Know your Map - Victory Point Mechanics

Hello everyone, this is VictorStewart, bringing you my first written guide for my Know Your Map guide series. As you know, Company of Heroes 2 is a game with a lot of depth and information. However, not all information is shown clearly with numbers or descriptions. I hope this guide will provide you with everything you need to know about Victory Points and their mechanics. Enjoy!

NOTE: For clarity purposes, I will use the term «Victory Point» to describe the point on the map that you need to capture and «VP» to describe the points reserve that you and your opponent are given at the beginning of the game to play with.

Victory Points are capture points that are available to the Victory Point game mode. These points are distributed on the map for players to contest and drain the opponent's VPs down to 0 for the win. To drain the opponent's VP, the player(s) will have to own more Victory Points on the map than their opponent. On the vast majority of the official maps in Company of Heroes 2, there are three Victory Points, except Lorch Assault, which has five.


Below is the visual indicator of the points on the minimap and the tactical map:



And here is the visual look of a Victory Point in the game (they have some barrels and some munition boxes at a broad, wooden base)

Victory Points have many properties that separate them from other resource capture points:

• They do not directly yield any resources and act solely as the game mode's victory condition.
  
• The territory surrounding the Victory Points are often very small, and thus, they do not really work as a territory connector to the base. (there are some exceptions, such as the middle VP on some maps)
  
• The player(s) do not need the Victory Points connected to their base to gain its benefit.
  
• You cannot build an OKW base on the territory that contains a Victory Point.
  

At the standard capture rate and revert rate of 1. We have:

Capture Time: 20 seconds
Decapture (Revert) Time: 13.3 seconds

Tips: The capture time of the Victory Point can be affected by the unit's capture and decapture rate. They can also be neutralized by Stuka Bombing Drop ability of the Wehrmacht commander. You can use these capture rate enhancing abilities or units to help you stay in the game when your VP reserve goes low. (I will talk about every ability's and unit's capture rate in another guide. Video version here)

The amount of VP drop per tick depends on how many more Victory Points the player possesses than the opponent. If the player has captured two Victory Points while the opponent has none, the opponent will lose 2 VPs per tick. If the opponent has one and the player has one, no one loses any points.

One interesting point to note is that the VP ticks happen every 4 seconds of game time. However, this "every 4-second" rule does not apply when you capture the point, but rather when the game starts. It means the tick will kick in at the 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th (and so on) second of the minute. Every minute, there will be a maximum of 15 ticks.

This may create an interesting scenario where you have 1 VP left. If the enemy finished capturing precisely the moment the ticking time has just passed, you could theoretically have an additional 4 seconds to decapture the opponents Victory Point to stay in the game.

Example:

If you manage to obtain the Victory Point advantage at, say, 15: 01, the next tick will come at 15:04. If you capture the Victory Point at 15:03, the next tick will still come at 15:04 instead of 15:07.

Since we know that there are a maximum of 15 ticks per minute, VP drain rate will be:

• 15 VP per minute with 1 Victory Point advantage
  
• 30 VP per minute with 2 Victory Point advantage
  
• 45 VP per minute with 3 Victory Point advantage (aka Tripple Cap)

Given the VP tick's static nature, you can calculate how much time you have left before you lose (or win) the game should the Victory Point ownership be unchanged.



Example:
You have 200 VP remaining and the opponent owns 3 Victory Points more than you. You will have:


By knowing this, you can visualize the urgency of your VP situation to decide the priority, such as contesting for resources or decapturing the opponent's VP to stop the VP bleed (and I hope you have an ok mental math skill to do that on the fly).

Unfortunately, the game has very little quantitative information displayed in the game, so it is almost impossible to gauge that moment when you can intercept and give yourself that additional few seconds. However, I hope you still find this guide informative and helpful (such as VP drain rate). If you have any questions related to Victory Point that I have not addressed, feel free to ask. I will update this guide accordingly.



Credit: Thanks to RitaRush for the banner art and Mithiriath, Hannibal, FichtenMoped for their inputs about formating and structuring the guide.