News

We're quickly running out of beta version numbers, so it's becoming obvious we're going to hit 1.0 pretty soon, whether we want it or not. What does it mean for the game? Well, the most important thing we hope to accomplish before removing 'beta' from the title is stability - no bugs, no problems, good balance, smooth gaming experience. Then, there are a few new features which we hope would improve the gameplay, and we want to finish them before v1.0. Here are some of them:

Clans - a way to organize players into groups, with own forums, chat channels, stats and so on. Clan vs clan team games should be a lot of fun, besides, we hope clans would bring in more player interaction.

Collectable cards - I always loved the cards in Risk, a great way to quickly collect a combination and get reinforcements at a particularly crucial moment. The cards we plan to introduce work quite differently, but the idea is similar - you get cards as rewards during battles or at the end of the game and can trade them during the game for various benefits.

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Glorious news, everyone! Units and cities now have the ability to detect stealth. Detection radius is based on visibility range and is different for land/naval/air units. If a hidden unit is within enemy's detection radius at the beginning of a turn, it will become visible to the enemy and his allies. Next turn, if it's outside the radius, the unit becomes invisible again.

Toggle 'show visibility range' (under the minimap) to see everyone's detecting range.

Also, if a team game reaches the maximum number of turns, the whole team with the highest combined SP wins.

Thanks to some great ideas from our players, we decided to split big countries into smaller ones, to make the areas more playable. USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, China and Australia all got split, adding 37 new 'countries'. For all game purposes, they are separate countries, however, we decided to keep the original county's flag and name, to underline that these are, basically, just regions of one big country.

In the process, we used official country divisions as a guide, only making a few alterations (like combining Victoria and Tasmania in Australia). Unfortunately, most official regions have incredibly dull names (especially China, where all regions are named Southeast, Northwest etc), so we deviated in some cases, with Texas, Ontario and British Columbia, for example, which actually contain more states than the name suggests.

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Team games: when creating a game you can set 2 to 4 teams - players in these teams will be permanently allied, with no other diplomacy options (rejoice, whoever wanted unbreakable alliances!). In the future this will also allow clan vs clan games. After players join the game, the team is assigned automatically, but you can change it in the players list in the lobby and in the country selection menu in the game. New tab, Teams, has been added to the players menu in the team games, instead of Diplomacy.

Private games: you can now lock your game with a password. Additional menu has been added when creating a game, with password and team options. These options cannot be changed later.

It's now possible to change Strategy after starting the game, in the country selection menu.

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Disconnects during the game are now quickly reconnected automatically, without even throwing you out of the game. Hurray for uninterrupted gameplay! (This only works if you reconnect during the same turn)

Turn time is now re-synced in the beginning of a turn, making the timer more accurate.

Now if you intercept an Air Transport, the units it carries will not participate in the battle, and will be destroyed with the transport.

Guerrilla Warfare strategy - gives a huge boost to Militia, reduces the cost of Marines by half, and severely reduces attack and defence for Tanks and Infantry. Very handy when playing in low-income areas, like Africa.

Added the Diplomacy graphic to the Players menu, which shows diplomacy relations between all players.

You can now use arrow keys to move the map, or Ctrl+mouse click to make the map follow the cursor.

Page up/down now zooms the map in/out. Use Home/End for min/max zoom.

After joining you can now see several previous messages in the channel.

Game admin is now shown in the Game options menu.

Private channel and drop-down box now have player colors.

Armies contending one place (2 allies in a captured city or on the same spot) are now moved aside correctly, taking into consideration land/water.

'Back' button in the browser will now ask for confirmation before taking you out of the game.

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All captured cities will now initially have their income at 20%. It will will increase by 20% each turn you're holding the city. On foreign territory the initial income is 5%, increasing by 5% every turn. After you reach 100%, the increase will be 1%.

This is done to make the transition more realistic and to make players invest in protecting their cities. Once your city income reaches, for example, 120%, you probably wouldn't want it to reset back to 20% (which will happen if another player takes the city).

While it will now take 4 additional turn for your new city to reach its previous potential, it's now possible to go over 100%, and even cities on foreign territory will bring some income as well.

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It's now possible to take empty cities from your allies - this way allies can help you with capturing something and then leave it for you to take.

If you and your ally attack a city in your home country and both survive, you will always be the one who wins the city (in other cases it's random).

This is possibly the most epic update so far. Take a look at what we've got for you:

Armies are now shown as icons on the map, not just circles. There are 5 different ones: soldier, tank, ship, submarine and plane - they indicate the predominant type of units.

Captured cities will now spawn free Militia in the numeber of the city's reinforcements. This is done to make the conquests more final and avoid pointless exchange of empty cities.

Air units can no longer capture cites. They can destroy all units inside, after which they will 'park' next to the city.

13 new upgrades and 1 new strategy (unlockable). Some people were already running out of upgrades, so they can finally spend their hard-earned SP now

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We've got a great new update for you today! Here's what's new:

New game creation panel, now with 200% more tabs!

New game options: "Allow rejoining" - to allow/disallow players to rejoin the game they finished (lost or quit). "100 additional cities" - switches on all the currently disabled cities and countries.

Highly customizable Victory conditions. New options: capture a Neutral country to win, require players to hold the capital/country x number of turns to win. Victory objective is now visible in a tooltip in the games list, as well as in the Game options menu in game.

Flood control in the chat. Sorry about the inconvenience, but spamming was getting out of hand. Also messed with chat colors again.

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Shiny new lobby!

Fixed Total annihilation victory condition - now correctly triggered by capturing all the opponent's cities.

You can now ignore players in the chat - click on the ? button next to the input box for details. Also, you now have to use English in the public chat.

From now on only players that have been inactive for at least 3 turns can be kicked from the game.

Slight changes in the chat channel colors.

Adjusted SP requirements for some ranks (sorry about this, hopefully it's the last time).

When buying units, press and hold +/- buttons to buy more than one unit.

Updated random algorithm for battles.

Country income is now more balanced.

Lots of server-related fixes.

This update brings Afterwind to the first stable release.