Welcome to the warlords remake

[SnotlinG]

The beta game is now hosted. The first ones to join will get to test it out with us

To join, you need to create an account and then login to the site.
Thereafter click the "Create/join" button in the menu, and then click the "Join game" button.
Once in the game you need to select a color and click in the ready checkbox. You are then ready to go, so just wait for the rest of the slots to fill up and the game will then start. (You will be informed via email when it is your turn).



I have also created an open thread in our forum where we would like all suggestions/feedback etc to be discussed: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9

[SnotlinG]

The first betagame was started this morning (after some few game initializiation-issues) Lets see how it goes.
I have hosted an additional open beta game for those of you who didnt make it into the first one. Feel free to join.

Also, it seems we have some issues with our forum login system. If you have trouble to login on the forum (and in some rare occurences to the community-pages), please try to hit the "Log off" button in the menu and try again. If you get stuck and it gets impossible to get it, it then seems the only workaround so far is to delete your cookies from our domain and open a new browser-window and try again. This is something we will look into to find the cause though, as its not very smooth

[SnotlinG]

Unfortunately we are having some weird issues with our login-system, which some of you might have noticed.
I will take as my next actionpoint to rebuild the login-system to make sure it works properly.

In the meantime I hope you can have patience with any strange/unexpected behaviour.
If you get logged in incorrectly, please try using the log-off button and then try again.

[piranha]

I found a serious bug that I fixed that caused logged in users to change into another person when visiting the forum, usually into the snotling account . If you have problems logging in now, please try to log off and then login again, or clean your cookies. You may have a cookie with the wrong information stored.

[piranha]

Its great to see all our 4 beta games going well. We have made many small changes here and there to improve things the last days.

When you program a game and test every little detail you can think of it becomes difficult to look at it with the eyes of a player who never even seen warlords before. Its really good to get that input from test players.

We are not going to start up new games now for a while because we need to be able to work on the game without being limited by games in progress.

I'm currently working on a improved chat to make it easier to communicate between players and form pacts. I'm also adding tooltips.
Account, Army, City now works in the menu.

Its awesome to see that the game works so well for our testers and to hear that most testers really enjoy it.

[SnotlinG]

As the beta games are turning bloody (eh kenc80 ) I have had to take a quick look at elimination functionality, and that is now added to the game. If you start your turn with 0 cities you are out of the game, and the turn goes to the next player. The eliminated player will be able to login and observe the game still though.

With this done I have also started working on the winning check, initially the winning conditions will be if either you are the only player left in the game, or if you own 75% of the cities. Razing cities will not count towards the total number of cities.

After this I will have a look at minimizing the number of DB-tables, as well as starting on the vectoring functionality (and surrender-option).

[SnotlinG]

Have re-worked the elimination functionality a bit, the eliminated player(s) now is shown with a "death" marker in the gamelist, and can still go in and observe the game.

Have added checks for winning the game. If you eliminate all other players you have won (obviously ), also if you at the start of your turn own more than 75% of the cities you have won also.

Added the option for Surrender (can be found in the game menu). You will get a safety-question if you really want to surrender if you push this link , so you shouldnt be able to surrender by misstake
If you surrender, all you cities and armies inside the cities will turn to Neutrals. All city production will be stopped.
Also, if you miss your turn 3 times in a row, you will be "auto-surrendered" in that game.

Also added a minor cosmetic change, now the diffrent capital cities are tracked (and shown in cityinfo). At the start of your turn the game will center on your capital city (if you still have it)

Fixed pathfinding issues around neutral/enemy cities, and also when conquering a new city there was a bug that the unit tried to avoid going in the new city

[SnotlinG]

Both me and Piranha has been busy today fixing misc bugs.

Fixed issues:
- the in-game chat
- boats unable to sail over bridges (they can now cross bridges, with a cost of 2)
- login issues to the forum (If you have issues logging in to the forum, do a "Log off" and then a new standard login from the startpage, this should syncronize your forum-password)
- pathfinding around enemy cities

I have also gone through and optimized the DB-table setup a bit. The beta-games where down a few hours today due to this, sorry about that.

Next to look at will be vectoring

[piranha]

I've been working on account registration, account update, login and such things. I've done it a million times before and its a really simple and small job. Still it often takes way more time than it should.

This time its because of the forum. I'm using PHPBB and integrate it with the site instead of writing our own forum since its a really good forum. However I'm running into strange problems, like today, all of a sudden I could no longer login to the forum. No errors on when logging in, looks perfect on all accounts I try with but I'm still logged out.
I had to delete my cookies.
If you have trouble with login well my only recommendation is to delete your cookies until we can figure out why that happens.

There was one error reported by some users, a request for capatacha. It turned out that if you login too many times the forum want to make sure you are not a bot so it will throw a capatacha image at you (picture of letters that only human can read). Since we aren't using the login module it gave you a error instead.

I hope I've fixed that error now.
Anyway yesterday many small misc bugs were fixed, bugs that we only found thanks to our beta testers so thank you .
I'm going to draw a suggestion to how the vectoring in cities should look now.

[piranha]

I've been working on battle reports today.

You can now view any battle that you were involved in. (menu report->battle report
You can't see where on the map the battle occurred yet but I hope SnotlinG will look at that in a day or so.

SnotlinG have fixed so you can click enemy units on the map and see information about that kind of unit and its stats.
I will make the city buy screen better now so its obvious that you buy units there and so you can see all the stats of units before buying them.

I also updated 2 units.
Wolfs now take 1 turn to build and catapult 3 turns (2 turns and 4 turns before)
This does not apply to you current production.