Welcome to the warlords remake

[piranha]

I've had a nice week on Crete taking some time of the programming. Snotling was sitting for me to test that feature. If I lose any of my games you know why

I've started on beta3 work just before I left. I'm currently working on the interface which will get a big upgrade. All the graphics, interface and game graphics will be recreated for beta3 and this is what I'm doing at the moment.

One of the things we are changing is how we handle terrain, our new system will use layers which allow units to stand behind things. Like a tower or a big tree. Map creating will be much easier too since you will only place one tile and all the needed tiles will be placed by the editor.

When the new terrain model is completed its time to work on for of war which is like the holy grail for our game right now If our ideas work it will be very cool. It will be a new landmark for our expertise on high tech web programming .

[piranha]

There haven't been a lot of posting here lately, but we are still working on the next beta phase.

Snotling have been working on our new terrain model and it seems like our ideas are going to work perfect. There are still things left to test that we aren't 100% certain of. Mainly we need to test the new castles (each race will have their own style of castle) with our terrain idea. But building maps is now very simple. In Beta3 it will be easy for anyone to build a maps.

I spent time with the interface, I'm almost done replacing all the current interface graphics. There are some small popups left to do. I have tried to think about those who haven't played warlords before to make the interface a bit more intuitive here and there.
Then I'm going to create a new popup that will give a good overview of your empire that will be helpful when you have a bunch of cities to control.

[piranha]

We have made good progress the last days.

Replacing the interface is more or less completed now. I've spent today on working with the battle system.
There was a bunch of bugs discovered in beta2 that are fixed now.
I've also create a new bonus that we are going to try a bit. The demon unit is unaffected by city walls when defending and when attacking.

This should make him a good attacker and a bit sneaky since he will be better versus good armies in cities with strong city walls. First all bonuses are applied, then capped at 5 then the city wall bonus is removed.
Its not a group bonus. Only when fighting vs the demon.

Next thing for me is to make it possible to have separate battle systems since we want to test some different ideas in beta 3 involving HP that only heal at the start of each turn and battle results with less random outcome.


Snotling is working on our new map editor. We can now place all sorts of grass, forest, hills and mountains with just one tile per terrain type. There is just one road button that works on all terrain types and that will create corners and crossings. What took hours to create for beta2 will take minutes in beta3.

From beta3 the map editor will be available from your account.

[SnotlinG]

It havent been much updates here lately, but we are still working in silence

I have been focusing on the mapeditor for beta3, which will be a big upgrade from the previous mapeditor.

The goal for the new mapeditor is simplicity. We are now using extra layers to draw the borders of all terrain, so it will be much easier to build. No need to worry about top-left-corner terrain-tile etc. So every terraintype only has one button for it in the editor.

As for roads I have implemented "smartroads" functionality. The same way as other terrain, there is only 1 roadbutton to use in the editor, and then the editor will calculate if it should be a turn, a straight road or a crossroad and place the correct tile.

To get a variety of terrain we are using 2 diffrent technicues.
First is the random tile: When placing a tile, the mapeditor will randomly pick one of a set of tiles for that terraintype, each defined with its own probability, so some can be more rare than others.
And secondly we use "bigtile"-functionality. The mapeditor tries to figure out if it is a big field of the terraintype you are placing, and will then replace tiles with a bigtile. The bigtiles are special tiles that are built from several small tiles (like 3x3 or 4x4) which will give us the possibility to create more variety in the terrain, like big mountains etc...

The water and shore placement follow the simplicty goal also, when placing a watertile it will automatically calculate what shores to place around it to make it fit. The same goes for placing land-terrain on water. These calculations are a bit heavy though, so using chrome is probably recommended.

Still to do on the mapeditor is:
The placement of bridges (on water), which will be placed using the same road-technicue.
Placement of Anchors
Startingcity positions (random or the placed by the mapeditor)
Cityproductions etc
Finalize-procedure

[piranha]

I know there are few posts here now. Its because the stuff we work on are taking a lot of time to complete so there isn't too much to brag about . We are remaking so much of the game to take it to a higher level and I think that when we are done the result will be worth the time.

I'm posting a couple of screens from some of the new stuff.


On this screen you can see the paladin hero (there will still be 3 heros but they will start with different stats).
As you can see you will now be able to see the actual strength of the selected stack.

Also the realm data is moved to the left side of the screen and always displayed.



This is how the new popup looks.
This screen displays all your cities, their actual production, city levels and vectoring. This screen will be handy when you have a bunch of cities to manage.



This screen is taken in the map editor and shows some of the new terrain.
The castle is not final.

Right now I'm working on the new hero screen. You will get points when you level up that you can distribute as you want on your hero stats. Kind of like the diablo level up works.

[piranha]

I've been working a bit here and there lately. I've spent the last days on updating the community site to match better with our new game graphics. I also took a while to try to make a better front page so that more new visitors will get interested and test our game.

Yesterday I worked on redesigning the map editor interface.
With my hero level changes I had to change the database structure of armies which caused the battle functions to not work anymore but thats fixed now.

Snotling is almost done with the map editor that he have been working on a long time now. I think he is planing to make additional changes to the database structure to minimize the amount of new tables created for each game. When he have updated the game creation functions to match with the new maps and new DB structure it should be possible to create maps using our new system and start games on them.

[piranha]

I've been working hard the last days on our battle functionality, with the help of some die hard strategy gamers on our forum I have reconstructed the battle functions.

From now on there is a simulation running each battle 1000 times to find extreme dice rolls. This simulation is used to decide which results are accepted results in battle. If you go to war and the dice rolls extreme results the battle will simply restart until the result is within the limit of what is considered okay.

This will prevent situations where 1 side completely wipes out the other side even when when the armies were equal in strength.
This is something many have complained about so it should be a nice improvement.

While I was rewriting the battle functions I also trimmed the data saved with each battle. We have changed DB structure per game between beta2 and beta3 so we only need about 50% as much Database information stored per game.


I'm still waiting for 5 of the 9 castles. All the nature terrain is in the editor now which is nice.

Here is a screenshot.

[SnotlinG]

Just a quick update

mapeditor
The new beta3 mapeditor is almost complete.

Completed
# The placement of bridges (on water), which will be placed using the same road-technicue.
# Placement of Anchors
# Ridge placement & ridge entry placement
# Startingcity positions (random or placed by the mapeditor)
# Cityproductions, citywalllevel, cityincome etc

Except a few minor bugs I am just working to finish the last of the mapeditor-minimap-functionality.

Finalize-procedure
Besides this a great part of the finalize process has been completed also.
Security checks are added that the map is a valid map, i.e. have enough starting positions etc
Data is converted from the "mapeditor-format" and proper database tables are created.
Also here it is mostly minimap-stuff that is still left to do (and of course some testing/bugfixing)

[piranha]

I have been working on the ladder mode for next beta during the last days.

There is now a ranking page in place. We are using the ELO system to calculate ladder rating.
There will be three modes. Normal game (the current mode), ladder and speed ladder in beta3.

Ladder is going to be a bit more strict than normal games. The advanced settings are locked when hosting, you can only choose between 1 and 2 days of time per turn and in the game you won't be able to view as much info about the other players as in normal games.

When hosting a speed ladder game the host will set the time from the hosting moment of which the game will be played in speed mode. 2:30 - 5:30 are the avilable options. In speed mode each turn must be completed in 3 minutes, after 10 turns 4 minutes and after 20 turns 5 minutes.
When the speed timer reaches 0 the game mode will change to a normal ladder game.
This mode has a max of 4 players.

There is a separate 1v1 and FFA ladder, and there will be a separate team ladder which is planed from beta4.



Snotling is working on the game initiation now so in a few days we should be able to start Beta3 games and start hunting bugs.

[SnotlinG]

As one of the new features in beta3 will be that the mapeditor is open for everyone to try out, I have put in some more work into the startposition area

When creating a map you will get to chose if it should be random startpositions, or if you want it to be mapcontrolled startpositions (pretty much like it works right now in beta2).

If you pick random startpositions, you can only place "Neutral" cities on the map you build, and neutral razed cities - we have added the feature to place razed cities on the map from the beginning. Right now the razed cities won´t have that much effect on the gameplace, but rather a cool detail if you want to create some scenario-like map. Later on beta4 etc we might add more possibilites for this

When random startpositions the game will randomize out your startinglocation, trying to separate the players as much as possible, dividing the map into a 9-grid area (Thanks KGB for the idea:-)). In the unlikely case all the cities are concentrated in only one area, the starts will simply be randomized in that area.

If you pick mapcontrolled startingpositions, you pick one or more cities per color that will be available as one of the players starting city. Using this setting will also enable you to place razed cities of a specific player from the beginning also, adding to the "scenario-feeling". The game will then randomize among these locations, and try to maximize the distance between them.

Example of a mapcontrolled setup where you can place razed cities owned by the player from the beginning: