Its that time again, the most exciting part of a Call to Arms – the post round stats breakdown!
You can find the stats for round 1 here and round 2 here.
The stats below now represents 218 games played which is more than most two day tournaments manage over 6 rounds, and we’re only on round 3!
Tournament Stats
The scenario this round was Kill – this turned out to be a slightly controversial choice of scenario!
A big thank you for being my ‘willing’ guinea pigs for an experiment to see how a modified version of Kill worked in practice. I’m currently writing up my thoughts based on the results and player feedback and will be sharing that in the next few days.
72/73 games took place this round, with two players deciding not to carry on with the tournament and dropped out taking us to a mere 144 players.
For the third round in a row, all 26 races were played at least once.
Its a shame to see the Forces of Nature falling so much in popularity, but I can’t say that I’m too surprised. Forces of Nature where my first love in Kings of War, but they’re definitely an army that can be hard to win games with – especially in Kill.
While Undead are still storming ahead as the most popular faction overall they were not most popular faction this round. That accolade went to the Salamanders.
I’m not surprised that Salamanders have gone up in popularity as I think they’re probably the army that gained the most out of 3rd edition, but I am surprised to see them being so popular in Kill as I have never really thought of them as a ‘killy’ army.
There was a big increase in the number of games that ended in a draw this round.
15/72 games (21%) ended in a draw – compared to 3% in round 1 and 8% in round 3. It’ll be really interesting to see if this pattern continues into the next round. This will tell us if the high number of draws is down to the scenario or due to player skill becoming more evenly balanced due to the swiss rankings system.
Games played at 2300 points have definitely become the norm this round with 72% of games taking place at that point level.
Far less people scored the top points this round.
This could be due to the higher number of draws, but Tom Annis made an interesting observation on the Universal Battle Facebook page. He noticed that a lot of people have been saying that they played Kill first and ignored the secondary objectives until the end; where as he had made sure to factor them in from the start. It possible that players might have approached the scenario in the wrong way and have given up the top points as a result.
Army Stats
Due to their large showing this round, Salamanders have jumped up to the second most played army.
There definitely seems to be some stronger armies appearing, as well as armies that are struggling to keep up. I said it last time and I’ll say it again – poor Free Dwarfs.
I’ve always been a believer that player skill is the single most important factor to winning a game. As a very rough rule of thumb I would say winning is 80% player skill, 10% luck and 10% down to the army and the list you use.
Even with that in mind, there are a few armies languishing on a 20% win rate or less (Free Dwarfs are on 0/10 games!) – I feel that this has to be down to the army and not just the player.
Myself and my fellow Northern Kings are taking a look at some of the armies with the lowest win rates, giving our take on how we would approach those armies. You can read my article on Free Dwarfs here and Tom Robinson’s article on the League of Rhordia here.
Undead continue to top the charts in bonus points scored – with Varangur hot on their heels behind them.
There is a fairly uniform spread across all of the armies until you get to the Dwarfs and it falls off a cliff!
It seems that the few wins that Dwarfs have managed to get, have been by the skin of their teeth.
Once again Varangur are on the top spot for percentage of the enemy killed.
The most pacifist army at this point is the Goblins, they really don’t want to seem to kill anything!
To have 23 percentage points of difference between the top and bottom armies after 218 games is pretty striking.
I have always thought of Kings of War as a very balanced game (and it is) – but it seems that although all the armies are equal, some armies are more equal than others.
Like the last round, I’ve pulled out the win rates for the top 10 most played armies.
These armies have played 125 games between them, so I would consider this to be a pretty reliable indicator.
Country Stats
Ok, I know this is what you all really came here for!
As before, some of the results above represent just one or two people and while I don’t want to take away their achievements (of failures!) I’ve pulled out the five countries with the most players – the ‘Big Five’.
I’m not at all surprised to see Spain out on top as every time I’ve had the pleasure of playing one of the guys from Spain, its been a bloody tough game.
In the greatest conflict the United Kingdom and the United States have fought (my history isn’t good!) it is incredibly close. As we go into round 4 there is just one game in it!
United Kingdom 22 – 21 United States
And that’s all for now. Now that I’ve got a good amount of data I’m going to start pulling out some more detailed information that I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks – I’ve already had a few requests for additional information.
One Northern King 
Varangur seem to be missing from a bunch of the graphs – suspect this changes the narrative somewhat?
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Which graphs are they missing from? I’ve had another look back through them all and they seem to be in all of them?
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