Call to Arms 5 – Round 3 Stats

We’re half way through Call to Arms 5 and to celebrate, I thought I’d get the stats out to you in record time.

Tournament Stats

The scenario for round 3 was Raze. Personally this is one of my least favourite scenarios as I feel that the ‘score as you go’ mechanic doesn’t fit well with the rest of Kings of War. You can often find yourself in very asymmetrical situations where your opponent has already claimed all your objectives, but you’re still trying to get theirs. At that stage, one person is playing Kill and the other is still trying to play a scenario game.

Of course, my opinion on the scenario has no relevance to the stats…

Continuing the theme of using the terrain to make players think a bit differently, I presented this monstrosity of a map! The idea behind it was to force players to think ahead about how they were going to reach their opponent’s Raze counters, when so many of their movement lanes were closed off by Obstacles.

I can at least say that no one can ever accuse me of designing maps that benefit myself, seeing as after putting together this map I went and played infantry Dwarfs!

One thing that I’ve been interested to track this Call to Arms is the number of Draws per scenario. I’m also intending to go back through the data from previous Call to Arms to do a bit of analysis there as well. While a high number of Draws isn’t a bad thing, I always think there is merit from a TO point of view in knowing which scenarios are more likely to provide a decisive result and which may lead to more Draws in a round.

Another stat that I’m tracking more for myself as a TO, is the average score per round. This lets me gauge the health of the Northern Kings Scoring System as we aim to have each scenario be as evenly weighted as possible – the scenario in Round 1 shouldn’t be more lucrative than Round 6 for example. At the moment, it looks like we’re in a good place, with the average score for the winners remaining within a range of 0.3 points.

Both wet and dry Undead continue to hold the top spot for most popular army, closely pursued by Nightstalkers and Salamanders.

Every army has been used at least once now. It looks like Twilight Kin generals are the most consistent, as they’re the only army to have been used the same number of times each round.

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Army Stats

Nightstalkers enjoyed their five minutes of fame as the most successful army in the tournament, before being toppled by the usual incumbents of Abyssal Dwarfs and Undead. Abyssal Dwarfs are currently sitting on a 2:1 win/loss ratio so the changes to the Angkor Heavy Mortar and Ignore Cover rules didn’t seem to have as big an impact as some people were claiming they would.

As the most popular army with the largest dataset, you would expect that Undead should be the most likely to fall to an average 50% win rate – it stands to reason that players from across all skill levels will be using them. However, having lost only 7 of their 26 games, I think its fair to say that there might be some truth in the idea that Undead are the strongest faction in Kings of War at the moment… maybe a little too good.

The biggest shock of the tournament so far is Varangur with an abysmal 20% win rate from 15 games. I’m personally surprised by this as I’ve always found Varangur to be a solid army. I also though they would do well with the map in Round 3, as their heavy hitting Frostfang hordes come with built in Strider. What do people think about Varangur? Is this a spate of bad luck or a sign of wider issues with the list?

Clearly still angry about the loss of their Stampedes and Eagles, the Herd have taken their frustrations out on their opponents, scoring the highest average kill percentage. The Order of the Brothermark on the other hand are clearly too pious for bloodshed with a pitiful 44.5% average kill percentage.

Country Breakdown