Debrief, Medals, Map Codes and Leaderboards

A battle in Wavefront: Vanguard used to end on a victory or defeat panel and a score line. This week is about everything that happens around the battle: understanding what just happened, sharing the map it happened on, and the long game across many matches.

The debrief

Every battle that ends now has a Debrief button on its score card. It opens a screen with the result, the match time, the map and its code, and charts: army value and kills over time for every side, your five resources as sparklines, your most valuable unit with what it destroyed and whether it survived, and first contact: when each side first held a track on the other, and with which sensor.

A row of medals sits on top. Nine post-battle highlights, any number per battle, won or lost: Eagle Eye for spotting, Long Arm for indirect-fire kills, Sky Shield for aircraft downed, Ace Wings for kills by your own aircraft, Combined Arms for kills from three domains, Iron Wall for a lopsided exchange, Missile Shield for missiles shot down, Quartermaster for building the most, Spearhead for the most kills. Each pays war bonds on top of the usual XP.

There's a Screenshot button that sends the debrief to your Steam library, and a Copy map code button.

Map codes

Every skirmish map now has a short code like 1TWD-KNTZ that encodes its seed, shape and biome. It's shown under the lobby's seed with a Copy button, in the debrief, and in bug reports. Paste one into the seed field and press Use, and you're on that exact map. Case, spaces, dashes, and the usual O/0 and I/L/1 mix-ups are forgiven, and a check character refuses every single mistyped character rather than silently sending you somewhere else.

Leaderboards, achievements and career stats

Every one of the 15 missions has a global Steam leaderboard, ranked by stars and then by the fastest time. The Missions window shows the top five and your own rank, and the score card shows your new rank after a win. The mission clock starts when the mission is staged and stops during the briefing, so loading and reading time don't count.

The achievement list grew to 53. The new ones are career kills: Practitioner and Adept tiers at 100 and 500 lifetime enemy kills by your ground forces, your aircraft, your ships and submarines, and your defensive structures, with a hidden tier beyond them. They run on Steam stats, so Steam shows your progress toward each tier, and a toast in game marks each quarter. Behind them sit 17 more career stats (battles played and won, win streaks, minutes in battle, medals, units built, enemies detected and destroyed, aircraft and missiles shot down, missions completed) for future achievements and leaderboards. Battles played without Steam still count: the game keeps every value in your account save and raises the Steam stat at the next start.

AI commanders with personalities

An AI seat in the lobby now has a personality button. Balanced plays the usual build order. Turtle builds radar, point defence, counter-battery and two SAM sites first, keeps a home guard that never leaves, and attacks late and big. Rusher runs two vehicle factories and a lean base, sends small ground waves from the first minutes straight at the nearest base, and only starts saving for tier 3 after five minutes. Air power builds two airstrips and an airfield and gives the air wing the money first, with fighter sweeps ahead of its attacks. Naval builds two shipyards and coastal batteries early and fights at sea. The default is Random, rolled when the battle starts, so you find out by fighting it.

In a first 12-minute five-way sample, the Rusher sent 14 waves and 75 units, the Turtle scored 29 kills for 7 losses, and the Naval AI had the most kills. Air power still fields too few aircraft. Tuning continues.

Report a bug from inside the game

Press F10 in a battle or in the menus, or use the pause menu. The game captures the screen first, then asks what happened. The report goes to us with the screenshot (optional, with a thumbnail so you see what you're sending), the end of the game's log with names and paths masked, and a summary of the match: map and code, weather, who was human and who was AI, forces, resources, your selection and camera. No name or Steam id is attached.

Alongside it, the game now sends anonymous usage statistics and crash reports to servers we run ourselves. They carry a random install id and never your name, Steam ID or chat. Settings > Interface > Share usage statistics turns both off and deletes the id. The game privacy policy has the full list of what's sent.

Also

• Heavy rounds from the tank's 120 mm gun and the 30 mm autocannon now ricochet off sloped ground at grazing angles, with a white-hot flash and spark streaks, at half damage and still able to hit something.
• The minimap gained a tool column: toggle sensor ranges and resource marks, jump to your base, jump to your selection.
• Birds flock with a boids model and scatter from explosions. Fish school under the surface, dart from blasts, and one leaps clear now and then.
• The frigate has a point-defence laser: a red beam that kills an incoming missile per shot, 1.8 km, 1.5 s recharge, always on in self-defence like the CIWS.
• Ping is shown per player in the lobby, in the battle's top bar and on the score screen.
• New fonts: Serati on headings and tabs, Shibuya Zero stencil on the HUD title.

Next: the Arctic, and a lot of new hardware.