Both 1v1 and 4v4.Since changing its core.
im one of the few ones playing it in teams and 1v1 on ladder recently and boy, boy is it rough
in short- civ is probably not too bad power wise its just weak as all hell to the meta civs. just my experience, its no longer a ez win noob bash civ nor good into meta, meaning lamers moved to other civs and mains wait for some changes to come out i think
lets look at lakota weaknesses: static building defenses such as walls, towers, forts, booms they cant chase off hunts a la house booms or banks, and dont have great answers to goon/skirm combos until they can card and fully upgrade their plaza and units
Now what are the top civs in 1v1? otto which corner camps FI into mosque or abus/cav archer. Italy, often corner camping an FI skirms and strong anti cav. india, which tend to drop a fort and can skirm goon age2. Ethopia, which can also drop defenses and skirm goon age2. And china which also likes to bot the FF into very strong skirm/cav (this one is slightly lakota favored but lakota gotta work 2x as hard to micro it well) Suddenly, you realize lakota is forced to sit often outside opponents base for 20+ minutes praying they take good fights or can close before the hunts vanish. basically, you get to work2-3x as hard as meta civs atm and for what? playing nr10 while they FI into super units and you get smashed ? its not very fun
ofc this experience vs top civs isnt unique to lakota, and lakota in 3v3 is still popular. but 1v1 right now you are basically turning on hardcore mode. lakota does ok and often great into many other matchups (non age2 goon ones) but its a fragile, very micro intense civ. this is fun, but on ladder where those civs make up almost half of all games regulates most lakota players to lobbies
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I cant say much about 1v1 but in team games there are still enough lakota players that I encounter, even my team mates also choose lakota time to time. Meanwhile in treaty lakota is a really rare.
They need a full rework. The new devs have pushed Lakota’s playstyle to just pseudo-European comp, instead of letting the Lakota focus heavily into their cavalry.
There’s 22 civs in the game - the old Lakota playstyle where their army was 90% cavalry and only a bit of infantry but no artillery was hard, sure, but it was unique and a good player could take it a long ways. Letting the Lakota push back into their cavalry would let them be the niche civ they once were, instead of this weird attempt at just the same basic unit composition that every other civ in the game uses.
Yeah, sure, the full cavalry is hard to play well and might be hard to balance, but it’s healthy for the game’s diversity and is true to Lakota history and beliefs. Why would you give a civ reliable access into 9 different cavalry units if you didn’t want them to focus heavily on cavalry?
Rework the military to make each cav unit more niche and let players decide if they like the all-cav military composition. It isn’t as easy to counter as it seems. Their units aren’t set up to have the generic European comp in the first place, so trying to push them into it is just making them harder to play because they have too many holes in their comp when they go that direction.
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Very true, indeed. I miss the siege bonus of the Plaza, the no penalties against settlers.
Lakota is actually doing better then you might expect. Games with Lakota are been played at a higher Elo then average with Lakota. They are on par with Aztecs and Incan with 10,000 games played since Jan 28 (far as data goes back). Double that of Haude, Ethiopian and Hausa. That is still on the lower placement of Civs but certainly not the least.
Their Play rate and win rate has varied a little since Jan 28. But not massively, this is about the same variation we see in other Civs. Week 7 (March patch) and week 12 (April patch) dont lead to consistent changes.
(This is for 1100+ elo games)
They are best with a rush but have a decent win rate overall.
(This is for 1100+ elo games)
And funny enough there best match up is Otto. so this current meta with high amount of Otto games may be helping them out in having such a good win rate. Also with about 150 games on each standard map, Arabia is so far the most favorable map. The classic great plains just has a 49.66% win rate.
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Total Lakato games played is 2.91%. which if all games played equally (4.54%) is under represented. and about a quarter of that to Otto (9.97%).
Subject to change with updated data
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i really doubt the best m/u for lakota is otto past a certain elo
it used to be favored but my theory is that due to corner campign otto meta atm, otto tends to concede the entire map to lakota which gives laktoa maximum eco. then they can get into age4 where bow rider are actually pretty nasty with plaza buffs
my experience at around 1400s to 1300s is that smart otto players simply safe ff into abus CA sipahi, which the lowly wakina and coin intensive BR do not do great into. and until next patch, AR die so hard to goon they might as well not even square up vs cav archer and abus. with no ability to stop the fort and then GBs, there is little lakota can do but rush hard and hope to idle them long enough to gain an advantge
what about 1400 and up? i see only 90 days played total, of which most had wild elo swings
I think its mostly due to lower players not repsonding to raids or being efficent with units moreso than lakota beats otto. once, if, the FI is nerfed age 2-3 lakota should be ok into otto even if cav archers and otto 3tc eco is far more efficent when contesting the map
Your experience may be jaded by a particular bad personal match up/good match up depending who your playing.
Though there is a definite drop off at 1700+
We are talking not many games though so it is likely only one/few players contributing to any of the higher elo bands.
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My understanding of the bump we see before the drop off is players hitting their skill ceiling, bouncing around a particular elo range. We see it more when we have less data on a civ. Take Aztecs. Big drop off in win rate from 1500-1600 (58.82% win rate) compared to 1600-1700 (47.25% win rate). Suggesting players can do well up to a point.
This could be seen in a different way though, where the civ itself just is bad at a certain point, not having the tools to counter high skill play. it might be hard to to attribute if its the civ itself that is bad/good at higher elos or if its the type of players drawn to the civ that make it appear bad/good. IDK.
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its certainly tough to measure civs accross elo and smaller sample sizes means more chance of error or confouding variables
I know ive kicked around ideas to measure how otto can boost elo. Its been known since RE that the civ is pretty straightforward to play and famously easy to rise in ranked ladder with. However, even with as popular as it is, I’ve never come up with enough data to say without error that there is a measurable boost. So it remains a widely beleived theory at best
great graphs and presentations by the way!
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Lakota used to be a bad match for Otto. But not anymore in 2023 after introduction of azap. Anyone just tell me how does Lakota beat azap+falcs?