The Gaming Den

[TheFlatline]

Plaid Hat Games is responsible for my single most favorite light to middle-weight game of all time: Summoner Wars (seriously, 30 minutes a game, none of the pay to win BS of Magic, wildly varying factions, and each faction has at least a 45% win ratio, so it's fairly balanced).

Well, they're coming out with an interesting looking game called Mice and Mystics. Looks like the concept is that you're all loyal to the king and get polymorphed into field mice by the BBEG and have to brave the castle to turn back to human and save the day.

http://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/mice-and-mystics

Not a lot of info yet, but it looks interesting.

[deanruel87]

You let me know if this is threadjacking, because I will stop. But I don't understand how anyone can think Summoner Wars is balanced. There are very clearly two good factions and two bad factions. Goblins and Elves are good, Trolls and Dwarves are bad. In all of my experimentation and playthroughs I have never seen anything that would dissuade me from that. I mean the elves are incredible, their basic troops have amazing abilities. The dwarves are utter garbage and the only viable strategy I've found for them is to save up all your "This characters attack gets +2 dice" cards and wait until that one AMAZING Hero of theirs comes out (the guy who hits an area like a goddamn bomb) and then try to maneuver into throwing everything into a single titan blow to kill the enemy commander in one hit. I just don't understand how people can look at the Dwarves and then look at the Goblins or Elves and say "That looks about right".
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[TheFlatline]

[John Magnum]

Nothing he said contradicts that fact.
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-JM

[TheFlatline]

Oh, the guild dwarf champion that hit like a bomb got nerfed in the latest printing.

Looking at the raw win/loss data for 14 of the 16 factions over the course of around a year with several thousand online and recorded plays, you find the following win ratios:

Phoenix Elves: 53%
Tundra Orcs: 53%
Cave Goblins: 54%
Guild Dwarves: 54%

So in the grand meta of the game, they're pretty fucking balanced. Vanguards came in last with a 43% win ratio.

I'm digging deeper into the individual matchups right now.

[TheFlatline]

Better numbers for the two starter sets (the excel sheet has a typo in it dammit so it threw the math off)

Guild Dwarves vs Cave Goblins: 327 wins vs 262 wins, giving the GDs a 55% win average

Phoenix Elves vs Tundra Orcs: 381 wins vs 302 wins, giving the PEs a 55.7% win ratio that I'll round up to 56%.

So... each faction in the starter sets *does* have a stronger team. PEs are stronger than TO's head to head it seems, and is the least "fair" balance, but event hen you're dealing with a 6% shift.

For GDs & CGs, your sense of who is more powerful is actually backwards.

So there is some imbalance, but it's not nearly as bad as you think, and tends to average out if you play other factions. Some factions *are* stronger than others though, with the Vanguard, cloaks, and fallen kingdom all being under 50% win ratios, with the cloaks at 46% and the vanguards at a whopping 43% win ratio and the fallen kingdom edging them out with a 44% win ratio.

And all those percentages are without upgrades as far as I can tell.

Original data:
http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/76319/summoner-wars-collected-data-charts

[deanruel87]

That's good data and I appreciate you bringing it to the discussion. But I have to say assume that these are not anything resembling tourney style plays. Because anyone losing Cave Goblins to Dwarves who has played more than 3 games is unthinkable to me.

I realize the veracity of the data however so I would like to slightly amend my claim. I do not believe Summoner Wars is balanced to anything other than casual play. I recall having to defend this in my board game club too with a "take all comers" approach but obviously that's not really a scientifically valid sample.

The thing that boggles me is just that people keep saying it when even a casual look at the cards shows that Goblins are fucking great, Dwarves suck balls, Elves are off the goddamn charts and Orcs are.....fine. I have only played with those 4 factions but the difference is STARK to me. Very stark.

Let me just ask then. Do you honestly feel that in a match with strong players the Dwarves or Orcs could even expect a 33% win rate against their coupled opponents of the Goblins and Elves.
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[TheFlatline]

Considering that they *do* have tourney play (and if you want to dig into that data, a bunch of tourney data *is* in there), and the tourney players are active in the community, and that they aren't saying what you're saying... In fact they have a lot of input into the balance of the factions as the game progresses, which is why you see significant reinforcement packs for some of the lower-performing factions.

I'll say that the two starter deck factions are among *the* most boring to play in the entire series, and I'll agree that PE vs TO is lop-sided a bit however against each other.

edit: And what's more interesting is that we're about to get orders of magnitude *more* data I suspect in the next six months on faction balance... The iOS app comes out within a month or so and online games probably will have their stats recorded.

[TheFlatline]

And to answer your question specifically, if I pitted a top faction player vs a top faction player against each other? I have no clue who would win. Whoever had the better tactics that round. I'd have to review AARs to even begin to address that.