For some time, I’ve been digging into some Kings of War statistical analysis and logging results, more as a way to organize my thinking than anything else.
If you have a tournament for which you’d like me to parse lists, let me know! Alternatively, if you have data questions about kings of war or ideas you’d like to explore, pass them along and I’ll see what I can do.
Are there game by game results anywhere? If so, I can generate some elo analysis and then also compare lists to the results. Tough to do with just the summary data unfortunately.
Scoring System - Herts
5 for a Win, 3 Draw 1 Loss (VP and Kills are NOT included into the TP, but kept clean as deciders)
1st Decider is VP accrued
2nd Decider is Kill accrued
So it is a win above all else system, then on how well you won (VP), then on Kills
I include list overview/rating as well as the Elo analysis and faction-by-faction crosstabs. I haven’t dug into all this too much, but it’s a least a starting point for the info.
Interesting dynamic getting more bang for your buck by giving items to units with worse values… though I think competitively players are looking to push the unit over the edge, and the more minimal improvement is worth it. Still, I kinda want to run a Militia Legion with an item now, and see what trouble they can get up to.
I remember a FB post sort of lamenting the opposite with shooting? Good shooters (4+ Ra) can shrug off cover penalties while poor shooters (5+ Ra) are suddenly half as effective. Ranged combat is more messy to calculate, but that could be a topic for you in the future, especially since Pot Shot was just updated out of existence.
I actually have a post in the works on this exact issue. If the goal is to minimize the cost per wound, putting items on cheap units hitting on 5s is the way to go. But the alternative is that the value of a wound isn’t linear–it increases exponentially to a certain point. Eg doing 10 wounds and routing a unit is much more than 2x as valuable as doing 5 wounds, having them get healed up, and staying in combat for four rounds to grind them out. So the points per wound metric people throw around isn’t nearly as important as something like “points per chance of routing.”
Something like a legion of penitents with cs(1) becomes 50% scarier if you throw sharpness on it. Funny concept that I may have to try sometime
I appreciate the shout out and hope we can get some more games in soon! The larger the sample size the better the data, right???
The article comparing the competitive scenes was intriguing. In particular the top half of the table was interesting to see a pretty tight spread for things like units taken and for unit strength.
Realizing that definitions can get debated to death, I don’t want to box you in, but do you have example units or guidelines for how you categorized units (leader, buffer, shock, flanker, chaff, baseline? And numbers wise, units can count in multiple categories, correct?) The Flanker = light cav makes sense, but I was surprised to see so much of that unit type taken across the board. I’ve been wanting to test out KoM Mounted Sergeants for a while, for example, but they just seem so underwhelming on paper.
As for nascent trends, and maybe future posts…
It’s mentioned in passing in several articles, but have you actually seen an uptick yet in Abyssal Dwarfs or Empire of Dust in these tournaments? Maybe tracking them as a percentage of the total attendees?
ASB’s got an overhaul. Have you noticed an uptick in lists including these?
Drops/Scoring units are tracked, have you looked at tracking individuals? IIRC the US scene greatly prefers heroes with US, but it might be neat to see that laid out. Perhaps the UK scene really is more unique.
Magic items are being examined and tracked, but magic is still a blind spot for me. Have you noticed or tracked overall spells taken? Host Shadowbeast, Alchemist Curse, and the lowly Bane Chant might be interesting to see. Especially with most of my armies opting for it and most of yours not.
