That's huge Lynkfox. I know we say this all the time, but thank you, thank you, thank you for the work you put in! We all really appreciate it and enjoy the fruit of your labor.
Middle of May Update!
As Pointed out on the BGG Forums, the data between Normal and Advanced for villians really needs to be clearly seperated. Overall is kind of a useless stat. SO that being said, theyve been seperated.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqClP82b_XgZdGJKUVJRakJmZ3RMX2pFUjB3MEtBWHc#gid=1
you can now see the Normal Games first, and then the Advanced games second!
I haven't updated the By Difficulty below, but i will in the future.
In other news, the Look Up A Hero section is finished, being able to look up Total games against a villain or just advanced (it matters less for a hero if it is adv or not, because the hero plays the same), Environment, and Position and Team Size.
as well as Flipped and Flipped Percentage
I've updated the difficulty estimator page and json data files. No major moves since the last model, with only a few things moving more than 15 points.
Bunker, Engine of War, Eternal Haka, The Scholar and La Capitan both appear to be harder than previous estimates.
Freedom Tempest and Horus of Two Horizons both appear to be more difficult than previous estimates.
Another interesting milestone is that there's now enough data for the many of the Advanced villains to validate the assumption that the advanced side is harder than the basic side. For some of the villains with fewer than 30 matches recorded, there's still an inversion, presumably due to sample selection issues (players who know what they're doing are more likely to choose Advanced villains).
We still need more Advanced games with several villains, many of them already-hard-on-Basic (The Chairman, Iron Legacy, The Dreamer, Cosmic Omnitron, and The Matriarch) but a couple not-too-hard (Spite and Mad Bomber Blade), all of which really need more games to estimate their difficulty.
Additionally, the data suggests La Capitan's advanced mode isn't much harder than Basic, which seems like we need more data.
As far as the data suggests, we can also identify the hardest possible game (using basic villains), and the easiest possible game:
Hardest: 3 players, Mr. Fixer, Bunker[Engine of War], and Absolute Zero[Elemental Wrath] vs. Iron Legacy in Rook City. Expected win rate: 8%
Easiest (without 2 Legacies): 4 players, Greatest Legacy, Team Leader Tachyon, Dark Visionary, and Omnitron X in the Final Wasteland vs. Gloomweaver. Expected win rate: 99%
The strongest hero team vs. the strongest villain/environment pairup should be pretty easy for the heroes, but noone has tried. The reverse (weakest heros, weakest villains) should be more of a typical matchup, but again, noone has tried it yet.
http://x.gray.org/sentinels-of-the-multiverse-difficulty-scores.html
Another observation:
Of the games recorded, the heroes have never lost if the net difficulty was below -276 (and there have been 38 games played with lower difficulty than that). A single game of TLT, DV, O-X and Tempest lost to Miss Information with a difficulty of -276. That's the only loss below difficulty -224, out of 150 recorded games.
Similarly, the heroes have never won if the net difficulty was above 203 and only two matches (out of 46) have ever won with a difficulty of 172 or higher.
Hmm... If I did my calculations right, Bunker, Fixer, and Fanatic against Chairman in Ruins of Atlantic is at 206 should yield a victory fairly easily. Just have to get Bunker and Fixer incapped so Bunker cna keep returning Wrathful Retribution into hand and Fixer keep putting Aegis back into play. Might take 3 Wrathful, but it is doable. As long as Fanatic gets lucky with her card draws.
I do not understand how Plague Rat can be so high. I seriously think I can beat him with any combination of heroes trivially. I've soloed him with just Nightmist (using H=3). He seems Gloomweaver-level to me. Not to mention there is no way he is above La Capitan. She's vastly more brutal. And Omnitron is above her? Not a chance. That isn't even a close comparison. Clearly I need to submit more game.
Well to be fair, all nightmist needs is Mistform and the amulet against a villain with no minions and just a ton of one high damage one shots. I wouldn't base your opinion of the Rat around a particular hero who is perfectly built to handle that kind of situation.
I have not seen that difficulty estimator before. I really like it! Gonna book mark that and use it for my next few game nights. Great work.
Omnitron also has a bunch of hugely damaging/debilitating nuke cards that can really ruin your day, especially if they come out at the wrong time. Tech Singularity can easily kill equipment-dependent heroes, especially on advanced or with damage bonuses in play. Likewise Sedative Flechettes can wreck most defensive strategies. And if you happen to get Electro-pulse Explosives played during the environment turn, you're generally going to either be in a world of hurt or TPK'd. It's usually not the drones that kill heroes, it's the board wipes and the spike damage.
Using a single hero (even with H=3) is not indicative of a balanced game, certain cards will miss the Hero entirely and certain cards will hit that Hero more than once. If you were playing a 3 player game and it came down to just Nightmist in mist form tank for the win then you've lost 2/3rds of your team, I can't see how you wouldn't consider that a hard fight.
YMMV. Thats why we do the stats.
Also, Plague Rat does Irreducable damage, and with the right combination of infections and limited ongoing removal, he starts doing 3-5 or more damage to each hero each turn. And thats without any of his one shot damages. Ive seen him take legacy down to less than 10 hp in the space of 2 turns.
I suppose it's possible. I just beat him with Bunker, Haka, Mr. Fixer and Absolute Zero at Pikes last night. And I've never played AZ or Fixer, and Haka and Bunker only once. It was a sloppy game as a result and I lost Bunker (stupidly...I miscounted damage by one) and AZ, but AZ was shut down by the "all dmg toxic" Environment Vats anyway. But Haka and Fixer were basically impossible to kill at that point, despite both being infected. I just find that without a +dmg environment, Plague Rat doesn't get enough damage boost of his own to make him a threat. I actually did this game with the worst heroes I had available to see if maybe I had always lucked into a great counter hero against PR. He still feels just a step up from Gloomweaver.
To be fair, Mr. Fixer is probably one of the best heros against Plauge Rat. For what thats worth.
Are you keeping Infected cards on incapacitated heroes?
Yes I am. I'm wondering if I'm doing something else wrong with him (or in general), because I just can't see losing to him except to extremely bad luck or lack of experience. Maybe I should post a play-by-play thread to see if someone catches something wrong. Heck, I didn't even learn about Jack Knife on Mr. Fixer and how it works with Plague Rat until after that game (I used the chain tool to negate most of his one-shot damage). But Incapacitated Bunker's return a card from trash power plus Haka with two Ground Pounds meant I was invulnerble the rest of the game.
Um, doesn't Ground Pound only negate non-hero damage? So heroes would still be hitting themselves if Infected. The thing that tends to get us with Plague Rat isn't so much that he does lots of little hits of damage (though that is one aspect). It's more that most of the damage is irreducible, so stuff like Fortitude, Stealth, and Ta Moko do nothing. Plus buffs like Galvanise become unwelcome as soon as someone becomes Infected (unless that someone is, say, Fanatic, who can build up for a Wrathful Retribution, or Mr Fixer, who can Jack Handle or Driving Mantis it elsewhere). It also doesn't help if Afflicted Frenzy comes out, because then heroes start hitting each other, and continue to do so even if they become incapacitated as long as they're Infected.
We find Plague Rat to be one of the more difficult villains, up there with the Matriarch, La Capitan, and Kismet with the villains who regularly beat us. Maybe it's easier with more heroes but we only use three.
Neat, I'll update the app at some point. Do you mind if I have the app hit the JSON directly or should I rehost?
I've got two requests for the JSON data, if you've got time:
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Validate the JSON so that it can be parsed without modification. Right now it's got trailing commas so it needs a lenient parser to work.
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Add "advanced" points to the villains that have it. (I've done it internally in the app like so: { "name": "Baron Blade", "points": -55, "advanced": 20 }).
Thanks!
I've updated the json generator to be more strict. If you do reasonably aggressive caching (ttl >= 1 day) feel free to hit it directly.
I've added the advanced points, but only for villains that have at least 30 games logged, and added a note on the ones with both relatively low data and suspicuous deltas.
I've also added advanced to the json, unfiltered, but I also added "advcount" which specifies the number of matches against that villain in advanced mode. I would be very skeptical of all villains with advcount < 50 and would disregard all with advcount < 30. More specifically, I'd use a minimum difficulty for advanced villains as basic+75, unless there's >75 games logged, and only Baron Blade has that many.
For example, even with >50 games, Apostate/Advanced appears to be barely more difficult than Apostate/Basic, which seems possible, but unlikely.
I've also updated to the latest version of the spreadsheet. No huge moves, but Gloomweaver seems harder and Omnitron seems easier than before.
Advanced Apostate being not much harder than Basic isn't unlikely; it's a rougher start, but if you deal with the Tome at the start then it's less likely to pop out when the Runes and/or Orb are protecting it. It's probably the smallest gap between basic and advanced of any villain.
There's a problem with "scale" now - missing trailing brackets. I usually verify my JSON with http://jsonlint.com/, helps a ton.
I'd like to think that was a game I recently logged . For someone who was theoretically so easy he obliterated us… though I blame Rook City, screw that environment.
Fixed the trailing bracket issue. It should validate now.