House Rules

There is a new feature to add some variety to the game play. Today I have deployed "Advanced Game Rules".

When you are creating a battle, you will see a button that says "Show Advanced Rules" on the 2nd page of the "create a battle" wizard process. If you click that, a panel will show up that has a whole bunch of custom rules you can apply to the game.

These rules fall into three categories: Game Rules, Player Rules and End Game Conditions.

Game Rules:
You can specify what kind of ships can participate or not. For instance, you can disallow carriers, or you can specify that only ships with FTL can participate.

Player Rules:
Here, you can set restrictions on the kind of player that can join the game. You can say no newbies, or you can say newbies only. You can also restrict players based on how often they fail to submit orders on time.

End Game Conditions:
There are two new ways to end a game: First Blood and Flag Ship Death. First Blood means that if one of your ships is destroyed (any one), then you are out of the game. The other condition is pretty self explanatory -- if your flag ship is destroyed, you are out of the game. The "Flag Ship" is defined as the most valuable ship you have in the battle based on its command points.

So try them out and as usual, let me know what you think.

Site Outage

The site has been down for most of yesterday and today. Even when it was up earlier today, it wasn't really working right.

My hosting company changed something about how file permissions were handled, so the application could not write to the file system. This means it could not save any changes to the game data like orders.

So, if you have been unable to play for the last 24 hours or so, thats why. Everything should be fine now though. If not, report any problems in the forum, or using the feedback form. (Hopefully those still work!)