Update 5.15: New Quickmatch options & More

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.15.0! This blog post outlines what’s new.

Classic: Quickmatch RT/MD

When configuring which templates you’re willing to play in Quickmatch, you can now set a different set of templates for real-time games versus multi-day games. Each template now has two checkboxes next to it, labelled MD for multi-day and RT for real-time.

Real-time games need to be played in a single sitting, whereas multi-day templates can be played only once per day. Because some templates can result in lengthier games, it may make sense to only enable those templates for multi-day games and not for real-time games.

Classic: Quickmatch Minimum Coins

If you love playing coin games in Quickmatch, you can now set a minimum coin wager. This will ensure Quickmatch only gives you coin games, and only gives you ones as big as you request.

Quickmatch has always tried to maximize the quantity and size of coin games you get, up to the maximum size you enabled. However, now you can force it to always keep waiting until it can make you a game of the coin size you want.

Classic: Finish Versus AI

When a multi-player game finishes with territories intact, such as by a surrender, the end game dialog now has a button to allow finish playing this game out versus AI opponents.

This only works when you and at least one opponent still has territories on the map when the game ends. This usually happens in games that are ended by surrender or boot, but not when a game ends by elimination.

Temporarily, this option is restricted to members for testing, but once all the bugs have been ironed out it will be opened to all.

Idle: Triple/Quadruple Strike fix

The Triple Strike and Quadruple Strike artifacts can take territories at a reduced army count. When upgraded sufficiently, their reduction percentage could exceed 100%, which is supposed to cause you to gain armies when conquering a territory with them. However, due to a bug, hospitals negated this profit and simply made the territories free. Most players were probably not aware that this was a bug, since you’ll almost always own hospitals when using the artifact.

This update fixes the bug, so now the Triple/Quadruple strike artifacts correctly cause you to gain armies when their percentage is over 100% even when hospitals are owned. This gives them a purpose of upgrading beyond 100% as they were intended.

Player Search

The Warzone website now has an option to directly search for players by name! This can be found by selecting Community -> Player Search.

Accessing it this way is much more convenient than the old way of going to Multi Player -> Create Game -> Invite Players -> Search.

In addition, the maximum number of players shown has been tripled.

Other Changes

– All: Added ability to search for private mail threads with a player. Open their profile and click Send Mail then Search.
– All: The slight rating boost that clans get when they get a free win now applies to whenever a player doesn’t get a game as well.
– All: Team templates in Clan Wars now has a note saying that they requires multiple players from the same clan.
– All: The “Join a clan” page now aligns names correctly for clans without an icon.
– Classic: The end game dialog’s buttons are now split onto two rows which helps them fit on small devices.
– Classic: Fixed single player levels sometimes showing the wrong thumbnail on the main menu when a device is offline.
– Classic: Fixed banking boot times not having a cap.
– Idle: When a territory is made visible via a visibility advancement, it now shows the full details of the territory in the bottom inspect panel.
– Idle: Mortars now blink on the map when they are ready to fire.
– Idle: Ascending now requires you abort all levels you have in progress.
– Idle: Fixed Market Visibility upgrade since no level has more than 7 markets, so its cap of 50 didn’t make any sense.
– Idle: Fixed hardened level reward for legendary artifact not awarding achievement until you got another artifact.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that made the balloon that appears after completing an arena tell you you got fewer money/armies than you actually got.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that made the Time Warp artifact reduce its own cooldown. It still reduces the cooldown of other artifacts and dig sites.
– Idle: Changed 50M money/sec achievement to 25M money/sec to make it easier.
– Idle: All levels we re-generated. This could cause costs, asset locations, recipes, etc. to be changed slightly. If you were in the middle of playing a level when you update to this version, you’ll keep playing the old version of the level. But all new levels started after updating will be on the new version of the level. For those keeping track at home, these new versions of the levels are called revision 19. Note if you start a new version of a level, then switch to a device using an older version of Warzone Idle, you won’t be able to play it there. Please update all your devices to the latest version to avoid this.
– UJS: Fixed a bug that made clicking “Join a clan” on the chat room then back cause it to not go back.
– Unity: Fixed display of forum posts that used quotes or lists.
– Unity: Fixed a bug when changing the UI scale with a chat room open.

Update 5.14: Tons of new content for Idle

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.14.0! This update brings a ton of new features to Warzone Idle. This blog post describes what’s changed.

Mortars

While exploring a Warzone Idle level, you can now find Mortars. You can fire the mortar at a neighboring territory to reduce its cost to conquer.

Mortars can miss, though! When firing a mortar, the game will tell you the odds to hit and exactly how many armies it will reduce the territory by.

You’ll only find mortars in levels that you start after upgrading to version 5.14.

Hardened Levels

Several new levels have been added that are harder versions of existing levels. These levels all have special unique rewards, some of which are brand new Idle features.

To avoid spoilers, the new features added for hardened levels are not listed here. Players will have to discover them on their own.

Clan Gifting

It’s now possible for clanmates to gift each other Idle money or armies! This allows those who are further along in a level to help out those who are smaller.

Check out the “Clan Requests” button on the Ore tab to request resources or to fill your clanmates requests. You can only request once every 20 hours. There’s also a new advancement to increase the limits of money/armies you can request.

Level Speed Bonuses

Many levels now have a completion time goal that gives permanent ore production increases as a reward. For example, if you complete Heavy Earth in less than 1 day 3 hours, you’ll get a permanent 30% increase to copper ore production from your mines. Different levels have different ore production bonuses.

New Markets

This update changes the way markets work. Instead of selling items at a fixed cost, they now start off cheap and get more expensive the more you buy from them.

Warzone Wheel Payouts Increased

The Warzone Wheel now pays out more coins than it did before, and has more varied coin rewards. Happy spinning!

Other Changes

– Idle: The ad-watch bonus now has options for ore production, smelter speed, or crafter speed increases.
– Idle: The level list now is a winding path instead of a vertical list.
– Idle: The game now keeps track of your fastest time-to-completion of each level and shows you these numbers on the Level Stats dialog.
– Idle: A few infrequently purchased advancements have had their unlock cost reduced slightly.
– Idle: Changed the way ascension works. Instead of requiring you to defeat every level, you now only have to defeat the last level in order to qualify for ascension. This gives skip level powers and advancements more of a purpose. Ascending also now costs 100 AP.
– Idle: Adjusted tech values. The later techs were made much more powerful.
– Idle: Recipe stats now shows how many of the item you currently have.
– Idle: Army stats now breaks out drafted armies and shows you how many of them came from each portion of the drafting system’s internal calculation.
– Idle: Modifiers that increase the speed of smelters/crafters no longer need to be equipped for the entire duration of the smelt/craft. They now speed it up while equipped and it reverts to the normal speed when unequipped.
– Idle: Coins can now be used to immediately finish a dig or to immediately refresh a cooling down artifact.
– Idle: Changed 100M money/sec achievement to 50M money/sec to make it easier.
– Idle: All levels we re-generated. This could cause costs, asset locations, recipes, etc. to be changed slightly. If you were in the middle of playing a level when you update to this version, you’ll keep playing the old version of the level. But all new levels started after updating will be on the new version of the level. For those keeping track at home, these new versions of the levels are called revision 17. Note if you start a new version of a level, then switch to a device using an older version of Warzone Idle, you won’t be able to play it there. Please update all your devices to the latest version to avoid this.
– Idle: Re-generated challenge levels.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that made autos not fire during idle time.
– Idle: Fixed the text on powers so they don’t say they go to waste if you don’t claim them.
– Idle: Fixed level stats so it doesn’t include empty bonuses in the total count.
– Idle: Fixed “Soldier” typo in tech list.
– Idle: Fixed a bug that could make the auto-smelt advancement pop up a message saying it changed a smelter when it didn’t actually change one.
– All: Fixed a bug that caused an error if you left an empty review for a map.
– All: Fixed “locked maps is null” error.
– All: Fixed sorting of in-app notifications when there was more than one page.
– All: Fixed color of map review voting buttons so they’re visible.
– All: Improved the layout of the “Change notification settings” page so it fits well on small devices.
– Classic: When a patterened color is used, like Blue Diagonals, the orders panel in the top right now shows this pattern.
– Classic: Updated the built-in Small Earth template to match the popular Quickmatch settings.
– Classic: Removed the “Featured Maps” category when browsing maps, since it hadn’t been updated in over ten years.
– Classic: Maximum boot time for real-time games is now 15 minutes.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that caused an error if you blanked the name of a community level while editing it.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that made banked time not get used up on boot.
– Classic: Fixed a bug that could make playing a card from the Receive Card Dialog sometimes not play.
– Unity: The top right button glow that indicates when you can join a clan war is now easier to see.
– Unity: Added url support for map of the weeks, map previews, and forum links with offsets.
– Unity: Fixed the color of the word “bye” on tournaments so it’s visible.
– Unity: Fixed a bug that made the two checkboxes on the edit profile page not default to the correct state.
– Website: Removed Flash mode.
– Website: Fixed a bug that made some bonus links in some maps, notably Europe Huge, not center their contents appropriately.
– Website: Raised bonus link text by one pixel which should bring it closer to being centered.
– iOS: Fixed a bug that made push notifications not pop up if they arrived while the app was open.

Guiroma and French Brawl coming to Clan Wars!

Clan Wars have been going strong for two months now! Back in March, Warzone got a new feature that allows clans to engage in competition for rewards like Warzone coins or Warzone Idle boosts. This is unique amongst Warzone’s competitions since all games are played in real-time, unlike most others which are multi-day. To play, you just need to be in a clan and open the Clan Wars page when a timeslot is active, which happens every 4 hours.

Clans are given out territories on a map to signal how successful they are. Here’s what the map looked like for Season 2:

Season 3 has just recently begun. Good luck to all participants!

New Templates

Recently on the forum, the community has been voting on new templates to add to Clan Wars. As decided by you, the winners of this vote are Guiroma and French Brawl!

These templates are being added to the mix immediately. They have a chance at showing up on any timeslot that has three or more templates. The number of templates available to a timeslot is based on how many people participated in that timeslot over the past 10 days.

Update 5.13: App improvements

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.13.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

App Improvements

The iOS/Android app is being updated with a bunch of features that were previously only available on the website at warzone.com. One of my long-term goals is to have feature parity between the app and website. The website launched in 2008, but the apps launched in 2013, so the apps have been playing catch-up ever since.

Recent updates have seen progress towards this goal, such as the adding the ability to create coin games, manage clans, and view achievements.

Today’s update brings us even closer to that goal by implementing a good chunk of the remaining features to the app. While we still haven’t gotten to full feature parity, this is a big step towards it! Here’s the list of features added to the app with this update:

  • Added ability to view games played in common with another player.
  • Added ranked game statistics to the profile pages.
  • Added coin leaderboard statistics to the profile pages.
  • Added ability to edit your profile.
  • Added ability to edit forum posts.
  • Added ability to tell if a forum post was edited.
  • Added ability to view downvoted forum posts.
  • Added ability to rate maps and leave map reviews.
  • Added ability to view map reviews, map descriptions, vote on map reviews, and respond to map reviews.
  • Added ability to add/remove maps from your favorites.

Fog shown on final turn

When playing a Warzone Classic game that ends suddenly, such as by killing the enemy commander, the game now continues to show fog on the map while watching the final turn. This helps preserve the surprise that a commander died on the turn.

Other Changes

– All: CLOTs may now create games using the bomb card or with commanders even if the players being invited are not members.
– All: Clan war timeslots can now have up to 5 templates instead of 4.
– All: A free win in clan wars now gives a slight increase to that clan’s war rating.
– All: Clan war timeslots now announce themselves in global chat.
– All: The in-app notifications page now sorts notifications so the newest ones are on top.
– All: The minimum boot time for multi-day games is now 10 hours.
– All: Fixed a typo in the birthday notification.
– Unity: Fixed a bug that could very rarely cause an error when signing out.
– Website: Profile page styling updated to be in-line with the rest of the site.
– Website: Edit profile page changed to use UJS.
– Website: Fixed a bug that made notification settings look like they didn’t save if you refreshed the page, when in fact they did save.
– Website: Removed the link to the SettingsHighlight page since almost nobody used it. The functionality still remains.
– Website: Removed the Support Warzone bundles.
– Idle: Increased the simulation rate of battles to reduce the effect of activatable artifacts. The actual time it takes to play the battle was not affected, just the amount of simulated time.
– Idle: Fixed auto-sell so it does not sell resources you need for techs.

Update 5.12: Notifications

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.12.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

Idle Changes

– Activatable artifacts have been significantly buffed.
– Added achievement for winning the Commander/Bomb Card arena.
– Auto-sell advancement no longer considers techs it can’t see.
– Auto-smelt advancement is now smarter about spreading out recipes when you have lots of non-working smelters/crafters.
– Added a “About Warzone Classic” button to the help menu of the Idle apps which explains how to properly transfer your progress over to the main Warzone app in case you want to play more classic.
– Fixed market raid dialog so the labels don’t get wrapped as much.
– Fixed the free cache power performance.

Notification Overhaul

This updates adds a ton of new notification-related features, and cleans up the existing notification options.

First, a history lesson: Way back in 2008 when this game was invented, the only notification options that existed were e-mail notifications. At the time, e-mail was the de-facto standard for notifying someone that something had happened. Back then we had pretty good notification options, as you could enable or disable each type of e-mail notification and also set them to be delayed (say, tell me 15 minutes after my turn advances). Delaying was useful in case you took 10 turns rapidly back-and-forth with an opponent — you wouldn’t want to return to your e-mail inbox and find 10 emails were sent.

When iPhone and Android hit the scene, people demanded the option for push notifications. These were added as they made a lot sense. They could integrate with the app and had some nice features like grouping up turn-notifications for a single game and the app could have logic to ignore them if you already had the game open, which isn’t possible with e-mail. However, these were kind of bolted on — the only options given to the player were “all on” or “all off” as they weren’t individually controllable like e-mail notifications were.

The most common notifications, like “it’s your turn”, were identical between e-mail and push. However, there were also lots of inconsistencies. Some notifications weren’t available in push form, like the ladder-rank-changed notification. Some notifications were push-only, like the “you’re about to get booted” message. Some e-mail notifications couldn’t be turned off, like the “you won the coin leaderboard” notification. Overall, I’d say it was a big mess.

This update fixes all of these by streamlining the notification system. Now, for each type of notification that Warzone sends, you can configure if you want to get it by e-mail, push, both, or neither. You can also configure a delay to the e-mail if you want it.

This makes for a much more robust system that gives the players full control over how they want to be notified and what they want to be notified about. You can configure your notification options by going to the Settings menu and clicking Notifications.

In-app notifications

Sometimes you want to know something happened, but you don’t really want it sent to you by e-mail or pushed to your device.

In-app notifications gives you an option to let notifications to delivered to you in the Warzone app or on the Warzone.com website. They will appear by flashing the mail icon in the upper right corner.

A good example of this is the tournament-ended notification or the fog-game-ended notification. These are things you are likely interested in, as you want to see what happened behind the fog of a game you were in, but it’s not urgent as nobody is waiting for you and there’s no downside in looking at it later. So you can choose to have these delivered by in-app notifications instead of (or in addition to) e-mail/push.

You’ll find in-app notifications is a third option right alongside e-mail notifications and push notifications on the Settings -> Notifications page.

New Notifications

In addition to giving you more control over how and where notifications are sent, this update adds new things you can be notified of, if you want:

  • Added ability to be notified when a Clan War timeslot is starting. Open the Clan Wars page and click Notify Me and you can set notification options for each timeslot
  • Added ability to watch a forum thread, which sends you a notification when someone replies to it. Forum threads are automatically watched by their creators.
  • Added a notification option for when someone sets a new record on a community level you made.
  • Added a notification option for when someone takes a record from you on a community level.
  • Added a notification option on your Warzone account’s birthday, to celebrate the special event.
  • Added notification option for new Warzone blog posts. It defaults to in-app notification only.

Other Changes

– All: Increased limits for big maps. SVG size from 2mb to 2.5mb, maximum territories from 3200 to 3500, max dimensions from 3330×2400 to 3500×2500
– All: Added a “P” button next to clans on the clan war map that lets you see a list of players who participated in this season from that clan, along with how many wins and games they played.
– All: Fixed clan war territories without rewards coming up every time. They should only come up once.
– All: Fixed clan war games not being assigned to territories if the first two games were on the 2v2 template.
– All: Fixed a rare case where a clan could get territories with fewer wins than was required if they were given multiple territories at once.
– Unity: Fixed the “view” button in the chat room next to a clan redirecting you to the website instead of keeping you in-app.
– Unity: Fixed clan chat not removing the red number when the chat room was opened.
– Standalone/WebGL: Coin purchase sizes are now listed correctly in the store. Previously they showed the iOS/Android sizes which are slightly different than what Standalone and WebGL clients can purchase.
– Website: The browser’s url now gets set properly when browsing clan war pages.
– Website: Forum threads now set page descriptions.
– Website: Fixed double-encoding on LevelsByCreator page.

Clan Wars Season 2

Congratulations to Master clan for winning the first ever season of Clan Wars!

Season 2 will take place on the World Nations 2014 map. Since it’s a bigger map, territories will also be easier to gain. Season 2 will also have slightly bigger rewards.

For season 2, we will try to do timeslots every 4 hours instead of every 6 and see how populous they are. This means the timeslots are shifting, instead of midnight, 6am, noon, 6pm, timeslots for season 2 are:

Midnight UTC
4am UTC
8am UTC
Noon UTC
4pm UTC
8pm UTC

As Clan Wars is a new feature, we’re all still collectively trying to figure out the best settings to use for it. There’s never been a real-time event like this before in the history of Warzone, so it will take time to figure out what’s optimal.

See you on the battlefield!

Update 5.11.2

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.11.2! This blog post describes what’s changed.

The website and standalone clients have been updated to this version now. The Android and iOS apps will be updated within the next week or so.

Clan War Improvements

The Clan War map now shows a info button (“I”) next to each clan in the list. Clicking this button lets you see a list of all Clan War games that clan participated in, with links to view each one, the template that was played. The color of the button signals if it was a win, loss, or if it’s still in-progress.

Clans that participate in a Clan War but haven’t earned a territory yet now show up in the clan rankings so you can see that they participated as well as see their games.

When viewing a started timeslot, it now lists both the games and players who didn’t get their game under the template that they signed up for. This helps make it easier to see what’s going on. As a side-effect of this change, timeslots that were played before this update won’t show any non-free-win players, since the old version did not record what template they queued up for.

Fixed dupe colors being assigned to a clan when there were opportunities to not dupe.

Idle Changes

– Inspecting a not-yet-conquered territories while having hospitals will show you how many armies your hospitals will save you when conquering that territory.
– Tuned the Speedy Crafters and Speedy Smelters artifacts: Low rarities were buffed, and higher rarities were nerfed.
– Fixed “Battle ends in 0s” countdown timer.
– Fixed auto-sell advancement running more often than it should.

Update 5.11: Modifier dialog, idle notifications

Warzone has just been updated to version 5.11.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

The website and standalone clients have been updated to this version now. The Android and iOS apps will be updated within the next week or so.

Modifier Breakdown Dialog

Warzone Idle has a new dialog that shows you a list of all modifiers active on your empire, as well as a breakdown of where those modifiers are coming from:

This helps keep track of what’s affecting your numbers. It’s available once you upgrade your Statistics advancement to level 2.

Idle Notifications

Warzone Idle can now send you Android or iOS notifications when certain events happen, such as:

  • Digging for an artifact completed
  • Artifact upgrade completed
  • Maximum idle time reached

You can enable or disable them in the settings menu. On Android, they’re enabled by default, but on iOS you must visit the settings menu and check the Notifications box or you won’t receive them.

Other Changes

– Idle levels 16: All levels we re-generated. This could cause costs, asset locations, recipes, etc. to be changed slightly. If you were in the middle of playing a level when you update to this version, you’ll keep playing the old version of the level. But all new levels started after updating will be on the new version of the level. For those keeping track at home, these new versions of the levels are called revision 16. Note if you start a new version of a level, then switch to a device using an older version of Warzone Idle, you won’t be able to play it there. Please update all your devices to the latest version to avoid this.
– Idle levels 16: Tuned territory income to be about 20-25% what bonus income is. Prior to this update, it was very inconsistent as some levels were too high and others too low.
– Idle levels 16: Resource caches now try to pick a resource with a quantity of at least 10 so that resource-modifying rewards can be more effective.
– All: When listing players on a timeslot, they’re now sorted by clan.
– All: Added a note about clan wars to the victory dialog after winning a clan war game.
– All: Clan war ratings no longer go negative.
– All: Fixed clan war timeslot countdown.
– All: Fixed clan war sign-up button saying “withdraw” on templates you weren’t signed up to.
– All: Fixed clan war rewards looking like they were claimable before you contributed to the clan war.
– All: Fixed clan war 2v2s game names from saying “x vs x vs x vs”
– All: Fixed the wins needed for next territory displayed on clan war page.
– All: Fixed new clans showing at the top of the clan list.
– Website: Adjusted Clan Wars glow so it looks better in Chrome.
– UJS: Fixed invisible bonus links being clickable, such as bonuses with no idle reward.

Clan Wars Season 1

Season 1 of Clan Wars will kick off on Tuesday at midnight UTC (this is Monday evening for those in negative timezones, like North America.) See this link for your local timezone or for a countdown.

See the Clan Wars announcement if you missed it.

To participate, you just need to be in a clan, and show up at one of the 4 timeslots each day. The timeslots are:

– Midnight UTC
– 6am UTC
– Noon UTC
– 6pm UTC

You can only play one game per day, so pick the time that works best for you, show up, pick the template you want to play, and then play a real-time game.

The season will end when its clan war map, Final Earth, is filled.

Ask Fizzer Anything

I’ll be doing an Ask-Me-Anything livestream on twitch on Tuesday afternoon, likely sometime around 3pm at https://www.warzone.com/Forum/535945-ask-fizzer-anything-tuesday and then watch the answer in the video after it finishes.

Rewards

As noted in the previous blog post, the first seasons of Clan Wars will have modest rank rewards. The rewards, notably the coin values, will increase as participation rises.

Territory Rewards: Rewards received immediately when your clan earns the required number of territories
– 1 territory: Alloy sell values increased by 10% for two weeks
– 2 territories: Mercenaries are 10% cheaper for two weeks
– 3 territories: Item sell values increased by 10% for two weeks
– 4 territories: Reduced artifact cooldown time by 30% for two weeks
– 6 territories: Army camps boosted by 40% in challenge levels for two weeks
– 10 territories: Armies recieved from caches increased by 10% for two weeks
– 15 territories: Reduced artifact dig times by 20% for two weeks
– 20 territories: AP received from levels increased by 15% for two weeks
– 25 territories: Attacks against you in idle battles reduced by 20% for two weeks

Rank Rewards: Rewards received at the end of the season based on your clan’s final rank.
– 1st: 2000 coins distributed evenly among your clan, 1 rare artifact, 1 of every Idle power
– 2nd: 1000 coins distributed evenly among your clan, 1 rare artifact, 1 multi-level power
– 3rd – 5th: 500 coins distributed evenly among your clan, 2 uncommon artifacts, 2 time warp powers
– 6th – 10th 100 coins distributed evenly among your clan, 1 uncommon artifact, 1 free cache power
– 10th – 20th: 1 uncommon artifact, 1 free cache power

Good luck!