Teammate Spoils
After several rounds of feedback from the community, we've added teammate spoil information in the most popular way. Simply click on [show / hide teammate spoils] to see what your teammates are holding!
Sharing spoil information between teammates in game chat is a tedious process that doesn't really reflect any skill, and scripts that automated the process give an unfair advantage. Hopefully this will help level the playing field between established and pickup teams, and allow strong teams to focus on real strategy - using spoil information to their advantage.
Losing Conditions
I added a new gameplay feature called Losing Conditions that will be added to new and existing maps. When adding a <requirements> definition to the XML that defines the map's gameplay, all players must hold the requirement to stay alive. Each time your region is conquered (or is neutralized from bombardment, nuclear spoils or "killer neutrals") the game engine will check to see that you still hold the requirements, and if not you are instantly eliminated. Eliminating a player via requirements counts as a terminator kill and you will still inherit the payer's spoils.
For example, imagine the Classic map had a requirement for each player to hold 2 cities in Asia. Losing Conditions would look like this:
2010-09-29 08:55:57 - rabin assaulted Mumbai from Delhi and conquered it from lackattack
2010-09-29 08:55:57 - lackattack no longer holds 2 Asian cities
2010-09-29 08:55:57 - rabin eliminated lackattack from the game
Losing Conditions opens the door to many new types of gameplay such as capture the flag. It can also be used to improve on existing maps - for example players can be automatically eliminated in the San Francisco map whenever they get stuck in Alcatraz! We'll have to see what our community of cartographers comes up with...
For technical details, please read this announcement from the Map Foundry.
Usergroups API
Usergroup membership data is now available for community tool developers through the Conquer Club API (Application Programming Interface). We also made a couple other improvements to the game listings data.
For technical details of the API, please visit the Tools & Enhancements forums.
Quicker Loading
A number of "behind the scene" changes have been made in the game screen to reduce the amount of data that goes back and forth between your computer and the server. As well, the game chat now shows only the last 50 messages unless you click "view full chat" (this is how the game log already works). Hopefully this will make things zippier for players with slower internet connections.
Conquer Club Time
With all the time zones out there, isn't it tricky to set a time with your internationational CC friends to meet up for a game? It's also been tricky for Team CC when we announce an upcoming event or server maintenance. Well, the trickyniess is behind us thanks to the new CC Time "BBCode"!
Simply type a fixed date and time surrounded by tags like this in a forum post or private message:
- Code: Select all
[Time]2010-10-02 21:00:00[/Time]
It will appear like this, linked to a webpage that displays the fixed date and time for all the cities of the world:
CC Time: 2010-10-02 21:00:00
Credits
Thanks to Gilligan for his suggestion for teammate spoils, to Dako for his script to share teammate spoils, to sherkaner for updating BOB and Clickable Maps, and to blakebowling for contributing the CC Time BBCode!
