Beta 4

[SnotlinG]

In Beta4 you will have the possibility to load and upgrade your beta3 maps to be beta4-compatible:


You will also get the option to resize the map, as well as adjust the position of the original map.


The Smallworld map can be fit into a 100x100 map, if I adjust the Y axis a bit during the load

[SnotlinG]

Have spent a lot of time to get the Ocean terrain to work properly in the mapeditor. Its alot of calculations to get all the borders correct Now I think it is finally working
Will also probably add medium brush (2x2) as well as large brush (3x3) to the editor...


Also visible is the gas plattform

Have added a basic versioning to the maps, to keep track of updates done to them, so we can easily see when a map needs to be replaced with a new better version etc. As it is now in beta3 its a bit hard to know what map is the latest :-/

[piranha]

Last week I was working on the battle functions again, its hard to properly test that everything work at the moment but some new bonuses have been added. One is called Swarm (I think its the same as banding from WL3+). It will make units stronger when more of the same unit are in the same army. Lets say a unit have swarm: 3/3 then it would get +1 by itself, +2 when 2 units of that type are grouped and +3 when three units of the same type are grouped. At the moment there are no counter for the swarm bonus which makes it really good.

Another bonus is the plunder bonus. In beta3 when you capture a city you receive gold by this formula: (Enemygold / enemy citycount) *0.4. From beta4 the 40% will depend on the highest plunder percentage in your army. The plunder percentage also comes into play when you choose to pillage a city.
Some units like the crow is really bad at plundering 5% so you might think before you capture a city with a crow.
Heroes will have the ability to upgrade their plunder value.


During the weekend I took time to fix the ridge graphic that is used on the SmallWorld map but removed from the editor in beta3.

The ridge will be available in beta4.

At the bottom left of the image is some ocean (deep water terrain) which will affect for fast you can move depending on which ship your units are sailing in. There will be three different ships in beta4.


We are also changing into icons instead words for bonuses (with mouseovers) shown in the fight order image.

[SnotlinG]

Just a small update, so you know the work with beta4 is still progressing

- Fixed a bunch of bugs in beta4 mapeditor, now I only have some very minor things left with the mapeditor before it is complete. Like minimap scroller gets wrong coordinates when the map has some of the new mapsizes.

- Worked through the mapeditor finalize functions. It is now possible to finalize maps in beta4. And now gets all new terrain and new database structures correctly processed etc

- Worked through the initgame functions for standard games (i.e. 1v1, ffa and teamgames. Scenario games still to do). It is now possible to launch a beta4 game. Im expecting a bunch of bugs here though

- Started on the work to update a lot of our js stuff to be js objects instead of js arrays. This will make the code much easier to read and understand, as well as easier to send updates back with the ajax calls. (and easier to implement future updates)
This change means a bunch of code in the game engine needs to be updated though, and this is the next planned thing to deal with for me, as it is currently not possible to open the game started with initgame

- Sorry, no new nice screenshot this time

[SnotlinG]

Completed a bunch of new functionality:

- Raze Tower now works (construct tower was already working)

- Raze City (selfraze that is)

- Rebuild city (with checking that no enemy unit is standing on any of the cities tiles)

- Disband unit(s)

All this new functionality takes advance of the new game js-structure. Im really excited about this as it makes it so much easier to work with

[SnotlinG]

- Finished the send resources functionality.

- Added the LookOut Tower functionality. It will now add viewradius to the unit standing on top of it.


While entering the tower you will se much further than normal

- Added the extra select menu.
Useful for those times when the city is full of units, or when you have units standing on one of the one-tile buildings


Edit: Forgot to mention that we have added shortkeys for
move (m)
group (g)
ungroup (u)
next unit (n)
defend (d)
set unit in attention for this turn (s)
(Im still looking into the arrow-keys to be able to move the map. It turned out to be a bit tricky)

[SnotlinG]

We are working full speed to be able to get beta4 finished as soon as possible.
Together we have now fixed a bunch of bugs and new functionality:

- Taken time to rework all the actions that could mean new viewradius for a player: New Hero, unit moved out of a city due to diplomacy action, hero upgrade of viewradius, occupy of city / building / lookouttower, if you build a tower or upgrade a tower to have more viewradius than the units building.
For all these actions/events I have made sure that if the player see anything new the client is updated accordingly.

- Changed structure for how we save defence values, so it will be easier in the future for updates/changes for defence values for cities/Towers

- completed diplomacy checks etc for unit attacks.

- Added Active city functionality. When a player surrenders all his cities will become active and produce up to 4-6 units per city. One of his cities (capital if still existing) will also become a "City-state", that will activate nearby Neutral cities (1 per turn), i.e. making them Active also.

- Initgame now populates ruins with monsters and treasures. No more "free" money

- Added repopulate ruins, ruins will now have a chance to repopulate during the game. No Item should be duplicated due to this as a check is made of existing items in the game.

- Done main part of the work for resize of the big maps (> 100 tiles in width or height) minimaps to fit in the 300 x 300 area for the minimap. These maps will be scaled down to 2/3 in size.

- keyboard shortkeys for moving the map with the arrowkeys is added and working!

- a unit stopping move on an Anchor will now pop the shipconvert popup, where you can choose if you want to pay gold to upgrade some of your ships. If you choose to move out in the water the popup wont be triggered.

- Also fixed a bunch of Beta4 specific bugs for the initgame part where some buildings didnt get any income generated, and also the FOW-knowledge of Towers (Towers existing on the map from the beginning) didnt get populated properly. Some issues with OK/Cancel buttons fixed where the popupwindows were not closed / clean out properly.

- Update to client move logic to stop if the path takes the unit through a building that is not owned by the player or by a teammate.

- fixed a bug in mapeditor Finalize where a bridge going over Ocean caused the graphic to be broken

- Explored ruins now show diffrent graphic. Its not as distinct difference as I though, i´ll check with Piranha if it is possible to add some green glow or something to make the distinction more visible


Right now Im working on finishing the new city-vectoring page.
After that I need to have a look at how items on the ground should be displayed by the game, and also need to create some kind of FOW-knowledge for dropped items that you have seen but that are in the FOW.

[piranha]

Time for a new post. We had really good progress for a while now. The reason B4 isn't released yet is because we have upgraded so much stuff. Snotling said to me the other day it feels like this is beta5 because we are rewriting stuff that was already rewritten for beta4 a few months ago. We kind of skipped to the next beta in some parts of the game.

I'm very pleased with how our updates turns out. Our plan is to start testing with some testers in early July and I hope we will be able to launch B4 in July.

I have worked on the new cities today. Here is a picture of what they look like:

newcity.jpg (210.95 KiB) Viewed 80177 times

[piranha]

We started playing a beta 4 game last week. There is still work left, we have been fixing a lot detail stuff that we discovered while playing.
Unfortunately what many have stated in our forum is true. The new buildings, resource and upgraded units have turned out to be confusing and boring management.

We are going to make changes to this because its not very fun right now.
We haven't nailed exactly what we plan to change but here are some things we want to do so far.

*Remove the 3 new resources and make all resource buildings generate gold instead. They need to be balanced with city income and ruin income.
*change cities back to buying unit production instead of buildings and do whatever we can to make new users understand that they are buying production.
*Make wall upgrade also upgrade the guard tower (view radius)
*Optimize city management to reduce clicks as much as we can.

Income management
We have a townhall that can be upgrade in our current version. Basically you pay 3 turns of gold on the lower levels and up to about 10 turns before you break even for the last level. turned out that when you have bunch of cities its not too fun looking around if there is a townhall somewhere that you want to upgrade.
One idea is to make a kind of global income page where you can spend gold to increase city income but don't have to do it on a city by city level. Another way would be increase townhall when you upgrade wall too. Or any possibility to affect city income could be ditched.

Portal management
Vector is called portal and it is distance based now and also upgradeable. Boring to manage your portals so either we just lock the portal speed or we can make it increase levels when you upgrade the wall or perhaps with the townhall. Any thoughts on this one?

Sites / resources / mercenary
We skip the whole extra version of units.
While we haven't tried the sites thing it sounds like something that you need to manage too if it is connected to a city. Also seems like it will create units that have different stats than whats standard (just like our other idea did).
Our current idea at the moment is to turn all the buildings for the city into buildings that a map maker can place on the map that will allow a player to buy units directly on the map. Mercenaries.
Should be pretty low management and then all units will have the stats you expect + possible blessing.
Any thought on this one?

[SnotlinG]

Finally Beta4 is live, and comes with an updated community, new teamladder etc.

We hope you will enjoy all the changes!

Please report bugs as usual in the forum, so we can keep improving the game

/SnotlinG & piranha