Profile of Siphon X.

While Rosbone mentioned that you can change the color in the menu, I think the more relevant part of his post was the ALPHA setting, which just happens to be in the same menu.

I found creating realistic fields pretty tricky as well. Rosbone already listed everything relevant.

What I'd like to add is that lighting is really important. The textures in the post you show look great and 3D because of the lighting produces nice, strong shadows.

My map, "Fields of Winnekendonk" is based on a historic battle and I tried to recreate the setting there. I wanted North being up, and the battle happened around dusk in overall rather foggy weather on muddy fields. Problem was that when I added more fog and placed the sun in where it roughly would have been historically, the fields would look flat without any reflections on the mud puddles.

So after some experimentation I had to put the sun in the North (ouch) and reduce the fog to actually make the fields look way more plastic and wet (still not superhappy with how they turned out, but it is waaaay better looking now than how they looked originally).

Ahh not sure how I got mixed that up. Makes much more sense, thanks.

No worries, the thread is title "Map vetoe stats", so it is normal to assume that the numbers show vetoes. "Map pick stats" could be a more accurate title, but then you have the disconnect to gameplay as players can't actually pick specific maps, so....

You mean like this graph that shows it as top 4 map Kappa?
And I think this was before the last rework patch.

Right, but in fairness you can see that Kharkov is significantly less popular with top players than with the rest. Sure, still is in the top 4, but not tied for first anymore like for pretty much the rest of the ladder...

Well, depends, right?

I think the "Go double fuel" thing is basically the result of stage 2 in people's path to learn the game.

The obvious thing you realize instantly is that the goal of the game is to bring the opponent's VPs down to 0. You do that by holding more VPs than your opponent, so holding VPs is the most important thing to do: Strategy 1 therefore is to rush the VPs and defend them as best as you can.

Now, you do that, you hold 2 VPs, everything works great, and then you get rolled over by tanks. Why is that? Ok, they had both fuels, we didn't because we sat on the VPs, hence they were able to buy tons of tanks while we had none. So, update the strategy stage 2: "Rush the fuels. The more fuel the better, no matter the cost."

Eventually, stage 3 would then be that everything is situational, but at that point it becomes tricky because the best strategy depends on a ton of things.

So, yeah, I can understand that it frustrating if your teammate constantly and blindly pushes for the other fuel, but maybe it is still better than if a teammate would only secure and defend one VP at the start of the game and then flame you for not being able to hold "your" VP?

Edit: More to your initial question, if it is effective: Well, yeah, if you can secure both fuels easily, you will win quickly. The obvious problem is, that will only be able to pull this off if your team is significantly better than the other team; which may or may not be the case; if they are not, then you might loose to much in the attempts and it might cost you the game instead as adamírcz wrote.

So, while I was at it, I thought I also made some graphs of the win percentages that the factions achieve on the different maps in automatch in January and February of 2020.

Disclaimer(s): Deriving anything from automatch statistics is somewhat tricky; the matchmaker is supposed to level out player and faction power levels, while on the other hand being limited to the players that actually queued. It seems fair to assume that the matchmaker is only taking into account a player's performance with a single faction and not the map - which is why I think there is some point in looking at these at all - but previous studies showed that map vetoes do depend on the player level so, there might be some imprint of this.

The values below show the difference between a faction's win percentage on a specific map and its average win percentage. I also computed estimates for the standard deviations with a pretty crude boot-strapping technique. I didn't display them in the graphs to not clutter them further, but I'll add some sentence on the estimated accuracy to each section. Note, that generally the values will be more accurate, the more often that specific faction played on this specific map. Conversely, values for less popular maps with less popular factions might be severely less accurate. I put a gray rectangular on the plots to indicate the part that is roughly reflecting the typical uncertainties.

Note: The maps are ordered based on their popularity. The most recent numbers can be found here.

I have no means of checking which side each player started on. In turn this means that maps that have very advantageous starting points (like, "North side will always win!") will end up with very balanced stats.

Finally: Don't fret over the implications. Even the more extreme values below barely exceed a few percent. To put this in perspective: Assuming your faction shows a -2% win percentage on a certain map; this means that out of 100 games you play with this faction on this map, you loose only 2 because of the map; the other 98 games are decided by the players' skill gap and faction balance (so, matchmaking stuff), starting position, random elements and other things. So, practically this will hardly be noticable.

1v1

I recorded 155284 1v1 automatch games (yeah, I think my server had some "disc-full" issues for a few days...), about 82k OH, 78k SOV, 73k OKW, 45k USF, 31k UKF. Win percentages are roughly 0.6% for the more played maps and factions but go up to slightly more than 1% for UKF on the lesser played maps:

2v2

I have data for about 190k games (AT and RT). I broke the numbers down to team compositions. Most common team was OH/OKW (108k), the least common was UKF/UKF and USF/USF (10k and 14k). For the other compositions I found between 34k to 51k games.

Axis teams:


Allied teams:

3v3

I have about 120k 3v3 games. The diagrams below show the axis win percentages (obviously, allied win percentages will be opposite of those). Uncertainties turned out to be 0.4% for the more commonly played maps to the 0.8% for the less commonly played ones.

4v4

I found the data for about 230k 4v4 games. The inaccuracies I found are about 0.3% for the commonly played maps which increases to 0.7% for Vielsalm.

I just played around with the small barrel stack on palettes. Ahhhh classic Relic.

Light vehicles can shoot them and destroy them to a state where there is only a palette and bottom rings of the barrels left. At this point they still block pathing and shots.

I then blasted them with a medium tank. Nothing changed. They still block pathing and shots.

Running over them with a medium tank finally destroys them to the state of NOT blocking pathing and shots. However, they visually never change appearance. So they look identical when they block and when they do not block.

I am guessing there was supposed to be a 3rd model state or some other bug.

Is there a list of bugged objects and their issues? We really need one.

Yeah, I tried something similar today and got to the same conclusion. I spawned an ISU in the upper right field of the first photo. By mistake I first hit attack ground behind the car on the left. After a couple of shots the car was destroyed (actually leaving nothing) but the shots still got blocked.

Then shot across the barrels which blocked like 6 shots as well. Then I ran over everything with the ISU and after that none of the shots were blocked anymore... Funny.