So, there is the metric that everyone is obsessed about balancing. The win rate. Did a civilization win or lose their match? Beyond 1v1, this becomes meaningless. For example, lets say you have a team of turks, britons, and portugese. The hand cannoneers of the portugese are going to have an outsized effect. But what about a team of britons, mongols, and tartars? The british archery bonus will still have an effect, but without the synergy of the turks, not as much. And what happens when the tartars decide to go cavalry instead of cavalry archer? No effect from briton team bonus.
Going further in depth, lets say its britons vs an enemy team with franks. Britons would counter franks by going pikes. But, what if they have an ally like malians who field heavy camels to cover the britons? The malian civ does not have any apparent surface team value here aside from faster university, but the presence of camels changes the outcome of tactics used.
So, this brings us to the different metric for team games. Survival time. Is there any way to see the average survival time for civs in team games?
No, winrate is fine.
It would only be better if it was split in flank and pocket.
Winrate is fine for 1v1. But for team games, winrate should be balanced out by survival time. For example, if cumans get repeatedly rushed and killed because they can’t wall up, but have a high win percentage, what does that mean for their team play? Should they have a tech that allows them to survive longer but does not affect their winrate? And if so, what?
That maybe they are so strong that others NEED to focus them down to even have a chance of winning? And that would be reflected correctly in the winrates, not the survival time.
Winrate is an absolutely flawed stat which keeps showing contradictions patch after patch. The only reason it is used so widely, is because it is very easy to claim “look at stats” and 95% people won’t look in depth…
Right now, the best civ in the game (Chinese) is at a mediocre 51.7%, below Malians and Indians,
Play rate is important too. I think win rate and play rate both need to be taken into account. When a civ consistently barely manages to reach 1% play rate, there’s got to be something wrong with the civ. Not to mention when a civ doesn’t even reach 1%…
winrate isn’t a useless concept for teamgames. winrate data is useless for teamgames because the matchmaking is horrendous, and all the data is just noise
outside of 1v1 on a handful of maps, winrate data won’t really tell you anything for aoe2. for other games it might, but aoe2 doesn’t have good matchmaking
the only metric that isn’t worthless is civilization selection rate. in a 4v4 civs, should have about a 10% selection rate if the game was fair. this is where you will see the big outliers.
their philosophy of trying to give each civ some gimmick is completely useless at achieving balance because people just see the map ahead of time and only pick the civs that are overpowered for that map
when you look at selection rate per map, you will find some civs with >90% selection rate and some with 0% selection rate (rounded). that’s an order of magnitude different from the expected selection rate