How base capture works in World of Tanks

Let's talk about this one, because I got a private, post-game, message this morning from a guy with 50K battles who doesn't understand it.

Note: I'm only going to talk about standard battles at the moment. It works slightly different for encounter mode.

You need 100 cap points to cap a base.

Cap timer

You get 1 cap point, each second, for each tank that is in the cap circle, up to a maxium of three tanks. That means when the first guy gets on cap, there are 100 seconds (1 minute, and 40 seconds) to go.

If a second guy jumps on cap, that guy is also earning 1 cap point per second, so if the first guy had been on for 10 seconds (has 10 cap points) you need 90 more cap points and since each of the two guys is earning 1 point per second (total of 2 points per second) it will now take only 45 more seconds to cap.

If a third guy jumps on cap 15 seconds later (you now need 60 more cap points), that guy also earns 1 cap point per second. So your team is now earning THREE cap points per second, and instead of it taking 60 more seconds (with 1 guy) or 30 more seconds (with 2 guys) it only takes 20 more seconds to finish the cap.

If a fourth guy jumps on cap...it doesn't speed it up at all. His cap points don't count towards the team's cap points. Really the best you can hope for is that an enemy trying to reset cap shoots that fourth guy so that they don't reset any of the three who actually do count.

So what does this mean, tactically?

The guy who messaged me this morning was mad that I didn't jump on cap immediately (rather than 15 seconds later after I killed their arty). Ultimately me  jumping on cap immediately wouldn't have changed the outcome and the reason is what we just talked about - cumulative cap points.

I was on cap alone. Which means it takes 100 seconds for me to cap. The enemy ELC jumped on cap around the same time. Fine...but then a second enemy tank jumped on cap. At that point without a reset there's no way I can win. They would cap out in less than 50 seconds (because there's two of them) and I still had something like 70 seconds to go.

Then, to make matters worse, a third enemy jumped on cap. Now there was no possible way I could outcap them, unless my teammates reset them, because they were earning cap points at 3 times the rate I was. 

The only way we could win would be to reset.

What does resetting the cap mean?

When somebody is on your cap the way to defend it is to shoot them. As long as you do damage (even a critical hit) you reset that tank's cap points back to zero and they have to start over.

That's fine if there's one tank on cap, but what if there's two (or three)? The other ones just keep going as normal. That means if you reset somebody on cap, and there are others, your next shot should go into one of the others. You need to reset EACH of them otherwise the others will just cap you out anyhow.

Should you "Don't cap, kill all!"?

Often late in a battle if a player is on cap somebody on your team might type in chat "NO CAP! KILL ALL!" or something to that effect. Why?

Team XP and credit earning is largely based off damage both your own, and the team's. So in theory killing that last enemy tank is slightly better than capping it out. But of course it depends - if the last enemy only has 100hp left then it really doesn't matter. If you're winning 12-2 and there are three relatively healthy enemies left then there's still a fair bit of XP your team might want to chase.

Speaking of chasing...if I'm in a heavy I'm not going to chase a wheelie around the map just to kill all instead of capping. I'll just park on their cap and wait.

I'll talk more about cap pressure soon, but another thing to know is that getting on their cap can force the flow of the game - the enemy tanks may have to come back to reset you if they want any chance of winning. So if an enemy is hiding, or running, or dug in somewhere....getting on their cap can be a way of forcing them to come out and fight.

GLHF!