Every match consists of 5 games. Each game is played on a different map with a different random seed. The team that wins more games wins the match.
Win conditions per game
A game ends when:
| Condition | Description |
|---|
| Core destroyed | One team’s core reaches 0 HP |
| Resources | After 2000 rounds, the tiebreaker sequence determines the winner |
| Timeout | After 2000 rounds with equal tiebreakers — decided by coinflip |
Ladder
The ladder ranks all teams by Glicko-2 rating. New teams start unrated and are seeded to 1500 when they upload their first ready submission.
Scheduling
Every 10 minutes, the scheduler:
- Pairs each team with one similarly-rated opponent (greedy nearest-rating matching with small random jitter to avoid repetitive matchups)
- Avoids rematches from the last hour
- Submits matches to the runner infrastructure
With N teams, each cycle creates floor(N/2) matches — one match per team.
Rating updates
Ratings are updated using Glicko-2 after each scheduler cycle. Match outcomes use fractional scoring based on the game score (e.g., a 5-0 win counts more than a 3-2 win).
Each team has three rating components:
- Rating — skill estimate (starts at 1500)
- Uncertainty (RD) — confidence in the rating (starts high, decreases with more matches)
- Volatility — expected rating fluctuation
Unrated matches
You can challenge any team to an unrated match that doesn’t affect ratings:
cambc unrated <opponent_team_id>
Test runs
Test runs let you upload two local bots and run them against each other on the same hardware as ladder matches:
cambc test-run my_bot opponent
Rate limits: max 10 test/unrated matches per 5 minutes. Unrated matches also have a 5-minute cooldown per specific matchup.
