Time of year

Spring, summer, autumn or winter: how a map looks, and nothing else.

Every match is set in a time of year: three stages of each of the four seasons. It changes how the land is painted and nothing else: the same map plays the same in spring and in winter, for the rules, the rating and the fog alike.

Not to be confused with the leaderboard’s seasons: stretches of the calendar with a table and medals of their own (Seasons and medals).

Which one a match has

• Auto (Quick Match, the bots, and a private match that does not pick): the map’s seed decides, so a map always wears the same time of year.
• A private match’s creator may pick any of the 12 in the create dialog (Time of year).
• A custom map’s author may give it a time of year in the map editor, and it wins over a room’s pick; left on Auto, it follows the map’s seed.

What changes

• The ground sheet (the pack’s five colours of grass), the tint of paths and the colour behind the water.
• The trees: their colour, and in autumn the leaf trees, in winter bare pines.
• Small scenery on the grass and in the rivers that fits the season: mushrooms and bushes in spring, straw-coloured bushes in summer, pumpkins in autumn, stones and bare bushes in winter, and rocks with foam in the water. It is only there to look at: it never blocks a unit, hides a mine or marks a lair.
• The water and the shore foam, tinted lightly (50 % of the way to the season’s colour); the default summer is left as the pack draws it.
• Snow falls in winter, more in its late stage.
• The minimap, the map’s picture in the muster and on the Maps page, the editor and replays wear it too.

Tip: Your units and buildings are never tinted, and the territory lines stay readable at every time of year: Blue and Red always tell apart.

The twelve