The new feature will allow players to set up teams at any time during a game. Players can then apply to join an existing team or create their own. All the necessary controls are available from the in game options menu. A player’s team affiliation is indicated by the team letter next to their name. A capital “B” for example means, that the player is a member of team B. A lowercase “b” means that the player has applied for team B but has not been accepted yet.

Units do not exert zone of control (where units can not move freely in the vicinity of other units) over friendly units nor can they attack them. Team members do also loose and gain points together when a player is defeated in a rated game.

We are very excited about this new feature and can’t wait to see the first teams in the wild!

The update is scheduled for 6pm CET (see it in your time zone…)

Casaubon has published a whole range of maps with great annotations and descriptions. Exciting stuff!

We’ve just opened the test server again! Log in and help us test  a new unit and the brand new team play. You can create, join or leave teams from the in game options menu. Each team member’s point gain/loss depends on the average score of the team. Once only one team is left the game ends in a victory (or a draw if no other player was defeated).

Remember: everything that happens on the test server stays on the test server and will not affect your account on the live server. The test server will only run for a few days – so you may not be able to finish every game! This is all about testing and we rely on your feedback to get this onto the live system as quickly as possible.

Please send us your feedback and findings via the contact form.

Have fun.

We have rolled out a number of significant changes last week and we are thrilled by your great feedback on those (see the comments here).

And so I am very happy to announce the first direct result of these changes: We will soon start public testing of proper Team Play! It will enable you to form alliances and play collaboratively. Zone of control (where a unit can’t move freely in the vicinity of an enemy unit) will not apply to team members and you will win (or lose) as a team rather than individually.

This has been a much requested feature and we are working hard towards giving it to you! Exciting times ahead…

Weewar has come a long way.  A big part of that is thanks to the excellent community which we are very happy to be part of!  We are especially thankful to our Pro Players who have opted to support us with their subscriptions.

Bert and I have committed  a lot of time and money towards making this happen and we are very pleased with where Weewar is and where it is going. We do however fall short of covering our ever growing expenses (this really is the cost of success) and it makes it hard to move things forward as fast as we’d like too. So we are about to introduce a few changes that will impact free play but will also make it a lot easier for new players to get into Weewar:

• Pro players will now be  able to start up to 15 games and accept as many invites as they like  while we limit regular headquarters to a maximum of 4 games at a time
• A new simplified  game set up form with only three maps to choose from (pro players will still have access to the feature rich current version and the 1000s of maps on the system). Please note: Pro players can still invite anybody to their pro games
• Newly signed up players get to play  an intro game against a computer player to learn the ropes (this is already live)
• We will introduce a new map tile: Bridges (Ships go under, ground units go over). This should make the map universe ever so much more exciting.

While we are introducing these changes we would like to offer you a special deal: From today till May 15th the price of the one year subscription is reduced by 50% to only $12. Everybody is entitled to this offer. If you already have a subscription this will simply extend it for another year at the reduced rate.

This is a big step. We count on your support so we can keep maintaining and improving Weewar!

ps> There is a new (still secret) unit in the making which we will reveal soon…

From Franz Sittampalam’s work on the weewar ai-commander. It is a work in progress but you can already set up your own bot – or challenge his!

We have updated the API documentation to reflect the latest version (rolled out earlier today). The changes are minor but might affect some of the 3rd party applications out there. Check out the latest version…

[UPDATE 2: And we are back!]

[UPDATE: a few critical backups seem to take a little longer than expected, so we will not quite make the 1pm deadline. Sorry]

We’ll roll out our latest Version tomorrow, Friday the 17th. Weewar will not be available between 9.00 and 13.00 CET (see it in your time zone).

There are just a very few improvements that will be visible to players. We’ve done mostly internal cleanups and refactorings. If all goes well, we’re ready to start working on new features.

We’ll be doing some backups and tests today. Weewar will be offline for shorter periods of time during the day. This helps getting ready to roll out the new version that is currently tested on test.weewar.com (which is still online).

We have been busy re-writing much of the engine that drives the good ship Weewar. The underlying code is now much leaner. With these changes in place we are in a much better shape to implement the new and exciting features we have planed.

At this stage we need your help to test it all and make sure it all works. To that end we would like to invite you to test.weewar.com. We have transferred your accounts and some of your existing games there. Please note:

• Not all games have been transferred
• We have reset everybody’s email as to  not confuse people who do not like to take part in this test (just edit your account on test.weewar.com if you’d like to receive notifications)
• Any  games, stats and other changes on test.weewar.com will stay on test and will NOT be migrated to the live server.

These recent changes affect almost every aspect of the system so please keep your eyes open and report anything via the contact form that seems unusual. Happy testing!