Note: The statistics shown here are not an exhaustive report of my Ant War experience. Statistics started to be tracked several years into development, towards the completion of the game. By that point, I had already played thousands of games, and these examples are only from the North American server, excluding the European Battle Net server. I am arguably the best player of my game, having won the most recent 1v1 tournament (in December of 2022). That said, the competition is EXTREMELY fierce. There are a couple dozen very powerful and very experienced players of Ant War.

 

In Ant War, I track hundreds of metrics across 7 categories and display them to curious players.

The metrics tracked include how many games have been played, play time, types of matches, maps played on, units made, upgrades researched, races and balance details, environmental interaction, queen data such as how many times the queen died or how many you’ve killed.

Statistic Tracking can help with balance or stop complaints. For example, player x believes that Fire Ant is overpowered and he sees a Fire Ant win rate of 80% under the Races category. When he shares a screenshot of his statistics to the discord community server, it’s discovered that he’s only seen Fire Ant chosen 10 times and he’s only played 30 games. Player y in the discord shares his own statistics screen that shows player y has played 200 games, seen Fire Ant chosen by other players 170 times, and the win rate is only 26%. This report is more authoritative because it has more data from playing more games, and the 26% win rate is consistent with 1 balanced ant race out of 4.

The Maps Played tab keeps track of how many of the 45 official maps a player has played on. Hovering over the image of the map will make the name of the map appear. Optionally, the current or previous map seed can be saved. This primarily is only useful for saving scrambled maps. For official maps, only the first two numbers change, the rest are 0s. The player is also encouraged to use the custom map editor to make, share, and play their own maps.

In Ant War, with map scrambling, custom maps, and 45 official maps, there are an infinite number of playable maps that may be selected, custom made, or procedurally generated. One thing I’d like to point out in the image above, is the Maze map (second map in the top row of the second map screen). The maze map was one of the most difficult maps I learned to generate. It creates a random dynamically generated maze every time it’s played!

The units made screen tracks all of the units in the game that can be made. If you hover over the image, the image changes in a cool way. The Brood Chamber for example, will show eggs around it. The Guard Post that launches spikes in game will show a spike launching out of it. The name of the unit will appear when the image is hovered over too.

Lastly, I’ll point out the buttons under the statistics. Each button opens an informational popup encouraging players to visit the ant war website, a SC2 arcade stat website, the youtube channel, the discord server, or donate via paypal. I’ll also note that hovering over the leaf with a question mark next to the screen name will replace the screen with a text box that gives information about the statistics tracked on the screen.