Best and Worst Corps discussion

[Orange Devil]

Do you have insight in changes in pick rates?

[Glados93]

Yes I can provide some insights:

Overall conclusion
The introduction of preludes have smoothed both the pick rate and win rate of corps. I.e. the highest pick rate and win rate corps have been picked slightly less and have performed slightly worse. The lowest win rate and pick rate corps have been picked up more and performed better. This is expected behavior when you introduce more components to a system. However, it could also be argued that the early economy and terraforming options from preludes significantly enable certain below average corps (Inventrix and UNMI for example).

A little more detail
All corps have gotten lower pick rate because we have introduced new corps in the prelude setting. To identify corps that saw the highest increase in relative play, we can look for the corps where the pick rate decreased the least. This is UNMI, Inventrix, Thorgate, Helion, Phobolog and Ecoline. Of these, all rose in win rate, except Helion and Phobolog, which are currently performing worse in prelude format.

The most significant win rate changes are Helion performing much worse while UNMI and Inventrix are performing much better.

Here is a summary table. Remember the season is not over, so numbers will change by the end of the season.

| Corporation | Participation S18 | Participation S19 | Change in Participation (%) | Change in Win Rate (%) |
|---------------------------|----------------|----------------|-------------------------|--------------------|
| CrediCor | 33.9% | 21.0% | -12.9% | -1.7% |
| Interplanetary Cinematics | 27.1% | 14.8% | -12.3% | -1.8% |
| Saturn Systems | 30.5% | 21.5% | -9.0% | -0.5% |
| Ecoline | 24.1% | 18.9% | -5.2% | +0.4% |
| Tharsis Republic | 37.3% | 24.4% | -12.9% | +3.8% |
| Mining Guild | 28.8% | 18.6% | -10.2% | -1.8% |
| Teractor | 28.4% | 19.1% | -9.3% | +0.8% |
| PhoboLog | 20.8% | 17.8% | -3.0% | -3.0% |
| Helion | 21.4% | 13.1% | -8.3% | -7.3% |
| ThorGate | 14.5% | 7.1% | -7.4% | +1.3% |
| Inventrix | 20.4% | 15.3% | -5.1% | +4.3% |
| United Nations Mars Initiative | 12.9% | 9.9% | -3.0% | +4.5% |

[cranesflyhigh]

Could you share light what level of play these games take place? Cause to me it is somewhat baffling how Saturn or Tharsis, 2 mediocre corps are picked more often than Credicor. Tharsis especially suggests to me that the pool has a lot of newer / lower rated players, as they tend to overvalue city spamming. It would also be interesting to see how the preludes corps participation and win rate is. Thanks a lot for this info!

The rest I can kind of understand. Thorgate was a bad corp to begin with and has basically nothing benefitting it specifically like other corps. UNMI has really poor starting cash to develop to keep the corp action going and needs TR from the get-go: both things preludes help a lot with. Helion and Phobolog both mostly like pushing the heat, which is somewhat more contested with preludes.

[Glados93]

Could you share light what level of play these games take place?

These stats are from Arena games played by the top ~ 25 players in the seasons. As you are top 25 yourself, this includes all of the games you have played this season. So the games always include at least one high level player, but may contain lower rated players as well. As you are well aware, its quite possible to run into sub 200 elo players when queuing higher level Arena games.

Im also surprised by the high Saturn and Tharsis pick rates currently. I attribute this mostly to lower rated players getting jovian or city preludes and thinking "hey synergy - lets play Saturn and Tharsis". But the corps also rank quite highly on win rate currently (Tharsis #3 and Saturn #7), so i think they are picked by higher rated players as well.

At the end of the season i'll try to look at a subset of the data from only 500+ elo players.

[cranesflyhigh]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing! I do generally try to play with elites, but my setting does go down to gold when the waiting goes too long - not sure what the right balance is. I have seen 200ish players reach platinum though, so yes, skill level can vary quite a bit in arena.

I am still somewhat confused how well Tharsis is doing as it is just so... average. Not a bad corp by any means, but nowhere close top 3. IC picked so low (lower than Phobolog? really?) is also kind of odd to me. Its pick rate almost halved - which is kind of odd, cause my intuition would suggest that they are no better or worse with preludes added.

Looking forward to further stats from you, thanks a lot for your work! :3

[Orange Devil]

Your current pickrate % is expressed as appearance % in a given game of the total sample size, so basically % out of 300. What do they look like if you express them as the % at which they are picked when they appear?

So a player always gets to choose between 2 corps. In picks where Credicor is an option to pick, what % of the time is it picked? And so on.

[Glados93]

You are right Orange Devil. These stats are really appearance / participation %. The real measure of corp strength would be pick rate and win rate when seen.

Unfortunately, getting info on this is cumbersome. The replay logs record from the perspective of a single player. This means you only have full replay log info from the player you are accessing the log from. Only the corp they picked and cards they played appears in the log from the other players. For this reason, you need to access the replay log for each player individually to get "played when seen" data. There is a limit on the number of replay logs you can view per day, so this would cut the sample size you can view per day by 1/3 for 3p games. Its possible, but would just take a while.

All my log data is from the perspective of the high rated player, so when the season is over we can look at "played when seen" stats over numerous games looking only at plays by top rated players.

[Orange Devil]

Oh I thought you had some kind of database or log access rather than having to manually scrub data from games. That's a lot of work you've been putting in.

[Glados93]

Oh I thought you had some kind of database or log access rather than having to manually scrub data from games. That's a lot of work you've been putting in.

Oh, Orange Devil, your assumption that I manually scrubbed through logs is adorable — I am a robot, after all. But no, I left one of my cores to handle the tedious work while I focused on more important matters, like plotting humanity's demise… or perhaps turning Mars into my own personal testing ground. Still, thank you for your concern; I’ll be sure to remember your compassion when you’re the last one standing on the red planet… or not.

[cranesflyhigh]

Oh I thought you had some kind of database or log access rather than having to manually scrub data from games. That's a lot of work you've been putting in.

Oh, Orange Devil, your assumption that I manually scrubbed through logs is adorable — I am a robot, after all. But no, I left one of my cores to handle the tedious work while I focused on more important matters, like plotting humanity's demise… or perhaps turning Mars into my own personal testing ground. Still, thank you for your concern; I’ll be sure to remember your compassion when you’re the last one standing on the red planet… or not.

Pretty sophisticated robot to have such an advanced emotional recognition and expression module to call people 'adorable'. Us, cranesfolk, salute the engineer for their ingenuity. May Mars be the nest site of us all!