which will make many low level units better and few high level units less good compared to the 20 sided one)
Dice is set when hosting a game. 20 sided is default.

[piranha]

I've worked on the chat. If you receive a message while playing the chat button will start to flash. Its being checked every 45 seconds.

Also there is a new side button for battle reports that will flash when you open the game if someone attacked you since last time you checked the game.

The new features are only available from beta2.

I also received the first units from our guy who is redrawing our graphics. Very cool stuff . WAY more professional that what we have now. Here are four of them.


These ones are in 64x64 compared to current 48x48 which we will change to later when the interface is redesigned, probably for Beta 3.

[SnotlinG]

Even though it hasnt been that many updates lately, we have quietly been working pretty hard for beta2 to meet our own deadline. Unfortunately it seems we wont make it to the end of May, as we want to press in as many updates as possible
We are almost done though, and are aiming to open the system for bet2-rounds end of next week.

List of new features in beta2:

# Internal community mailsystem
# Improved gamelobby layout (including new advanced tab)
# Gamelobby new settings: Produce allies, Dice (20 or 24), Starting armyset
# Possibility to password protect hosted game
# City defence is controlled by a new citywall level value. (Which can be upgraded independently)
# Hero from start, get to choose between 3 diffrent hero-types (identical stats though)
# Hero leveling through XP
# New hero offers (increased chance to get a new hero if your first hero dies during the first turns)
# Window queue system (i.e. events are waiting to happen until you close opened window)
# Minimap includes hills and mountains
# New beta-test map, bigger and more well-made (last map was built in ~1 hour )
# Startunits for the players are in categories (standard and good)
# Cityincome changed. Standard cities have 15-25 in income, capitals have 60
# Better error messages (including out of sync message)
# More tutorial messages added
# Battle report shortkey is flashing if you have been attacked since your last turn
# Chat shortkey is flashing if you have unread messages
# Chat improved
# Battlesystem updated, critical strike added, as well as new anti flyer bonus and new cancel terrain bonus
# Unit statistics updated for balancing.
# Fightorder added (possibility to set your own customized fightorder that is)
# Battle-popup layout modified to account for battles with large armies
# Bug with adding/removing units to the group when the army is outside the mainmap is fixed
# Bug not allowing you to move through your own armies if the total number of armies was more than 8 is fixed
# Archer unit changed to Elf unit
# New Battering Ram unit added
# Fights happening at water is fixed to take boat strenght into account (as well as special rules for bonuses for boats)
# Grouping functionality error fixed (when moving/grouping several units of the same type the grouping could get out of sync)
# Changed sensitivity for mainmap-dragging. Sometimes when you click on the map it didnt count as a click but rather dragged the map very little
# No cities have the same name from start

[piranha]

Beta 2 is very close now.

I've completed the last points on my todo before beta 2 today.
We will let all users create games freely (at least as long as the current shared server can allow it).
We have a better server which we will move to later but for development environment the current one is very nice.
We have set a max number of games to participate in simultaneously to 2.

Snotling have a few things left to do before starting beta 2, I'm also gonna go through all battle functions again to make sure all calculations are working.

FOW wont be in the game until Beta 3. It affects so many different parts of the game so we will require more time for it but we want to test the new features that are in place since beta 1. I think all of you who played in Beta 1 will enjoy Beta 2 much more.
Its also turned out to be very good for balancing purposes to play the game.
We have been talking about changing the battle calculations, I will open a discussion about that later. People are getting pissed and suspicious when there is so much randomness as it is now. Personally I prefer the luck factor to be as limited as possible even if it has a place in warlords for sure.

With the new balancing it should be much better than Beta 1.

[piranha]

We are starting beta 2 now.

Games can be hosted by anyone now and people can join. When hosting a game it will normally start within 15 minutes from the game is filled but we won't start any games until later this evening or tomorrow, but you can host and get the game ready.

[SnotlinG]

Now the three first beta2 games has been started. Please report any strange bugs back to us and we will try to fix them asap.

Other changes to beta2 not mentioned before is:

# Inspect hero meny is working (very basic hero overview though)

# History entries are working, including statistics for army/city/gold on previous turns

# Winning conditions has been lowered to 50% of the cities (as the map is open it is hard enough to get 50% )

[piranha]

I've made some updates to the lobby and the account page today.

When you joined a game (clicked join in the join list) and you don't pick a color or click leave you will get a popup screen every time you enter account asking you to either select color or leave the game.

This is to not have games full of curious players who don't want to play, or can't play because they are already in too many other games.

Also some users may have got the message saying that they are already in too many games when trying to select color when they in fact weren't in too many other games. I fixed this today so it should work now.

If you get a popup saying that you have a game where you have to decide to join or leave, try leaving and then join the game again.
If the lobby doesn't exists and longer. Send a mail to piranha or snotling.

Another bug that caused some games to be full after clicking around in the lobby is fixed.

We have decided to make so players who timeout on their first turn are eliminated instantly. Their spot will be listed for 10 hours under create/join as "instant play" so the first person who want can jump in and play in that game.

[SnotlinG]

As mentioned by piranha we will make a modification for the first turn. If a user misses his turn, the game will be listed as available for instant play (i.e. the first person to join will get the timed-out players slot and color, and can do his/her turn directly). If you have managed to do your first turn, the normal 3 strikes before getting kicked out will be valid though, so this is only for the very first turn.

Anyway, implementing instant-play will take 1-2 days, and in the meantime I will be extending the time of the players first turn, so noone will drop out before this is in place.