At which point in time Turks were even worth anything in a tower rush? If towers are so good at making a weak civ beat a strong one, then why the better civ player doesn’t just trush with his better bonuses?
1 Like
Because, picture that, there was a time in which Players played ranked for fun and didn’t tryhard every game 
Fact is, while every civ has different civ bonuses, almost all civs have the same towers, allowing you to go past feudal and not having to have a losing archer matchup like in a Mayans vs Byzantines for example. In which you can increase your chance to use your cheaper Imp
Burmese in a great shape I see.
Bottom 5 in 1v1 open, bottom 10 in 1v1 closed, bottom 5/6 team open, but they’re top 10 in team closed, wow, so ok, you just have to play them in Arena, Hideout or BF in team games, seems fair, that’s quite a good amount of maps for variety.
Byzantines are also in great shape being bottom 10/11 in all game types.
But winrates are meaningless, and we don’t have water maps here (why?? they’re super important since they’re played so much!), I’m sure Burmese and Byzantines win rate on water would be like 99,97% at least so they’re balanced.
On the other hand Franks are not even top10 in closed maps, plus we know they’re not good on water, so I don’t see any reason to nerf them. 
MEGAlol at Poles though, a cavalry civs that is average on open maps and the top on closed maps. 
Folwark almost useless on open maps?
Cumans, Teutons, Bulgarians, Franks and Celts seem the only good (top 15) civs that you can pick in any map type, excluding the super-played water maps, of course. Look how strange, except Bulgarians, all these civs lack Bracer.
Other similarities, all these civs have FU infantry (Bulgarians THS are better than FU champs) halbs included, good siege, except Franks, and all these civs have good heavy cavalry, except Celts that have Paladins though, none of these civs have Arbalesters.
1 Like
Yeah that just displays again how little these statistics say. Like poles spanish and koreans top 5 on closed maps (most of the data actually comes from arena games) is just a joke. Koreans and spanish are okayish, poles is hard to say but none of these should be even in top10. And conversely top arena civs like malay or byzantines are below average according to that. That’s like saying byzantines is top arabia civ and vikings or chinese or at best mediocre 11
1 Like
What I like about these stats is that author expresses confidence interval, which should always be reported in order to make the stat trust-worthy.
3 Likes
True, and its hilarious how the confidence intervals change depending on elo. For example, in closed maps, goths and franks have tight confidence intervals at lower elos, with high winrates, and suddenly they go wide at middle elos with balanced winrates.
in open maps, on the contrary…
Those stats exclude low elo matches (below 1200 if I am not mistaken). It is different from those shown as aoestats.com People in 1200 know how to play some bad civs that lower elo players don’t. Also, I suspect this may be due to a castle drop meta in those elos? can someone confirm this?
It looks like Turks have a civ bonus as cheaper gunpowder techs. Nevertheless, it is nothing but overlapping useless stuff. Turks get chemistry for free and it is already stated at their civ bonus. Do they have siege engineers to use 50% off? No. Do Cannon Galleons require any pre-tech to be produced? No. Do Turks Gunpowder units have any discount for their Elite upgrades? No. This Turks civ. bonus is there only for the Bombard Towers tech and it is more or less useless in many circumstances. Hence long story short, Devs are very welcome to remove this useless Turks bonus to buff their early game somehow.
In addition, I must disagree that Turks Imperial are strong. 95% of the closed map games are won as Turks if you can rush with fast imperial. After the gold mines are done, you are trasher than the trash units as Turks.
3 Likes
This is just your speculation. Poles number 1 win rate on Arena and also Okay in Arabia on win rate show that how people judge civ strength just by bonus or tech tree is just meaningless. Poles can be weak on Arena on paper, but people still don’t know how to play/play against and civ’s potential is unexplored.
Remember people in this forum argue that poles are so weak and they need Halbs or Plate barding armor or better bonus range of folwark.
Byzantines or Malays are great on Arena but hard to play. It is expected result for mediocre win rate on Arena. No one say that Mayans are mid-tier arabia civ because they have balanced win rate on Average players.
And I stand by that. Poles are pretty trash without last Cav armor on open maps. Obuch is great for closed maps though.
Concerning spanish and koreans no. That’s not just speculation. Concerning poles, yeah you’re right or let’s say it’s an assumption of what I’ve played and seen so far. Maybe the obuch and arb bbc composition is better than I think, idk. It just feels like that all the top civs have way stronger comps but I guess we’ll see about that in the future.
Yeah exactly (although I don’t think Byzantines are particularly hard to play on arena). I just said to stress that those winrates have very little to do with how strong civs actually are (which is what people tend to think when they see those).
Hence why i targeted that civ bonus first. Its essentially just Elite Cannong Galleon and Bombard Tower 50% cheaper
Heya, “reddit user” here.
Just to say that I just updated the statistics again to include the following:
- Distribution of game lengths
- Civ win rate by game length
- New output for rm - 1v1 - all maps (requested by a player)
- New output for rm - teams- all maps (requested by a player)
Apologies I was tired and lazy when I did my previous file naming convention and have updated it to something more meaningful now so some of the prior links that were shared in this thread may not work anymore sorry…
Anyways the stats can be found at: Age of Empires 2 Civilisation Performance Statistics
If you have any feedback / comments or spot anything that looks fishy please feel free to let me know !
4 Likes
Thanks for your amazing work and for sharing the R code. i may have a look on it to learn R…
2 Likes
Half of them are probably from unranked bf only players 11.
Nowadays they play amazon tunnel more.
I made an excel sheet to correct the influence of Civ picking to the civ winrates.
First: Explanation (I try to be as sharp as possible without boring you)
If a player picks a civ 100% of the time, over time he will still reach a 50 % winrate with that civ. What this behaviour changes is the Elo of the player. His winrate will be pulled towards 50 % (and such the winrate of the civ). But his shown in-game elo will actually be his elo plus the “civ elo” - 1000.
Now most Players usually don’t always pick their main civ, but also play occasionally others. So, according to their “pick rate” their elo will be pulled more ore less by the “civ elo”. Still, in the long run they will reach 50 % winrate. The Civ winrate then is calculated by the weightened sum of “civ pickers” which are overrated (if the civ has a positive record) and random players (which aren’t overrated). This weightened Sum is the civ winrate shown in the stats, but not the “real” if someone would play random civ.
This leads to two formulas calculating the shown winrate in dependency of the real with different dependency factors. If you insert one (inverse) of the formulas into the other you can get an iteric calculation method that will - repeatedly apllied - give you the “real winrate” of the civ. That’s what I did.
Notes: The calculation assumes civ pickers don’t change their behaviour (I will come to this later.) Same for all other factors like changing in Maps (pool), Meta changes, balance changes, new civs…
I assumed that civ picker rate == civ picking rate. Which is for sure incorrect, but this way every civ has the same amount of “people who get it by chance” and “pickers who go random”. It just makes live easier and it is on the safe side. Every other estimation would lead to higher differences in winrates.
I assumed that with low elo differences an elo is equal to an absould in- or decrease in winrate, not depending on the already probably shifted winrate. This leads to a small mistake, but makes the calc way easier.
The results for 1650+ elo at the current aoestats.io website::
| Civ | Shown Winrate | Real Winrate | Playrate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mayans | 56.18% | 64.86% | 5.91% |
| Franks | 55.29% | 59.54% | 4.26% |
| Aztecs | 52.80% | 54.71% | 4.10% |
| Burgundians | 53.32% | 54.46% | 3.03% |
| Huns | 52.83% | 54.46% | 3.78% |
| Malians | 53.98% | 54.36% | 2.14% |
| Mongols | 52.03% | 53.77% | 4.75% |
| Chinese | 51.64% | 53.73% | 6.05% |
| Britons | 51.96% | 52.88% | 3.63% |
| Indians | 52.61% | 52.74% | 2.09% |
| Vikings | 51.88% | 52.47% | 3.19% |
| Celts | 51.93% | 52.09% | 2.38% |
| Berbers | 51.19% | 51.23% | 2.57% |
| Lithuanians | 50.54% | 50.56% | 3.79% |
| Teutons | 50.46% | 50.28% | 2.21% |
| Goths | 50.22% | 49.99% | 2.31% |
| Saracens | 49.47% | 49.29% | 1.68% |
| Koreans | 49.03% | 48.70% | 1.97% |
| Japanese | 49.27% | 48.58% | 3.12% |
| Turks | 49.00% | 48.58% | 2.16% |
| Incas | 48.39% | 48.13% | 1.74% |
| Burmese | 47.94% | 47.76% | 1.60% |
| Italians | 48.15% | 47.70% | 2.00% |
| Spanish | 48.18% | 47.62% | 2.17% |
| Tatars | 47.65% | 47.09% | 2.06% |
| Magyars | 47.81% | 46.97% | 2.44% |
| Ethiopians | 47.62% | 46.91% | 2.24% |
| Byzantines | 47.06% | 46.82% | 1.64% |
| Slavs | 45.71% | 45.11% | 1.90% |
| Khmer | 45.77% | 44.38% | 2.47% |
| Bulgarians | 46.12% | 44.21% | 2.92% |
| Portuguese | 44.54% | 42.87% | 2.45% |
| Malay | 44.04% | 42.77% | 2.18% |
| Sicilians | 42.48% | 42.48% | 1.35% |
| Vietnamese | 43.28% | 42.47% | 1.89% |
| Cumans | 42.38% | 41.64% | 1.82% |
| Persians | 42.60% | 41.50% | 2.00% |
It isn’t surprising that civs with high pickrate are changed way more than those with low pickrates. Seen with Malians and Huns. As Huns are picked way more often, their shown winrate is pulled more towards 50 % than Malians, which have a calculated lower winrate than the huns. But the winrate pull by more civ picking lets Huns look worse than Malians in the stats.
Still, this is only accounting for civ picking, nothing else. And there is one major issue: Civ pick changers and multipickers (changing between different picked civs). These can’t be regarded with this method, but have a huge impact in winrates. If a good civ is picked more often, it’s winrate raises. Because the players now picking it were (overall) assumed correctly in their elo. Now they get the correct winchance of the civ applied until they reach their new (too high) elo - therefore the winrate of this civ raises temporary. With bad civs it’s actually the other way around.
The same is also for the other factors mentioned in the beginning: Everything that raises or lowers a civs winrate will be exaggeratedly shown in the civ’s stats at first, as the “civ pickers” need first their elo to be corrected. So for example if mayans would be nerfed so they lose 5 % real civ winrate, which would translate to about 2 % in the stats, they would at first lose something in between these 2 % and 5 % in the stats before they settle at the 2 %. This kind of behaviour leads to an inpredictable error in the calculation I done, as the assumptions of my calc are settled overall winrates and player elos.
5 Likes
Just wanted to say I added a comment about this in the FAQ section. I also did a simulation of this a while back which I posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/pl4jpz/a_brief_look_at_the_impact_of_civ_picking_on_win/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I think though it’s very hard to know what the impact of civ picking is as it largely depends on the pick strategy which is very hard to accurately estimate with the data we have. But yer I think the main finding is that overplayed civs are likely to have underestimated win rates which is worrying given how high franks win rate already is on open maps.
3 Likes
Yeah, I read this.
Great work btw, I really like how you approach this and give us so much interesting information.
If you like I can give you the calculation and explanation how my “correction” method works. But I’m not sure if you should post it on reddit cause as I mentioned in my post, there are so many factors involved that can’t be corrected, the Results are maybe not viable to be posted on a public reddit.
I just was curious if there is a method to correct civ picking and I wanted to share my result, just for all which might be interested in this.
We might do a poll to obtain this information from a sample.
We need to know the prevalence of:
People who play (mostly) only one civ
People who play a few civs (i.e: 2-6 civs)
People who play a lot of civs (i.e: 7-15 civs)
People who play (almost) all civs, either random or not.
Of course, we need to know what civs they are picking.
And this poll should be done for each map type.
With the results of this poll in mind, you may apply proper corrections to your calculations.
I think a google forms would be fine, mostly because we can share it here and in Reddit. The form should ask for the civs people usually picks or if people picks random civs often, and then we can recode the data to assess what is the prevalence of one-trick ponies.
Maybe you can use the data from that website which publicity displays players history (with out their consent) .
Just run a script to go trough all players there, and check form there? Would be better than a small poll