Chrono Divide build orders

How it works

Every ranked 1v1 game on the Chrono Divide ladder leaves a replay. This site reads the ones where both players sat above 1800 MMR and follows each player's first 8 minutes of production clicks: what they queued next, and when. Per map and matchup it shows the mainline, the opening most players follow, with sidelines, complete variations and pictures of example bases in the real game art.

Data

Games come from the public Chrono Divide ladder API and its replay store on the EU server. Every night new ladder games are crawled, their replays downloaded and decoded, and the book is rebuilt. Only games where both players were at 1800+ MMR at game time count. The replay format is a plain list of player commands per game tick, which is exactly what a build order is: no unit positions, no fog, no camera.

What counts as a decision

A build decision is the click that starts production, not the placement of the finished building: placing late is execution speed, not intent. Each production queue builds one item at a time, so miner or tank is a decision like any other. Units queued in one burst count as one decision (4 dogs), miner counts branch (1, 2, 3, 4+). Duplicate clicks, cancelled orders and deploy spam are removed before counting.

Mainline, sidelines, variations

Like a chess opening book. At every step the mainline follows the decision most players took, with the median click time, the share of the field still on the line, win rate and perf. Perf is the win rate minus the Elo expectation from the MMR gap, so beating a stronger opponent counts for more than beating a weaker one. Sidelines list what the others did instead, and the variations browser cycles through complete lines ranked by performance, games played, depth or win rate. Lines stop where fewer than 3 games remain.

Views

Buildings and miners, the default, keeps the economy decisions. Buildings and all units interleaves every production queue. Full tree shows every branch. A start position narrows the book to players who started there, which is what matters for placement. Builds are map-specific, so nothing is pooled across maps.

Pictures

The build pictures draw the mainline's example base for every start position on the map render, numbered in build order, with a card per production building listing the units it produced. Each start position has its own house colour. Maps, buildings and cameos are rendered from the original game files with CNCMaps, the renderer behind spysat.cc.

Skill

Better players win with worse builds, and better players also build better. MMR is not a filter beyond the floor: the perf number corrects each result for the strength of the opponent, so a build's score is not just a proxy for who plays it.