Updated civ stats from reddit user

I’d love M@A and Towers to be a thing again with M@A buffs like this cheaper Supplies buff. After many needful nerfs to full walling, crafty players adjusted their builds to the nerfs, and early full walling is about as common as it was before. But Trushing before the Feudal Tower HP nerfs was always a consistent counter tactic to early full walls. And I feel Trushing with buffed M@A’s could be just as effective vs. early full walls as before the Feudal Tower HP nerf, while being less annoying for the defending player.

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Cav archers are almost never a thing in closed maps. Cav archers need to raid to be effective and in closed maps, well… Raiding is nerfed heavily.
Cav archers need a lot of space to make use of their mobility… Closed maps don’t offer much “open space”, it’s in their name they don’t.

So I chose to look only for open maps for good reason. The only way you can win with cav archers in closed maps is if you manage to build up an unbeatable force and camp right in front of your enemy’s base. And that also presumes your opponent lacks tools to break your composition. Ofc there are some of these cav archer civs which can make “kind of” deathballs like tatars or mongols. But as you mentioned it is hard to get to this even on arena.

Not convinced by that. I don’t see Saracens or Magyars as top tier early game civs. Magyars have good agression, but lack eco and saracens only shine with market abuse - who in the range of 1200-1600 does this? And surprisingly the cav archer civ with the highest early agression potential doesn’t excels against Poles. Mongols only make about average against Poles. But most other cav archer civs have one of their top 5 matchups against Poles.

Well, Poles would like to go for Szlachta Privileges against cav archers. That gives the cav archer player enough time to build up a raiding party. I mean most of the time the weird transition to cav archers is the biggest Problem for cav archer civs, so giving them time to perform it can be the decisive factor here. This can also be an explanation. Cav archers aren’t weak, of course the FU HCA is what you’re aimig for but also the raiding potential of cav archers in the midgame is what allows you to go for it. (I mean you literally sacrifice your eco when going for CA - that’s why you need to get raids in asap otherwise your opponent just outbooms you.)
But ofc the early agression potential of some of the cav archer civs is an interference factor. Still don’t know if the Poles bad early game mainly comes from bad decision making, like going for too much trushing or too greedy play, trying to make szlachta privileges work. Cause I don’t think Poles early game is as bad as the stats suggest. I think there must be strategical misconceptions involved.

Maybe it’s just that easy, many of us, including me, focussed on shenanigans poles can do in the early to mid game, like making trushes, castle drops eg. Trying to go for szlachta privileges (which I incentively had great success with). But maybe that civ should be played more defensively (That was also my first interpretation when I saw their two eco bonusses, that they should work nicely together to build a strong base first as the folwark eco is easy to raid but the stone bonus should help a lot to build up defences early. Maybe that’s more the way to go with Poles. Because of the Folwark poles also should have very good trash to defend in the early and midgame - untilt they can transition into either obuch or szlachta privileges knights. That’s what I try to make work now after seeing the stats of poles “underperforming” in the early to mid game - where so many claimed poles should actually excel in. It seems a bit weird to play a civ with bad lategame scaling with a defensive opening, but maybe that’s just what you need to do, so their otherwise vulnerable eco is protected.

Interesting, is that Celts grouping with Huns? I wouldn’t have expected that.

Also interesting there are two main “cavalry groups”, the purple one seems to be those that has a reasonable archery range (in terms of defense, ie. skirms), weird slavs end up there albeit with a lower correlation.

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Hoang?

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I’m not sure about this kind of clustering diaagram.
I also would shift all winning percentages of the civs in a way that they all have average 50 % winning percentage. Why? Because with this kind of calc civs will be paired that have good winning records and civs will be paired that have bad winning records. I think this explains more why certain civs “pair” better, not because they have relative commodity, but rather because they are just overall equal in strength.
That’s why on the left there are so many “bad performing archer civs” and on the right there is the cavaly cluster with good performing cavalry civs, not because they are archer or cav civs mainly, but mostly because they have quite close overall winrates.

Of course the character of the civ is still important, but I think it would be better if we would isolate the overall winrate from that analysis - I think this would give way better results.

This at least is my interpretation of that dendrogram.

This algorithm has managed to pair the Malay, a civ missing the last two armor techs for Cavalry and a powerful long-term eco bonus, with the Burmese, a civ missing the last two armor techs for Archers and a short-term eco bonus, by comparing their winrates against other civs and found them similar.

Anyone else feel like the data is grasping at straws, just a bit?

Please note the “Malay - Burmese” pairing is 2nd highest individual civ pairing indicating that they are likely not that similar. Likewise, it is not pairing Burmese to Malay directly; it is actually pairing Burmese to the cluster formed by Malay, Vietnamese and Portuguese.

The ward algorithm works by minimising the increase in variance i.e. of all the available clusters the variance was increased the least by adding the Burmese to this one. Again this is the 2nd highest pairing so it indicates Burmese are a bit of an island like the Indians in that they are very different to other civs.

Please let me know if you need anymore help in understanding how to interpret what the plot shows.

The main issue I have with it (and why I labeled it as experimental) is that it just uses the point estimates and ignores the uncertainty we have in those estimates. Considering how wide the confidence intervals are for the civ v civ win rates it means that the graph is likely very unstable. (Also I don’t think it really has that much utility and its kind of just there for interest)

Edit: I am now wondering if a 2d minimum spanning tree plot might be more interpretable as it more clearly shows each civs relative position to each other than than hypothetical clusters…

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Cav archer’s ability of raiding is nerfed heavily on closed map for sure. But Closed map make easier for CA civ to make their huge death ball of CA army. Turks strategy on Arena is either early Jannisary or HC or boom into HCA + Hussar. Mongols and Cumans usually build their CA type UU in Arena as their main force. Other CA civs are not commonly played on Arena but they are likely get HCA when game hitting imp.

Also I don’t feel like Saracens or Magyars play with CA mainly on open map. Saracens more stick to their siege archer or Camels. Poles probably weak against their early powerspike of market abuse and extra HP camels from Castle age. Magyars have no bonus in Castle age to go for CA. They are more likely to play Scout and Knight until castle age in open map. Poles are also not particularly weak against Tatars (around 48%), which is best civ to play CA in castle age. Only obvious case of underperforming vs CA is Huns. But huns itself top5 civ on open map, and they likely perform well against any other civ, not only for poles.

Yes. I agree. There are no settled “meta” of how poles play and how play against. They are likely strong on open map and bad on closed map “on paper”. But stats show quite opposite result.

It’s very complex. They lack “power unit” in late game which can make their late game bad. But their army is super cheap and cost efficient. If game goes to 200 pop fight with full upgrade, Poles would have disadvantage. But, if poles can force fight when they have number advantage, they can be quite successful also in lategame.

Actually interesting case is Burgundians. They are one of the only three civs (Koreans, Burmese, Burgundians), clearly perform well against Poles on Arena. Burgundians also have great eco on Arena and fastest transition to Paladin. Therefore, there is not much time window for poles to have number advantage against them with Szlatcha privilege.

Poles are bit wield design. But Devs probably deeply thought about balancing civs with buffed Hussar combined with huge farming eco. Therefore, clear weakness of lategame power unit like HCA or Paladin or Heavy Camel with bonus are granted. I don’t know that their late game weakness of power unit can be addressed without heavily change civ design. Maybe just give last archer armor or Halb with exchange of nerfing percentage of Szlatcha privlege?

That’s a good point actually - But maybe there is a way around it. Still, I think there are some necessary changes to make Poles a more “balanced” civ, like the mentioned lack of lategame scaling is a big problem for them, on the other hand they have an insanely strong boom, almost trash knights that can be spammed forever, the obuch and the mining bonus… all of this can be op if allowed to play.

That’s why I though, maybe it would be better if the folwark bonus would help more in the early, less in the mid and then again quite nicely in the lategame?
Example: Folwark crops nearby food sources at a rate of 4 F / Minute (or 3 % / minute) (animals only when dead ofc). Or: Folwark increases Food gather rate of nearby villagers by 20 % (also farms generate food 15 % faster). (With the exception of fish ofc)

This would give the poles player better starting food eco, the booming potential would be a bit nerfed cause the food isn’t given instantly, but in the lategame the Folwark eco would be even stronger than currently.

And for the lategame I think the only thing really helps would be something to compensate a bit for the lack of the last armour upgrade. Like just more HP on the lightcav (instead of the trample damage). The armour is so crucial when fighting against ranged units, you just can’t compensate for it with gimmicky shenanigans - even the 30 g cavaliers die too easy to (cav) archer balls for their price.

This upgrade is just so essential for cavalry, there must be some direct compensation to be able to deal with lategame archery - and I personally think that can only be achieved with higher hp. Cause even if they can tank way less shots with a bit higher hp but less pierce armor, they could perform way better against meatshield and counterunits in the exchange. This can possibly compensate for the lack of armour. But if they have less armour and nomral HP, they get too easily killed before they even have a chance to engage.
And you can’t just completely avoid an opponent’s archer ball in the lategame. Especially if your units lack the armour to be effective raiding units (poles cav dies under TC fire). At some point you just need to deal with it.

And btw I like that Poles aren’t designed around great raiding potential, but then you must allow them to fight and win the open field battles, also in the lategame. And this would also historically fit poles as the late medieval cavalry powerhouse they were. They weren’t known for raiding, they fought battles on open land and won with superior tactics.

Hey, OP. You should be proud.
SOTL used your graphs

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Poles #1 arena civ yay

O I am, trust me I’ll be telling my future kids about this day :joy:

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General question, I was thinking of updating the stats to remove users who have a 1 civ play rate of > 70-80%. I was debating whether to do this globally (a) or just in the WR calculations (b). If the (a) it obviously gives a distorted view of the play rates / game lengths / etc as it’s a very artificial subset; if (b) however there’s then a mismatch between the data used for the win rates and all the other plots…

Or I guess as a third option I can do it via (a) but make a separate page for it. Though if I do this would there be interest in all combinations or just the 1v1 stats ?

I think only the third option really makes sense. As you stated with the others we may get nto trouble with interpreting that subset.
Also it would be interesting to compare the subset to the mean.

Hi all,

Made a few more updates:

  • Added 2 new cohorts for open/closed maps where I remove people who have more than 10 games and a pick rate >70% >50% for any civ (EDIT: There might be a bug with this cohort, am currently investigating)
  • Added 2 new cohorts for open/closed maps where I focus on the “pros” (> 1700 Elo)
  • Updated the Hierarchical clustering plot to use Cosine distance + complete linkage instead of Euclidean distance + ward’s algorithm
  • Added new experimental plot to estimate how overrated / underrated each civ is (credit to SOTL for this idea)
  • Cleaned up some of the wording in the methods / FAQ page

As always stats can be found here and source code can be found here. Please let me know if you have any feedback / comments / suggestions / spot any bugs (I appreciate all the feedback I get!)

I also added a plot contrasting the rm-solo-open WR vs the rm-solo-open-NoSingleCiv WRs which comes up as:

Its interesting to me that it really made only small differences with the main effect being the increase in Franks win rate.

Moving forward I think I’m going to spend some time on improving the site navigation and maybe purchase a domain so that the URL is a bit more memorable.

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You only removed about 20 % of the matches. You can’t expect from that to have a huge impact.
Maybe you should try to exclude all players who have > 50 % pick rate?

But very interesting statistics. Funny that some civ pickers seem to have a “negatic impact” on civ winrate… Like celts :smiley:

Yer, I think you are right I think I am been too lax with it. Additionally I just noticed I have a bug in that I am filtering by civ picking across all leaderboards. Currently updating it to be civ picking within a given leaderboard.

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The most interesting part is when you say that you main Vietnamese

I… don’t think I quite know how to take that… :laughing:

Ok yer have updated it now to fix the bug as well as up the threshold to 50% which currently removes ~41% of matches. The comparison of win rates before and after removing these matches now looks like:

Also comparing the open vs closed statistics after removing the 1 civ pickers:

(the website has also been updated)

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