Season 19 Meta Data for 3p Prelude Arena

[RoyalRook]

Glados93 put together meta data for 3p Prelude Arena Season 18 in his depository. The sample size is early but telling:

https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... in/prelude

Please look it over and discuss, I will post some of my thoughts later. Happy hunting guys.

[HappyMeaI]

Interesting. We all know AI is the best card in the game. Especially HU, if drawn at almost any point = autowin. Why does it only have 8 plays though? I think I missed the sample size. Also what is the significance of a card like underground cities being top 10 for winrate? It’s one of the worst cards in the game but when used strategically at the end it can swing miner / block cities / steal greenery points.

Credicor / IPC / Ecoline / Tharsis all make sense to be at the top. Ecoline especially is much stronger in prelude as well as Tharsis because they both have preludes that are specific to their cause.

I feel like the card data relevance < prelude data relevance < corporation data relevance. Basically I don’t see how the card data has much relevance on its own.

In prelude I will say this. The start matters the most in any format, especially HU. You will almost certainly by gen 5-6 begin to pull way ahead or fall way behind depending on the preludes you received and chose to play. That’s not withstanding any major mistakes, there is even more variance and HU is once again… you guessed it mostly a crapshoot and the cards play themselves 90% of the way.

[Glados93]

Interesting. We all know AI is the best card in the game. Especially HU, if drawn at almost any point = autowin. Why does it only have 8 plays though? I think I missed the sample size.

The current sample size is 1,234 games.

You have looked at cards_gen1.txt, which is specifically for cards played in generation 1 and hence of much lower sample size (its rare to be able to play AI in gen1). Here AI is currently rank1. Overall AI Central is rank 25. Underground cities is rank 196 overall (very bad).

Cards played at any point of the game:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... /cards.txt

Cards played in generation 1:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... s_gen1.txt

Prelude cards:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... eludes.txt

Corporations:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... /corps.txt

Claiming milestones:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... stones.txt

Getting 1st place on awards:
https://github.com/RuneDK93/terraformin ... awards.txt

[HappyMeaI]

Ah sorry yeah I misread that. Looking at overall cards played any time, looks like special design and flooding are both top 25 with special design being top 10. This makes me think that the games where these cards are played are in matches where the player is crushing and playing them has no impact since they’re both pretty shit cards.

[Glados93]

Flooding and Special Design are absolutely not bad cards. They consistently place well in the stats. In the previous BGA TfM arena season (no prelude) they placed rank 22 and 36 with 47.7% and 46% winrate over 1,500+ games from the top25 3p players in the world.

Special Design (SD) is a "special" case of a card that is generally only played when it is directly advantageous. It is not played often by lower rated players, so the winrate is not dragged down by suboptimal plays. For example Ganymedes Colony can be a fine lategame card in a Jovian heavy strategy, but its winrate is dragged down by lower rated players playing it generation1. SD is mostly only played by top players in two situations.
1) It is drawn for free and you have event rebates or Mars University cycle. In this case it is a free card cycle or can even be cash positive.
2) It is an unusual situation where 4 oceans have been played early, allowing SD to get kelp farming online in generation 1,2 or 3.

Flooding on the other hand is just a generally good card. You can see it has a high winrate even when played in about 500 games currently. Ocean placing cards are generally very strong (see how many score in the top 50 in the stats). Its a super cheap no restrictions ocean placing card. This can secure good early placements bonuses (cards or titanium), or it can be used to defend plants by playing it into a conversion. It also works well in the TR rushing strat for setting up ocean walking in the center. I think this card is one of the most underrated by newer players. They see the negative VP and skip it.

[HappyMeaI]

Makes sense. Yeah if someone has mars univ down or kelp early and uses special design to get kelp in the first cpl gens they’re probably going to win more than half the time.

Flooding is a card that Mars Expert rates as a D and I’ve never thought it was that bad. I disagree with quite a few of his ratings on there (like terraforming ganymede or ganymede colony being S tier cards) for example, but when you break it down yes Flooding is very specific to greenery conversions and great for AA. That’s about it. Points wise it’s a wash and cost wise is 10 (net -6 if played against opponent) and even worse in a 4p game. So best case its 6 mc and must be used on a good placement.

[Glados93]

You are forgetting that Flooding is also 1TR (can matter for Terraformer milestone) and hence 1 mc income.

One of its strengths is its versatility. Early game its 10mc cost for about a 4-6 mc placement bonus value and 1 mc income. Additionally you can set it up for ocean adjacency bonuses from your own early tiles. This means that you are paying about 6-2mc for 1 income, which in the lower part of the interval is fine value early game. And this is without taking into account the potential negative mc to opponents and potential event rebates. Later in the game it can secure conversions especially with Arctic Algae. Its very versatile and good at pretty much any time in the game.

[Orange Devil]

Can you add another list for cards, preludes and corps looking at only the plays made by the top 25 or top 50 or top 100 (whatever you need to get to a decent-ish sample size) and also in these lists put the rating of the full sample?

Be real interesting to see which cards get significantly better and significantly worse as player skill increases.

[AdrianoFreitas]

Very interesting data, with quite a bit of things coming as a shock to me (some of my favorite preludes are providing middle of the pack results).

Some thoughts and questions:

1 - Where I usually play, the perception is that the top tier corps are Point Luna and Vitor (+ Manutech and Poseidon at 4p). Evidently, I play with Venus and Colonies added (sometimes Turmoil, but seldomly). Would you say that opinion is simply wrong or is it expected that they get a big boost in win rate when Venus/Colonies are added? Would you be willing to take a swing as to how the entire corps power rankings shift when those expansions are added?

2 - IC has a high win rate, but is one of the least picked corps. I'm guessing it means it's not considered strong by the masses, and thus said masses don't drop its WR by playing it? Or is it that it is just picked when perfect conditions appear, which boosts its WR? I tend to like it very much with Media Group and Optimal Aerobreaking, or Advanced Alloys or when I can immediately play 40mc worth of building cards that give me good production, but that is not that common.

3 - Ecology Experts has a bad WR (23rd prelude out of 35), while Kelp Farming and Trees are among the best gen 1 cards (respectively #6 and #12 out of 158). Meanwhile, Fish is #131. What do you conclude based on that? High WR when it's paired with the right cards, bad otherwise? Or just bad? I reckon gen 1 Kelp Farming might be a result of 6 oceans (or 4 oceans + Inventrix/AT/SD), but gen 1 Trees are probably always paired with EE. If you get EE with Kelp/Trees and see an adversary with Ecoline, would you pivot to Birds instead?

4 - Any chance we can get stats on how often cards are consciently picked rather than randomly drawn? Some events are probably only played because they were drawn for free and you have Media Group, which speaks more about Media Group (and card draw engines) than the event itself.

[Dikvarkentje]

Honestly, fun data to look at but mostly meaningless. I do really appreciatie the effort put in by the author.

The lack of context along with the format being a hodgepodge of top players frequently playing against players that are 400-500 elo below them (this equates to an average winrate of 5-7% for the lowerrated player) makes the data borderline useless in a competitive context.

Most good players that have any form of knowledge on card picking and efficient will simply crush 95% of the field, irregardless of the cards they play. A great example of this is the ranking of Tharsis/Saturn which are both influenced by opponents playing into them by playing unncessary cities or jovs.

The "good" cards are heavily skewed towards late game cards that provide winmore value. There is no pick rate (how often did a player take ice cap melting in gen 1/2/3 etc) available. The opposite is true for card ls like nuclear power, carbonate processing and geothermal power which are all bottomtier according to this list.

Directly extrapolating information about how to play from this dataset is, imho, unwise and also not based in any form of real analysis.