Need Webgame Testers

[MetalMilitia]

That's right achimp I made a web-game. It's WW2 themed and is influenced heavily by Company of Heroes so if you like that you may possibly enjoy this too.

The basic premise is that you gain resources over time and can spend them on units and weapons. Once you feel you have enough units you can move out of your home country and attempt to kick other players out of the other countries.
Each team scores points depending on how many countries they control so the aim of the game is to keep control of as many countries as possible for your team. I'd be very interested to hear any feedback or suggestions anyone can offer:

http://warnet.dnsdojo.com/WarNet/Proj/

Thanks

[WhiteRat]

Nice work, but unless you include Japs or Yanks, I'll be passing on this.

[MattJack]

It won't let me login. Keeps saying login failed :(

[Guitar Woman]

Hey, a World War 2 Real Time Strategy game?

That totally sounds like a completely interesting way to make my penis bigger!

[MattJack]

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/1279/guitartroll.jpg

[MetalMilitia]

It won't let me login. Keeps saying login failed :(

When you registered did it confirm that it had worked? Because you do not have an account in the database. I did a whole load of changes to the authentication system yesterday so I'm really hope I haven't broken it. :(

[MattJack]

I guess my browser fucked up or something. I just registered again and it looks good now!

[MetalMilitia]

Hey, a World War 2 Real Time Strategy game?

That totally sounds like a completely interesting way to make my penis bigger!

Uh oh, Guitar Woman - the pretentious aspie faggot that criticises anything she doesn't understand - has spoken. May as well just shut this whole thing down and start again. Sorry to have wasted everyone's time!

[MattJack]

Need more Germans :lol

[Guitar Woman]

How could I be expected to wrap my mind around the concept of building a million units and then clicking on the "kill everything" button

Clearly, StarCraft is the passtime of gods

[MattJack]

Dude we all know that WWII style games aren't your thing, so not exactly a news flash. MM created a game and is simply asking for testers for Christ's sake. Go in the thread that was meant for bitch*ng and moaning about video games because that's what it's there for.

Try it or don't, but please just shut the fuc* up in this thread.

[Sam]

If this game was about collecting resources to make clove cigarettes and My Chemical Romance cds Guitar Woman would be all over this. :rolleyes

[MetalMilitia]

Need more Germans :lol

Good point. I've added a little message to the registration page that informs new users which team has the fewest players which should hopefully encourage new people to keep the teams balanced.

[Tadao]

Lol I signed up for Germans because I knew no one wanted to.

[MattJack]

I would have went Germans if I had known before. It is something like 6 v 1 :lol

[Tadao]

I found a bug that lets me get the best weapon right away.

[MetalMilitia]

One thing - this is actually hosted here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v37/176659.9/server1.jpg

So it may be a a little slow at times. Truth is I have no idea how well this rubbish server will cope with any number of users but that's all part of the test so just give me a shout if it's retardedly slow as I'd be interested to know.

Also feel free to tell me if anything confusing/counter-intuitive/rubbish as the site is still very much in development and some parts may need work.

[MetalMilitia]

I found a bug that lets me get the best weapon right away.

Is it showing your munition as 100 from the get-go? I think I've broken something.

Ah crap no I see what's going on. Thanks for the heads-up.

Fixed now.

[Tadao]

lol

[Dr. Boogie]

Internet Explorer:


I'm seeing in some of the text fields that letters like p and j get cut off a little when they're on the bottom line.

Also on the Manage Company page, "resources" and "requisitions" are misspelled. I checked dictionary.com to see if it was some bizarre british spelling, but they said no.

[MetalMilitia]

Haha, fuck. I can't believe I didn't check I spelt that right. It's going to be a bitch to change requisitions as it's used in loads of functions and shit. :tear

Btw, when you post a bug could you tell me your browser also, cheers.

[Zomboid]

There should be a little "click to close" button or something for pop-up windows. Like in the war room or whatever it's called.

[Tadao]

I've got a German in Firefox, IE, and Opera now.

[MetalMilitia]

With the overlays (message/attack etc) you can just click anywhere outside of the main bit and it will close. Are those the things you mean?

I think you're right though as most people would probably expect a close button.

[MattJack]

With the overlays (message/attack etc) you can just click anywhere outside of the main bit and it will close. Are those the things you mean?

I think you're right though as most people would probably expect a close button.

Yeah at first I was like wtf how do you close this shit. It wasn't hard to figure out, but it would be nice to have an X

[Dr. Boogie]

In Internet Explorer:

The squad name in the "Equip Weapons" section of the Manage Company page overlaps the unit type a little.

[MattJack]

Also, will there be an option/way to upload an avatar?

[MetalMilitia]

Yeah I prob in a day or so. On that subject anyone using IE may notice broken images in some parts, that's just from no one having user images and there being no default. I'll fix that too.

Also I've added a close button to the overlays. To be honest it was always there I'd just forgotten to copy the image to the right place. Whoops!

Boogie: thanks I'll get that sorted out asap.

[Dr. Boogie]

Internet Explorer:


In the descriptions for the different squads you can by for the Germans:

Grenadier Squad - Grenadiers excel in both attack defence. (missing "and")

Strumtruppen Squad - A good company should not rely entirely on Stermtruppen...

Panzer V "Panther" - ... effective armour and manoeuvability...


Also, I think it's supposed to be "Sturmtruppen" instead of "Strumtruppen".

[MetalMilitia]

Cheers, fixed those (though they get cached so you won't see the fixed-ness for a while). Maneuvea....bility is one of those crazy words that are so difficult to spell it's broken Google's spell checking. Kind of like Massachusetts - I don't know anyone knows how to spell that one.

[Dr. Boogie]

Well I didn't even spell the misspelled version right, so don't look at me.

[Tadao]

dictinary.com

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=maneuverability

maneuverability

[Dr. Boogie]

Shut up.

Also: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/manoeuvrability?qsrc=2446

[King Hadas]

I created accounts on both sides and then had one defeat the other.

[MetalMilitia]

It's weird it says I attacked you but I didn't. I have no idea how that could've happened. :/

Btw, I'm going to push the win criteria up to about 200 points as the game wasn't being played for the first 70 or so points of this round.

[King Hadas]

Are you Monster Metal? He just destroyed the Panzer tank I waited until 4'oclock in the morning to get.

Once someone gets the initial advantage can they ever actually be defeated?

[Zhukov]

OK. No Soviets, bummer, but the UK is an alright trade off. Can we get that changed to COMMONWEALTH FORCES by any chance? No?

I like that you don't have a weak SMG, or a weak machine gun, just "reliable" ones, haha.

[MetalMilitia]

Secondary weapons now available. Right now only 1 is available - Sandbags which give you a defensive bonus but I'll be adding some other things shortly.

Feel free to make suggestions. I'm considering adding things like mortars or even structures like bunkers that give big defensive bonuses. Not sure though as it'd be weird for a retreating army to possibly take their bunkers with them.

[MetalMilitia]

Are you Monster Metal? He just destroyed the Panzer tank I waited until 4'oclock in the morning to get.

Once someone gets the initial advantage can they ever actually be defeated?

Nah that's not me it's some guy I know on another forum. It should in theory be possible to defeat him as it's practically random which units get destroyed in a battle (say you lose 50% of your health, it will randomly destroy half your units). If you have a lot of infantry chances are your tanks will be safer but there is still a chance you will lose all decent units and keep your infantry. The rounds will also get reset every so often (prob every 100 points but I haven't sorted it out yet) so players won't be able to build ridiculously huge companies.

Zhukov: The Russians are actually in the game but I disabled them for the time being as I haven't had time to add any images or descriptions for their units. I'd also need to add another country to the german side (probably Italy) to keep things balanced which is quite time consuming. If anyone plays this game for longer than a week (unlikely) I may look into expanding the available countries.

[King Hadas]

Add barbed wire and shovels to dig trenches with.

[King Hadas]

Going strong after decimating Zhukov's forces, I arrogantly attacked Monster a third time and lost all my units a third time. I assumed you could gradually chip away at your enemies superior numbers with kamikaze attacks but he looted my dead units STG Assault Rifles. I think I'm finally beginning to understand how this game works. :)

[MetalMilitia]

Yeah sooner of later someone will take out his tanks (even if they inflict only 10% damage, if he has 10 units there is still a chance it will destroy his most powerful tank).

Also, I've added an entrenching tool which gives you a good defensive bonus but it also reduces your attack strength.

A quick note on how a battle works - it compares the attackers attack strength to the defender's health, then compares the defender's defence strength to the attacker's health and the winner is the player that inflicts the most damage. So if you plan on occupying a location you should make sure you have good defence stats.

[Tadao]

Like now

[Misdemonar]

REGISTRED AS ZORAK, PLEASE DELETE MY MISDEMON ACCOUNT

[Tadao]

Opera

MG34 Light Machine-gun. +0 / +20

+0 attack?

[MetalMilitia]

Yeah the idea was that you can't really use a machinegun in an attack, it's more of a defensive weapon. The MG42 gives a small attack bonus just because it's so expensive.

[Tadao]

I see. On a wishlist, I wish that when I go to change weapons on troops, the default would be "no change" and I could apply several changes to multiple troops at once.

Hope that made sense.

[MetalMilitia]

Yeah being able to both buy and equip several different weapons at once is defiantly something I would like to do. Only thing is that it's quite hard to do with dynamic data so I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to make it work properly.

Another thing I've been thinking about doing is having something like "auto equip" which will just randomly assign all your equipment to your squads.

[Zomboid]

Is there some way to buy more than one weapon at a time?

[Tadao]

Eat that Mattjack!

[AChimp]

You have no idea what kind of monster you're creating!

About 5 years ago I was developing a fantasy-based game like this, but I ended up burning myself out on it, plus all the people testing my game were more interested in hacking it for their own in-game benefit than telling me about the bugs. :(

[MattJack]

Nobody would help me take Belgium :(

I almost lost it all :(

[MarioRPG]

I'm in, for a while anyway.
Yay for germany.

[Tadao]

Firefox

It says:

[2009-04-12] Hadasse was attacked by Tadao. Hadasse won. Tadao was forced to retreat.
[2009-04-12] sam was attacked by Tadao. sam won. Tadao was forced to retreat.
[2009-04-12] Hadasse was attacked by Tadao. Hadasse won. Tadao was forced to retreat.

But I have all my guys and I haven't retreated and I think I won thier stuff too. I think they attacked me and lost.

[Tadao]

Hey MisD You lost this one right?

[2009-04-12] Zorak was attacked by Doom. Zorak won. Doom was forced to retreat.

I didn't attack you, you attacked me and lost right?

[Sam]

Yeah I attacked Tadao and lost. :(

[Misdemonar]

Hey MisD You lost this one right?

[2009-04-12] Zorak was attacked by Doom. Zorak won. Doom was forced to retreat.

I didn't attack you, you attacked me and lost right?

IT SAYS I WON BUT ALL MY TROOPS ARE GONE AND SO ARE MY WEAPONS. GAY.

ACUTALLY I ATTACKED YOU AND LOST.

[MetalMilitia]

It's weird, apparently auto team is working and the teams have the same number of people on each side but the UK are losing really badly. Perhaps I should add the option to defect to the other side - keeping all your equipment.

Something is defiantly wrong with the events that are being set. I'll try and fix is post haste.

Also - damnit I just switched teams and got my arse kicked by every twat in Belgium.

ADDED: Okay I think I've fixed the events thing.

[Misdemonar]

MY SAS TROOPS WITH +10/+10 DIDN'T DO SHIT

[Zhukov]

The Italian flag should be Fascist Italian flag.

[Zomboid]

MM should stop saying "defiantly" when he means "defnitely."

[MetalMilitia]

Yes I defiantly definitely should. It's because that's what the firefox spell checker thinks I'm trying to write a lot of the time.

[bigtimecow]

ummmm i don't know where to register :/

[MetalMilitia]

Here: http://warnet.dnsdojo.com/WarNet/Proj/index.php/auth/register

:)

[bigtimecow]

thanks! but how would i have accessed that from the main page?

edit: and there are no enemies anywhere :( - mozilla firefox

[MetalMilitia]

In the banner bit that says "You are needed now!" there is a register link. Though it's the same colour as the rest of the text so it doesn't stand out too much. I'll fix that soon.

[Tadao]

Can I lose troops in a battle I won?

[Tadao]

So you know how it says how many allies of mine are in what country? It would be could if I could mouse over that number and see who is there. And if I clicked on the number I would be able to see what who is there and see what their troops look like to see if I need to help hold that country or go to a different one that has a weaker/stronger force depending on if I am weak or strong.

[MarioRPG]

Perhaps I should add the option to defect to the other side - keeping all your equipment.

Heh, that'd be pretty cool actually.
As long as it is set so you can't just defect back and forth over and over again just to be with the winners.

[MetalMilitia]

Can I lose troops in a battle I won?

Yes, both sides can lose troops but only the winner will gain equipment.

So you know how it says how many allies of mine are in what country? It would be could if I could mouse over that number and see who is there. And if I clicked on the number I would be able to see what who is there and see what their troops look like to see if I need to help hold that country or go to a different one that has a weaker/stronger force depending on if I am weak or strong.

Sounds like a good idea, I'm going to try and overhaul several bits of the UI now that I've played for a bit and know which parts are useful/useless.

As long as it is set so you can't just defect back and forth over and over again just to be with the winners.

Might just put a "request team change" option in the profile and have it so an admin must OK the request before it goes though.

[Tadao]

Yes, both sides can lose troops but only the winner will gain equipment.

That's what I thought, been then I would think I should get the equipment of my fallen troops back as well. But that would make me way to powerful? IDK.

[Misdemonar]

ALSO I ATTACKED MARIORPG AND HE WON SOMEHOW EVEN THOUGH I HAVE MORE XP AND I'M SURE I HAD MORE POWER AND I LOST MY TANK AND THAT IS RETARDED.

[MetalMilitia]

XP doesn't actually do anything. I just put it in there as a kind of player ranking system and possibly so it could be used at a later date. There was some talk of being able to use it to buy "special" weapons like a Tiger Ace or whatever.

[MetalMilitia]

That's what I thought, been then I would think I should get the equipment of my fallen troops back as well. But that would make me way to powerful? IDK.

It's really just a case of me not wanting items to stay in game too long or it'll quickly end up with everyone having an excess of the most powerful weapons making it much more difficult for new players to get involved.

Really the ideal situation would be to have weapons randomly destroyed and the winner capture a combination of their dead squads' weapons and their enemy's dead squads' weapons but in reality I doubt this would be much different from the somewhat hacky alternative I currently have.

[MetalMilitia]

Germany Wins - Game reset.

You should all now be back in your home country with you weapons and stats reset. Hopefully this round will be more balanced because we're starting with more players.

Cheers for all the feedback so far.

[Dr. Boogie]

Here's a few spelling errors from the manual page:


Overview
WarNet is a PBBG (see explnation below) set in WWII-era Europe. You must maintain a company of soldiers and fight other players for control of each country. The team with the most countries under their control will gain points more quickly than their opponent and when a team reaches 100 points that team will win the round. When a round has been won the game is reset and begins again.


Status Bar
The status bar is the upper-most bar shown at the top of each page. It displays important information related to the user such as their resources, general information such as their location, the number of units they have, the strength of their company and the number of points each team has. It also shown recent events such as attacks and messages received.


Requsitions

The Requisitions tab is used to purchase squads, vehicles and weapons. The first section shows a company summary which gives a brief summary of the units and weapons you own. Below this is the request units section from which you may buy units. To do this, simply enter the quantity you wish to buy into the input box in the table and click "Buy". Provided you have enough resources, the unit will then be added to your Manage Company tab. The Request Primary/Secondary Weapons table works in an identical way to this.

War Room
...
Below this is this Enemies in Country section. This shows all enemies in the country and allows you, by way of clicking on the of "Action" buttons, to attack or message any of the enemies in the country.

[Dimnos]

Definitely need a way to see who and where your allies are and possibly what they have.

[MetalMilitia]

Cheers for the proof read, Boogie. I think at some point I'll have to vastly improve the guide in general as it's very poorly written.

Quick poll to those have played the game:

You receive resources:
1 - Too quickly
2 - At about the right rate
3 - Not quickly enough

If you don't think you get them quickly enough, how long do you think it should take to purchase a high-level tank?

[Dimnos]

I would say at about the right rate. Maybe just a tiny bit faster, but just a tiny bit, if anything at all.

[Tadao]

Not sure yet, I'll know how I feel after a full game. BTW, what do we get every two hours and how many points for an occupied country?

[MetalMilitia]

You get:
- 1 turn (max 15)
- 4 manpower (max 100)
- 5 munition (max 100)
- 2 fuel (max 100)
- 1 point for every country you own

Every 2 hours.

So I guess it takes 100 hours to buy the most expensive tank, which is less than the amount of time a round will typically last. Hmmmmm.

[Dimnos]

Maybe bump the fuel up to 3 every 2 hours, and possibly drop the tank costs down just a little.

[Tadao]

I think I would use the war room communications if I could communicate with my team while they are in a separate country.

[Tadao]

Maybe bump the fuel up to 3 every 2 hours, and possibly drop the tank costs down just a little.

IDK, I would hate to see tanks everywhere so easily. The game could last a long time with stalemates, so there could be one guy saving up his fuel to dominate later.

Which leads me to think that it would be nice if a bunch of little squads could chips away at a super tank. Like say hit points don't just go back to full after the battle, you get a certain amount back every 15mins or something.

[Tadao]

You get:
- 1 turn (max 15)
- 4 manpower (max 100)
- 5 munition (max 100)
- 2 fuel (max 100)
- 1 point for every country you own

Every 2 hours.

So I guess it takes 100 hours to buy the most expensive tank, which is less than the amount of time a round will typically last. Hmmmmm.

Also this would be good in the manual ;)

[MetalMilitia]

I've updated the UI in a number of small ways. What do we think - better or worse?

Tadao, good suggestions I'll see what I can do.

Other than that in the near future I want to try and add some way of viewing detailed summaries of past battles and also some kind of spy/recon unit that can be used to probe an enemies defences before an attack.

[MetalMilitia]

One other thing: does anyone have any suggestions for how to make the events summary more useful considering how little space there is to play with?

The main failing seems to be that it doesn't show you what has changed since your last log-on.

[Tadao]

The "more info" on what happened when someone attacked you is great.

[Dimnos]

In the requisitions tab, under the Company Summary... The armament box still shows equipment that I used to have but lost in a battle somewhere.

[Tadao]

Am I the only active German?
Tadao
Oadat
Doom

[MetalMilitia]

Lol, I think so. D:

[Tadao]

Lol, did I win that last round on my own?

[Misdemonar]

HOW THE FUCK DID GERMANY WIN WHEN THEY HAD NO COUNTRIES?

[Tadao]

Last night I took 1 country and stalemated the other 2.

[Misdemonar]

GAY

[Tadao]

Yeah, but a 3 squad army beat all your asses.

[King Hadas]

It'd be nice if I could change weapons on my units and apply them all in one go rather then have to apply each one individually.

[MarioRPG]

It'd be nice if I could change weapons on my units and apply them all in one go rather then have to apply each one individually.

Yeah, that's what I popped in to say.
It'd be good to be able to apply bought weapons to an entire squad (pending you had bought enough of course).

[MarioRPG]

I got an error after I attacked Monster (browser: Firefox)
A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: Undefined variable: weaponsAquired

Filename: controllers/game.php

Line Number: 673
A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: Undefined variable: secWeaponsAquired

Filename: controllers/game.php

Line Number: 673

[MetalMilitia]

Ah okay cheers for the heads-up, I'll fix it.

Thanks for all the testing you guys did by the way. I don't know if I mentioned it before but the reason I made this was as a university research project, responsible for something like a third of my overall degree. The artefact isn't especially important - what you get good marks for is adapting it to suit user requirements and feedback.

Right now I've got a huge report on how and why I did everything to put together so I probably won't be able to put many big updates out but I hope to do something with this in the near future to make it much, much better and hopefully get a few more people involved.

Cheers all.

[Tadao]

Right on, that's twice this month I contributed to someones college project.

[MarioRPG]

My god we've been used all this time.

Glad to be of service, though. ;)

[MetalMilitia]

While I'm fairly sure no one from here still plays - I've put a few big-ish updates live. When you attack someone you now get a much nicer results pop-up thingy and it's possible to disable units without them being destroyed completely. Check it out, particularity if you're on the German team as we're losing very badly.