Counselor 2.917 - see an order's reach, find anything, and watch your war replay

[GM Team - CoL]

Greetings, commanders.

It has been a busy stretch: four Counselor releases and a good deal of work on the website. Three things are worth your time - a search box that finds anything, a map that shows you how far an order reaches, and the Chronicle of a finished game, which will now replay the entire war for you turn by turn.

Find anything, from anywhere: press Ctrl+P

Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) anywhere in Counselor, or use the new Find button on the toolbar. A search box opens. Type any part of a name, a hex coordinate, or an order, press Enter, and Counselor switches to the right tab, selects the row and centres the map on its hex.

• It searches everything you have listed at once: characters, cities, armies, magic items, locations, nations, troops, the actions catalogue. Typing 1122 lists everything standing on that hex. Typing recruit lists everyone you gave that order to.
• It also searches this turn's results, exactly as each tab reports them: a character's orders, skills and movements, a city's production, a hex's full report, a nation's rumours and encounters. Something happened and you cannot remember who it happened to? Type a word from the report, such as ambush, conjure, or the name of a ship.
• Several words narrow rather than widen: targaryen 1122 finds only the Targaryens on that hex.
• Best matches come first: an exact hex, then names, then everything else, so the thing you meant is at the top instead of buried.
• Up and Down move through the results without leaving the box, Enter jumps, Esc closes. Double-clicking a result works too.

One thing to know: rows excluded by a tab's List dropdown (for example a tab set to show only your own) are not searched. Switch that dropdown to All to reach them. Rows merely hidden by the Filter by box are found, and Counselor clears that box so you land on them.

See how far an order reaches, right on the map

Many orders can only target a hex within a certain distance - move a character, map an area, pick up an item. Until now the only way to know what was in reach was to open the drop-down and read the list.

• Now the map draws a thick border around every hex the order can reach, the moment you choose that order. Movement orders show a wide ring, short-ranged ones a tight one, and the border follows the edge of the map where the range runs off it.
• Pick your own colour in Settings > Map > Hex Range Color. It defaults to white, and whatever you choose is outlined in the opposite shade so it stays readable over dark sea as well as pale desert. It keeps the same thickness however far you zoom.
• The border shows how far the order reaches. A hex inside it can still be refused for other reasons - dry land for a ship, a city where the order needs one - exactly as the drop-down already refuses it.

Watch the whole war play out on a map

The Chronicle of a finished game now opens with the game's own map and replays it turn by turn: terrain, every city in its owner's house colours, armies standing where they stood, markers where the great battles fell, and a line tracing each army's march from the hex it left.

• Press play, or drag the scrubber to any turn. Pan, zoom, toggle the layers, hover anything to read it. Every turn heading has an on the map link that takes you from the story straight to that moment.
• My War. Pick a house above the replay and the board becomes its war - its cities, armies and marches stay full strength and draw larger while the rest of the world fades to a wash, so you can follow one story on a crowded board. A readout tracks what it held each turn, and Follow keeps it in view as the turns run. Territory is shaded by nearest city, so you can watch a realm swell and shrink.
• A capital put to the torch now names the house that did it, and there is a new Put to the Torch record in the Hall of Fame.

It is all built from games you have already played, so your past games have it too. Open My Games and follow the Chronicle link beside any finished game.

Fixes worth knowing about

• Changing an order no longer leaves the old order's number behind. Picking an order, saving it, then changing that slot to a different order could carry the previous value across - a movement's hex 0512 turning up as a recruit quantity, a gold amount, or a 512% figure. A value now only carries over when the new order genuinely expects the same kind of thing.
• Order costs update as you type them again. Total orders cost and Forecast Balance only refreshed when you opened the turn, so entering an order left them unchanged until you reopened it. Thanks to the player who reported it.
• Army sizes read as words again. The Size column on the Armies tab briefly showed a bare number instead of Vast army, Small navy, Huge garrison. The wording is back, and the column still sorts by real size.
• Startup packages you cannot buy are no longer offered. On turn 0 the list included packages restricted to another scenario or nation, which the Judge would then refuse.
• Three crashes fixed: pressing Open with the file name box cleared; running the Battle Simulator on a hex with no city, or with only blank armies in the list; and clicking a column header to sort while the map was still setting itself up.
• A tidier order panel. On orders with many parameters, the ALL checkbox and the order buttons no longer get pushed down to the bottom of the panel.

On the website

• Scores now stop counting at turn 50. Punctorum and the Hall of Fame count only what you earn in a game's first 50 turns. A very long game used to keep paying out score turn after turn, which rewarded playing forever over playing well. Everything up to turn 50 counts exactly as before, your true max turn played is still shown, and it feeds the seniority order used when nations are handed out, so a long campaign no longer buys an earlier pick.
• See for yourself whether the die is fair. A new Die Fairness page on the Links page, open to everyone. Nearly every action is settled by a 1-100 roll against a target the Judge works out, and this page lines up every roll ever made, in every game, against how often that die should have succeeded. Chart, table, a plain-language verdict, and you can narrow it to a single game.
• Sort the open games however you like. On Open Games, click any column heading to sort by it - name, scenario, type, frequency, starting day, max turn, minimum rank, status or open positions - and click again to reverse.
• Game instructions sit beside the sign-up form. On the Sign Up page a game's instructions now appear in their own column next to the nation picker instead of stretched across the top, so you can read what makes a game special while you order your preferences. On a phone they stack, instructions first.
• Your orders and live-game Chronicles stay private. Turn files and in-progress Chronicles can only be read by the players entitled to see them. The Chronicle of a finished game is unchanged and still open to everyone.

Visit clashlegends.com to replay one of your finished games and check your standings.

Download Counselor 2.917

Windows, macOS and Linux installers, plus portable versions, are all on the release page. The full list of changes is in the Counselor changelog, and website changes are on the website changelog. If Counselor is already installed it will offer to update itself.

Good hunting,

The GM Team