The best civilization is whichever one my opponent is playing when I’m losing. They’re CLEARLY just using an overpowered civ and not just more skilled then me.
@@ethribin4188 In my opinion it not only doesn't change it but even emphasises it. If the winrate of one specific map in one mode is this balanced and each civ has some advantages on different terrains and with different teams then it's incredibly well balanced
I feel like Bohemians are one of those civs that are slightly better at higher levels, Chemistry in Castle Age and the free mining upgrades with cheap blacksmith and uni is deadly but is highly execution dependent. And as I type this, you filter the data to 1600+, love it!
It is just the most classic map that a lot of people have played on and when you tell someone "Arabia", they will most likely know. There used to be a normal Arabia with the water ponds, but it was replaced with the Dry Arabia to remove such randomness. Before the DE days, there used to be a lot of either Hun or Frank Arabia Voobly games, so yeah the popularity of the map goes way back in time.
I wonder if you'll do a Through the Ages series on the Forgotten expansion civs as well, considering Indians have gotten a major rework and they have all been getting quite a few changes too? Would be interesting to also see an Incas analysis, as they seem to be this forever B-tier civ in most rankings (D-tier for teambonus rankings), and even in videos like these, they end up always staying out of top 5 or bottom 5 placements as well. Like they're cursed to stay just above average, with a bad rep and pick rate compared to reasonable winrates.
@@undefined6341 Incas are pretty good actually. Firstly they have eagle warriors which is a strong bonus in itself. Secondly they have very strong counter units in the mid-late game. Also having beefy vils helps against lategame raiding.
Very interesting video. It's pretty clear that water maps receive no love from the active player base right now, so civilisations that will suffer the most in matchups are naval specialists. Since the remaster (HD) and the definitive edition, it seems to crystallise even more that land maps are getting played way more than any hybrid or water maps. The balance between civs is pretty good, considering how many there are today, but it wouldn't make sense for all of them to perform as well on arabia.
Seeing that Portuguese aren’t in the top 5 worst gives me some hope that they are slightly being improved, especially since they are one of the top civs to use on Arena and perhaps even closed maps.
What I find interesting is not only are the dismally hopeless Khmers from a few years ago nowhere in sight (or at least not bottom 5 material anymore), even the worst civs stills have much better win rates than they did. I think the meterics are a little different this time around but it still speaks to the game being overall better balanced.
I think an interesting bonus for koreans would be a tower buff aura from the tc. F.e. if korean towers are placed within 20 tiles of a tc, they would gain additional strength like f.e. extra Ap, extra HQ or extra range. Or maybe even that they are built faster. Because remember: the main reason korean towers lost their faster build speed and automatic range increase was so that they wouldn't be as dominant for tower rushes anymore, but if you restrict that to a specified area around tcs then thats no longer an issue.
It would also emphasize their "defensive" nature. And the game mechanic of having a range indicator around a building has been introduced with the Poles' folwark. Only farms within that perimeter give the bonus effect; only towers within a Korean TC perimeter would get the bonus. I like the idea of extra hp and maybe built faster; those are more defensively-minded bonuses.
Dravidians balance ideas: They don’t need Galley-line, Hand Cannoneer not because I don’t use them, but they have Thirisadai. As for Hand Canns, a Dravidian player would have already upgraded Archers and Skirms before researching Chemistry. I would remove their first three civ bonuses - +200 wood, fishing bonus and discounted barracks techs, and just have faster firing Skirms and Ele Archers. I would give civ bonuses that actually justify their ‘infantry’ identity by giving 2X barracks tech effects as someone suggested on forums. This may be swapped with Medical Corps. The former being a Castle Age tech and the latter (Med Corps) being a civ bonus. I would also give Dravidians some food bonus (faster food income) like Hindustanis’ Castle Age tech. Since Dravidians excelled in Spice trade (especially BLACK GOLD aka PEPPER), they may get some eco/trade/market related bonus too. The above changes, I believe, would address their lack of mobility and food insecurity 😂 starting from mid game. After the above changes, if Dravidians look OP, I would remove a couple of Blacksmith upgrades and not apply Wootzsteel effect on Urumis.
Interesting as usual! Something that might be nice to look at would also be to consider popularity - especially for the more unique ones, if they're both unique and popular I feel like that would drop their win % (compared to players who main/specialize in the more unique ones and could achieve a higher winrate by being specialized).
I played many times as Dravidians in Arabia against ai (humans vs ai TGs) and won all the time. I manage to cripple an enemy ai at the flank and this happens in early Castle Age. After that Dravidians are lost completely and only come to life after Wootzsteel is researched. And by that time, your knight civ allies would have obliterated the remaining AIs.
I think Malay are one of the civs that are quite strong if you know how to use them, but can be tricky if you're not accustomed to them. The faster age up into Trash Swordsman, Cheap Elephant and Karambit spam can be amazing if you can pull it off, but if you just get them randomly and try to pull off the usual 20/21 into Knights/Crossbows, it may not work that well. And as you said it's easier to get to the Malay Imp spam on closed maps.
Ahhh lovey, new vid! Not too many surprises on this list for me personally. EXCEPT for #5 -- oh how the mighty have fallen! Though of course it's not meant to be their wheelhouse, I would have expected them to do better on open maps than the data reveals.
It's nice that even the "objectively" worse civ in Koreans still has a place in competitive 1v1 games (Villese used them against against Cumans on regicide fortresses in Titans league making good use of all their bonuses).
Byzantines are very average on most maps And they are above average on hybrid maps But i would welcome more buffs just because Imagine if they had architecture
@@The-jy3yq You sure you're not talking about Malay? Their castle age unique tech is docks upgrading to harbors; Koreans castle age unique tech increases tower range, which is definitely good on land. I do love the idea of Byzantines having FU building hp with architecture as well. FU meaning "fully-upgraded" and literally "FU, I got more hp than you can deal with!"
I would say Dravidians is a badly designed civ. Their play style is hell DIFFERENT. Though Urumis seem strong (on paper), they are not like other UUs which are good for raiding, soaking up arrows and distract enemies’ attention. You always need to protect Urumis from anything ranged (sos 11).😂 Their best unit composition in the late game is L. Cav (with Wootz), Skirms and BBCs with a couple of Urumis and monks for namesake protection and healing. If you go Ele Archers, you can include Halbs, S.Ele/BBCs. You don’t need monks in this case cz you should have Medical Corps on, but is slower than the previous army composition, very food intensive, and scouting and raiding are unthinkable XD. So, you gotta put outpost here and there to make up for your zero mobility.
Their navy is strong and seriously need a buff on atleast light cavalry.. mangonels and scorpions are literally pain in the A$$ for infantry civs with low pierce armor.
I wonder if it's possible for stat websites to start separating between picked civ games and random civ games. Maybe it's even possible to calculate an elorate rather than a winrate, in order to correct for situations where a 1700 with a 45% winrate civ beats a 1400 with a 53% winrate civ, and potentially get larger deviations from 50% while remaining meaningful
For the elorate, you'd sum up all elo points gained and lost with the civ, then divide the elo gained by the sum of the elo gained and lost with the civ
From what I can see, a lot of people do not get the Bohemians nerf, as you have pointed out yourself - they seem to underperform. But the Bohemians got nerfed because of their big dominance in the tournament scene (seriously, we have seen Bohemians vs Bengalis A LOT), showing us yet again that the tournament scene and the ladder scene are two totally separate worlds 🙂.
They don't underperform on Arena and the Houfnice nerf will have little impact on Arabia games. If anything, the Houfnice nerf opens up the Bohemians to get a buff in the future without effecting their Arabia performance much. Really good change.
Been working since thanksgiving to get 100 malay wins and get my first 100 wins with a certain civ icon. I’m around 1100 elo and I feel they help me with how slow I am to advance to the next age sometimes. Fast castle into battle elephants can be effective if they’re still feudal and can’t get the monks out. It also forces the player to invest in monks and pikes and a quick krambit switch can be nice. But in feudal they don’t have anything special going for them especially if you’re doing empire wars which is all i really play, you miss out on that fast advance time too 😢
I was expecting Vietnamese to show up at any moment given that they're standing at 45% winrate across all elo rankings. Very much looking forward to the next big update in general, feels like some civs *coughfrankscough* are hogging the spotlight while other barely ever see any play
I think that another relevant aspect to consider is that this data is about 1v1. I guess this punishes slow civs (who could play fast castle as their ally pushes early), and make team-oriented civ bonuses way less relevant (Berbers, for example). Anyway, I think "team performance" would be waaay harder to measure, bc you'll have to a) compare 42² civ combinations (that's just thinking for 2v2 matches) or b) not taking into account what ally the civ have (which obviously have a great impact on performance)
I think a good example for team game kind of bonus is the persian team bonus. it is rather situational in 1v1 but will find value in a majority of team games.
@@gletscherminze9372 yeah. And some team bonus get useless depending on what ally you get (I'm thinking of Vietnamese with Turk allies) or very powerful (Viet+Brit)
I think I'd like the Malay, because I overcompensate my main resources a lot (not stone). So I'd be cool with getting the spike on upgrade timing to get upgrades earlier. I think it could be a good practising 'Timing-Attacks' as a Civilisation.
The problem is you need to relearn how to play the game from the ground up because all your standard build orders will go haywire playing Malay. Also, the age-up thing means you tend to reach a new age either late or with no resources, making you extremely vulnerable to pressure. There's a reason their best map is Arena.
I am a Czech from Bohemia so I would really love to enjoy playing Bohemians. But I simply don't. My problem is that you can't build just one or max two type of units (knights for Franks or Huns, infantry for Vikings or Celts...). But you've to put a lot of type of units together to create a truly efficient combination which is truly a pain. They also suck on water maps aka no dry docks which is essential for me for playing water maps which I love. As for the bottom 4 civs; I think that most people play land maps or mostly land maps which means that the naval focus civs like Dravidians, Malay or Bengalis can't use their bonuses properly. As for the Koreans, they are just a weird civ. As for Sicilians; they are basically my 2nd favorite civ after Vikings but I kind of get it why people dislike them. They are focused on both infantry and knights while not being that great in either.
I think the best comp for Bohemians should be halb houfnice with a ranged unit based on enemy civ ( arbalest for the most basic solution, skirm vs a civ with weak stable and strong ranged units and hand cannons as a situational unit)
@@gletscherminze9372 Well that's part of the problem. So you've to have 2 types and the 3rd is different based on the enemy civ. WIth civs like Vikings, Celts, Huns etc. you just create a horde of one type and send it toward the enemy's base.
@@Kubinda12345 Yeah Bohemians are a bit tricky in that regard. Huns (and Franks) especially are all about just making tons of knights/hussars and send them to kill. Bohemians focus more on slow pushes, keeping your houfnice safe and destroying the enemy one building at a time.
I'd be interested to see a video about the overall worse civs and trying to find a map or niche where they actually work ok. Civs like the Koreans and Sicilians seems to never be seen in high level games and/or tournements. The lastest series of TTL was a lot of non-standard maps and civs being used but certain civs are just flat out never used. Would like to see where exactly these "worst" civs can actually find success.
Koreans are an absolute powerhouse on closed maps like Arena and Black Forest. Walling the gap against a Korean flank on BF almost isn't worth it because between towers and onagers, they'll be able to push through a wall Very quickly. They have bombard cannons and bombard towers too, so they can really pack a punch after that safe boom.
I'm loving this content as someone who just started playing again. I play every now and then since it's on Xbox now (i know it's not the best way to play it).
I do wonder how much SOTL accounts for what's known as Survivorship Bias. I saw it explained in another video for how in the context of video games, a more overpowered or 'meta' pick in a multiplayer environment might actually have a lower win rate percentage than an objectively less powerful pick; the reason being that because of the OP pick being 'meta', less skilled players will take it thinking it will give them an edge, and get beaten by more skilled players who know how to counter the meta pick. Then again, that he split the listings based on ELO ratings probably does already account for it. Still, I wonder how the 'worst/best civ' lists line up against a most/least played civ lists.
Awesome! And now that we've established that a lot of these are naval civilizations, how about we do a naval map rather than Arabia and see the context? That would be a fun video.
Bohemians are probably the best troll civilization. I once used them against some friends, and haven't recovered from PTSD due to how many trash monks I used.
Honestly, this suggests the spear line should get a buff. All the weak civs are weak because don't have a strong enough answer to knight civs. If spears were stronger (maybe give them more range or more movespeed?) these civs could maybe survive a bit longer until they can access their strengths.
I've been saying all along we *really* need Blast Furnace but a straight up better Halberdier would do just fine, not like we ever bother with champs 11 but fr if I get steamrolled by another Frank dingus who can't even PRETEND that he needs his axemen to defeat me and just steamrolls with 60+ Paladins instead. Literally nothing I can do.
Ikr it's as if using it as the standard bearer for the game isn't a great idea for diversity and balance. Funny that. (Directed at the game/devs/bland tryhards, not SoL)
I would imagine that the Spanish tech tree might be a weakness at low elo. They do everything and in doing so I could envision the player researching too many upgrades.
Dravidians I would love to see the Dravidian ‘’Skirmishers attack 25% faster’’ bonus go to a new Mapuches/Tarascans civ that forms part of a New DLC Tribes of the Tropics DLC Taíno/Arawak peoples / Carib kingdom/Tupi Zaputechs Mapuches/Tarascans. Toltecs Polynesians/ Tuʻi Tonga Empire. In turn the Dravidian Urumi gains the ability to build/repair docks and faster firing BBC/hand cannoneers.
I think Koreans could use another unique unit on land, something less niche than the war wagon. The game Empires: Dawn of the Modern world had a lot of interesting units for Korea, that game had fully unique armies for each faction and some had interesting abilities too. Like a bomb thrower, cavalry with primitive fire arms that could also throw caltrops, infantry with two swords and also a swordsman that could instantly kill any enemy below half health.
Dravidians actually very strong early game as they have 54-58% wr in first 20 mins on 1600 and below elo. They dropped hard after that though which means they are absolutely terrible in mid and late castle, the graphs shows that they have 50%ish wr around 40 mins which is like early imp, possibly due to ele archer + wootz steels urumi but if game went post imp they just got absolutely crushed due to having terrible light cavs.
An interesting statistic to look at would be -- for a given civ matchup which is in no way balanced, like Portuguese vs Huns, what ELO rating on average would it be enough to bring the win percentage back to 50%? I mean, on average when a player is on a worse civ, he is expected to lose say 60% of the time and only 40% to win. At the same time, when a player has 50 more ELO rating, he is expected to win 60% of the time, same 10% difference. If we combine these two, how much more ELO you need to give to a player to consistently outplay the disparity in civs?
I agree that's a very interesting question. Let's take Vietnamese vs Huns as an example. Vietnamese' ~45% win rate overall is comparable to having -35 elo points (a 1665 player has a 45% chance to beat a 1700 rated player). Huns' 53.5% win rate is roughly the same as having a +25 elo advantage. It would be interesting to know if that actually works in practice, and if a Vietnamese player who was 60 points higher rated would actually end up winning 50% of the time against Huns. Unfortunately none of the tools available let us check that, but using numbers from a year ago, Huns seem to beat Vietnamese about 57% of the time, which is pretty darn close to the 58% win rate that would be implied by a 60 elo advantage, so it seems to have some predictive power in that example, at least.
@@SpiritOfTheLaw Yeah, just like so, exactly what I've meant! If there is enough data for a matchup, one can even build a rough graph of some of the relations like "for a specific civ pair, elo difference vs win rate" or some other graphs. More than telling us about the particular civ, this statistic describes the rating system used in matchmaking. If there would be a close correlation with +60ELO perfectly balancing an inherent weakness of a civ, that would be super impressive I see that this data is not in the graphs at the moment and there is no way to retreive it from woobly. I think it won't be too tricky to compute this statistic if we had a csv with the data, so maybe somebody could email woobly to give the csv with raw gameplay data?
Elephant civs are complicated to play effectively. Plus, current meta prohibits these civs to get strong enough to really shine in the late game. They need a little love in upcoming patches.
So it is mostly elephant and naval civilizations that you should avoid picking on Arabia. The case of naval civilizations makes sense, since they primarily just get dock bonuses that don't matter there, but the elephants performing poorly stands out.
"spirit of the law" definition; The interpretation of the law towards the end of providing justice, even if this interpretation does not fall within the law as written. What a perfect name for the guy who analyzes the balance (or law) of the game.
For spanish with low ELO players i think its about 3 major factor 1 Too much micro. Low ELO can do way to much control and completely forget to rebuild behind, making kills they get from that micro less effective to even detrimental for them. They have to watch 2 places at the same time while the opponent they have only has one place to watch 2 A poor fast castle. Pretty self explanatory if they dont know or are not good at fast castling then its hard to use the conquistadors at all, even more so if they do try to do the fast castle by neglating defence and the opponent play aggro on them 3 Poor micro. Reverse of point 1, makes the good unit feel like less than average ones. Its just me obviously saying what i think it is but from having a few low ELO friends playing with me a lot, i am pretty sure those 3 points are the most likely to be why the civ is underperforming at low ELO Sorry in advance for the poor english writing, its my second language
Guys, I need help really, its so frustrating and I cant find a solution, I did everything, antivirus off, everything off. "a running process may be interfering with the correct operation of aoe2 de"
I'm curious, if you average winrates between most popular open map (Arabia I assume), most popular closed map, and most popular water map, which civs fall outside the "balanced" range of 45-55% wr? As this list shows, when you play a civ can be nearly as important as how you play them, so how do the stats change if you take that factor out?
From personal experience, hugely. I'm 800 ELO Korean mainer and I see a huge gulf inbetween my abilities on a hybrid water map vs an open map. Interesting point I actually don't rate Korean that high in open water maps like Islands/Team Islands. If opponent knows about the lack of demo it gets really rough really quick, and the turtle ship is pretty useless if it's not sneaking in a pond, making us a pretty standard naval civ (not weak by any means) Proofs: I'm 100% this rotation on Mediterranean, and of course I ban Arabia are you nuts!? aoe2insights /user/6849245/
Totally agree with the last point about how even "bad" civs aren't that bad, and you should just play with what you enjoy. I'd add two things to that. First, if it's a civ you enjoy, you're probably better than the average player for that civ, because you've probably played them more and taken time to figure out how to play them well. Your win rate might be well above 50% even with the "worst" civ. Second, the joy of Elo is that everything comes out in the wash and you will win 50% of your games on average. If you always play Koreans and you always perform "badly", you'll still win 50% of your games because your Elo will just drop a little until you're playing against people you can beat. Don't worry about the number on your Elo, just enjoy playing games against well matched opponents and play each game the best you can!
I think an interesting topic I'd like to hear your thoughts on would be shuffling around unique units. Many civs have unique units that don't synergize with their bonuses (The throwing axeman is the first to come to mind). it would be a fun thought experiment to give those units to civs that have bonuses and/or unique techs that directly benefit them, or maybe even expand that to regular units, like giving the britons hand cannons and making them benefit from their extra range bonus.
@@The-jy3yq In the sense that they are not quick enough to go raiding with, yes. In the sense that your opponent can engage your knights if you have TA numbers with them, no.
I've thought a bit about this. Korean conquistadors could be lethal. Faster stone mining to drop that first castle plus free armor upgrades means conqs would have 4/4 armor out of the gate! Maybe we can cheat a little and pretend like Koreans have bloodlines tho! Malian Teutonic Knights would have +3 pierce armor for 9 total! I can't think of a more OP combo!
I noticed that you never really mention the naval game when it comes to the naval factions. I think it should be worth mentioning their strengths on the water when compared to their land based counterparts.
It's sad that DE development team taken out the Korean personality in play style I do play towers, when if were possible, with Korean, Japanese, Turks, Portuguese and Vietnamese Personality, those civilization may help with tech tree "gap" . Either defense or offense
My pet theory on koreans: the lack of lag in game really hurt their onagers which was their best unit in hd. That and there's better/more flexible siege civs now, where Koreans lack good melee options.
I rue the day I picked this game up and immediately found out Koreans were unstoppable and committed to them for life... what a poor, poor choice it was. JUST KIDDING SEE YOU ON THE HYBRID MAPS #banarabia
aoepulse is the best at the moment, in my opinion, and still works even when AoE2.net goes down. Ageofstatistics is better for breaking down individual civilizations, though it's no longer updated regularly.
Worst civ is definitely Gurjaras. Unique units -> Camel scout (good joke) , Chakram thrower (good if you have 50 of them lul..) and Shrivamsha riders (can dodge projectiles, 70 hp, 0/1 armor , weaker than basic Cavalier... another joke). I am always happy when they are my enemies.
The worst civilization is clearly whichever one I'm playing when I lose.
The best civilization is whichever one my opponent is playing when I’m losing. They’re CLEARLY just using an overpowered civ and not just more skilled then me.
#factcheck=confirmed
Fax
Much more entertaining than the Oscars. Probably also has more people watching.
What's an Oscars?
@@jankobehring4445 The fifteenth term in the phonetic alphabet.
@@jankobehring4445 i think is a unique tech
@@jankobehring4445 it's a big domesticated fresh water fish
@@jankobehring4445 It's a celebration of monsters living in garbage, some of whom prefer living in a can.
The worst civs having around a 44% winrate, and the best having between 50 and 56% winrate, id personally call a well balanced game.
It is arabia only, there are like 200 maps, civs are not supposed to balanced solely around arabia.
@@Igor369 doesnt change my statement of AoE2 being a rather balanced game.
@@ethribin4188 In my opinion it not only doesn't change it but even emphasises it. If the winrate of one specific map in one mode is this balanced and each civ has some advantages on different terrains and with different teams then it's incredibly well balanced
Compared to AOE4 not that much
Ever Player aoe3 it is so much more balanced.
Worst civilizations?
"It's not the plane, sir. It's the pilot" -- Top Gun: Maverick
Simple as this. Spirit of the Law uploads a video, you stop doing what your doing and start watching.
Especially when it is the AOE2 Raspberries award!
@@Njuregen cringe
I feel like Bohemians are one of those civs that are slightly better at higher levels, Chemistry in Castle Age and the free mining upgrades with cheap blacksmith and uni is deadly but is highly execution dependent. And as I type this, you filter the data to 1600+, love it!
As a sub 1k Dravidians player, I struggle against the Bohemians lol
Also they're just more of a closed map type of civ, really. Arabia might be the most popular map but not all civs have to be balanced round it.
Did Arabia become the most popular map simply because its at the top of the alphabetical list
Because its a open map and it's been more consistent throughout the years compared to other maps
It is just the most classic map that a lot of people have played on and when you tell someone "Arabia", they will most likely know.
There used to be a normal Arabia with the water ponds, but it was replaced with the Dry Arabia to remove such randomness.
Before the DE days, there used to be a lot of either Hun or Frank Arabia Voobly games, so yeah the popularity of the map goes way back in time.
Arabia was already the most popular map in hd edition
Simply because it is the most basic most predictable map
With the least gimmicks
I dont get it honestly... There is so much more interesting land maps :D
@@krystofcisar469 you kinda said it yourself, most people or at least the competitive people dont want "interesting" but rather consistent.
I wonder if you'll do a Through the Ages series on the Forgotten expansion civs as well, considering Indians have gotten a major rework and they have all been getting quite a few changes too? Would be interesting to also see an Incas analysis, as they seem to be this forever B-tier civ in most rankings (D-tier for teambonus rankings), and even in videos like these, they end up always staying out of top 5 or bottom 5 placements as well. Like they're cursed to stay just above average, with a bad rep and pick rate compared to reasonable winrates.
Incas are complete garbage. It's generic civ minus stables. The house and llama bonuses are nice but aren't all that substantial.
@@undefined6341 Incas are pretty good actually. Firstly they have eagle warriors which is a strong bonus in itself. Secondly they have very strong counter units in the mid-late game. Also having beefy vils helps against lategame raiding.
Very interesting video. It's pretty clear that water maps receive no love from the active player base right now, so civilisations that will suffer the most in matchups are naval specialists. Since the remaster (HD) and the definitive edition, it seems to crystallise even more that land maps are getting played way more than any hybrid or water maps. The balance between civs is pretty good, considering how many there are today, but it wouldn't make sense for all of them to perform as well on arabia.
Seeing that Portuguese aren’t in the top 5 worst gives me some hope that they are slightly being improved, especially since they are one of the top civs to use on Arena and perhaps even closed maps.
I expect a nerf towards their all-in Castle drop UU strat. Either the Organ Gun or the Feitoria or both.
That opening made my day lol
What I find interesting is not only are the dismally hopeless Khmers from a few years ago nowhere in sight (or at least not bottom 5 material anymore), even the worst civs stills have much better win rates than they did. I think the meterics are a little different this time around but it still speaks to the game being overall better balanced.
I think an interesting bonus for koreans would be a tower buff aura from the tc.
F.e. if korean towers are placed within 20 tiles of a tc, they would gain additional strength like f.e. extra Ap, extra HQ or extra range. Or maybe even that they are built faster.
Because remember: the main reason korean towers lost their faster build speed and automatic range increase was so that they wouldn't be as dominant for tower rushes anymore, but if you restrict that to a specified area around tcs then thats no longer an issue.
It would also emphasize their "defensive" nature. And the game mechanic of having a range indicator around a building has been introduced with the Poles' folwark. Only farms within that perimeter give the bonus effect; only towers within a Korean TC perimeter would get the bonus. I like the idea of extra hp and maybe built faster; those are more defensively-minded bonuses.
Woooooowww, loved the edit and style of this video, thank you!!! Keep going you are the best!
My dude you are such a legend with vids like this. Much love and keep up the amazing work!!
Dravidians balance ideas:
They don’t need Galley-line, Hand Cannoneer not because I don’t use them, but they have Thirisadai. As for Hand Canns, a Dravidian player would have already upgraded Archers and Skirms before researching Chemistry.
I would remove their first three civ bonuses - +200 wood, fishing bonus and discounted barracks techs, and just have faster firing Skirms and Ele Archers.
I would give civ bonuses that actually justify their ‘infantry’ identity by giving 2X barracks tech effects as someone suggested on forums. This may be swapped with Medical Corps. The former being a Castle Age tech and the latter (Med Corps) being a civ bonus.
I would also give Dravidians some food bonus (faster food income) like Hindustanis’ Castle Age tech.
Since Dravidians excelled in Spice trade (especially BLACK GOLD aka PEPPER), they may get some eco/trade/market related bonus too.
The above changes, I believe, would address their lack of mobility and food insecurity 😂 starting from mid game.
After the above changes, if Dravidians look OP, I would remove a couple of Blacksmith upgrades and not apply Wootzsteel effect on Urumis.
Interesting as usual!
Something that might be nice to look at would also be to consider popularity - especially for the more unique ones, if they're both unique and popular I feel like that would drop their win % (compared to players who main/specialize in the more unique ones and could achieve a higher winrate by being specialized).
I wish there was a spirit of the law for every RTS game
I played many times as Dravidians in Arabia against ai (humans vs ai TGs) and won all the time. I manage to cripple an enemy ai at the flank and this happens in early Castle Age. After that Dravidians are lost completely and only come to life after Wootzsteel is researched. And by that time, your knight civ allies would have obliterated the remaining AIs.
For what it's worth, I really like the Malay in team games. Forced Levy is great for spam. Getting there in 1v1 is hard though
I think Malay are one of the civs that are quite strong if you know how to use them, but can be tricky if you're not accustomed to them. The faster age up into Trash Swordsman, Cheap Elephant and Karambit spam can be amazing if you can pull it off, but if you just get them randomly and try to pull off the usual 20/21 into Knights/Crossbows, it may not work that well. And as you said it's easier to get to the Malay Imp spam on closed maps.
Ahhh lovey, new vid! Not too many surprises on this list for me personally. EXCEPT for #5 -- oh how the mighty have fallen! Though of course it's not meant to be their wheelhouse, I would have expected them to do better on open maps than the data reveals.
It's nice that even the "objectively" worse civ in Koreans still has a place in competitive 1v1 games (Villese used them against against Cumans on regicide fortresses in Titans league making good use of all their bonuses).
Great video. Love my Byzantines not being here. I should really check out the top 5 best to see how that list is.
Byzantines are very average on most maps
And they are above average on hybrid maps
But i would welcome more buffs just because
Imagine if they had architecture
@@dj_koen1265 I would welcome Byzantine castle age unique tech not being useless on land maps.
@@Igor369 _Koreans sitting here, literally being the #1 worst civ and also having a water-only Castle Age unique Tech_
@@The-jy3yq You sure you're not talking about Malay? Their castle age unique tech is docks upgrading to harbors; Koreans castle age unique tech increases tower range, which is definitely good on land.
I do love the idea of Byzantines having FU building hp with architecture as well. FU meaning "fully-upgraded" and literally "FU, I got more hp than you can deal with!"
@@jefffinkbonner9551 ooysh, forgot that Turtle Ship speed got deleted
Please make a list about the Top 1% players. Thank you.
9:34 That lion getting more damage than me when i try a drush...
I would say Dravidians is a badly designed civ. Their play style is hell DIFFERENT. Though Urumis seem strong (on paper), they are not like other UUs which are good for raiding, soaking up arrows and distract enemies’ attention. You always need to protect Urumis from anything ranged (sos 11).😂
Their best unit composition in the late game is L. Cav (with Wootz), Skirms and BBCs with a couple of Urumis and monks for namesake protection and healing.
If you go Ele Archers, you can include Halbs, S.Ele/BBCs. You don’t need monks in this case cz you should have Medical Corps on, but is slower than the previous army composition, very food intensive, and scouting and raiding are unthinkable XD. So, you gotta put outpost here and there to make up for your zero mobility.
Their navy is strong and seriously need a buff on atleast light cavalry.. mangonels and scorpions are literally pain in the A$$ for infantry civs with low pierce armor.
I wonder if it's possible for stat websites to start separating between picked civ games and random civ games.
Maybe it's even possible to calculate an elorate rather than a winrate, in order to correct for situations where a 1700 with a 45% winrate civ beats a 1400 with a 53% winrate civ, and potentially get larger deviations from 50% while remaining meaningful
For the elorate, you'd sum up all elo points gained and lost with the civ, then divide the elo gained by the sum of the elo gained and lost with the civ
From what I can see, a lot of people do not get the Bohemians nerf, as you have pointed out yourself - they seem to underperform.
But the Bohemians got nerfed because of their big dominance in the tournament scene (seriously, we have seen Bohemians vs Bengalis A LOT), showing us yet again that the tournament scene and the ladder scene are two totally separate worlds 🙂.
They don't underperform on Arena and the Houfnice nerf will have little impact on Arabia games. If anything, the Houfnice nerf opens up the Bohemians to get a buff in the future without effecting their Arabia performance much. Really good change.
On closed maps those are both very good civs
Bohemians got nerfed because of it
i like bohemians in 2v2 as their extra damage counters the based knight&archer fights. making them win a lot of a time.
Been working since thanksgiving to get 100 malay wins and get my first 100 wins with a certain civ icon. I’m around 1100 elo and I feel they help me with how slow I am to advance to the next age sometimes. Fast castle into battle elephants can be effective if they’re still feudal and can’t get the monks out. It also forces the player to invest in monks and pikes and a quick krambit switch can be nice. But in feudal they don’t have anything special going for them especially if you’re doing empire wars which is all i really play, you miss out on that fast advance time too 😢
I was expecting Vietnamese to show up at any moment given that they're standing at 45% winrate across all elo rankings. Very much looking forward to the next big update in general, feels like some civs *coughfrankscough* are hogging the spotlight while other barely ever see any play
Teutons since ~AoC 🤣
I would like a list of the best and worst water civs:)
Love the intro!
I think that another relevant aspect to consider is that this data is about 1v1. I guess this punishes slow civs (who could play fast castle as their ally pushes early), and make team-oriented civ bonuses way less relevant (Berbers, for example).
Anyway, I think "team performance" would be waaay harder to measure, bc you'll have to a) compare 42² civ combinations (that's just thinking for 2v2 matches) or b) not taking into account what ally the civ have (which obviously have a great impact on performance)
I think a good example for team game kind of bonus is the persian team bonus. it is rather situational in 1v1 but will find value in a majority of team games.
@@gletscherminze9372 yeah. And some team bonus get useless depending on what ally you get (I'm thinking of Vietnamese with Turk allies) or very powerful (Viet+Brit)
Let’s gooooo! Love your stuff man, Goths for lyfe 😤
I think I'd like the Malay, because I overcompensate my main resources a lot (not stone). So I'd be cool with getting the spike on upgrade timing to get upgrades earlier. I think it could be a good practising 'Timing-Attacks' as a Civilisation.
The problem is you need to relearn how to play the game from the ground up because all your standard build orders will go haywire playing Malay. Also, the age-up thing means you tend to reach a new age either late or with no resources, making you extremely vulnerable to pressure. There's a reason their best map is Arena.
It's interesting that the objectively worst Civs in this game are the ones that have Horse drawn wagons or chariots as Unique Units
I am a Czech from Bohemia so I would really love to enjoy playing Bohemians. But I simply don't.
My problem is that you can't build just one or max two type of units (knights for Franks or Huns, infantry for Vikings or Celts...). But you've to put a lot of type of units together to create a truly efficient combination which is truly a pain. They also suck on water maps aka no dry docks which is essential for me for playing water maps which I love.
As for the bottom 4 civs; I think that most people play land maps or mostly land maps which means that the naval focus civs like Dravidians, Malay or Bengalis can't use their bonuses properly. As for the Koreans, they are just a weird civ.
As for Sicilians; they are basically my 2nd favorite civ after Vikings but I kind of get it why people dislike them. They are focused on both infantry and knights while not being that great in either.
I think the best comp for Bohemians should be halb houfnice with a ranged unit based on enemy civ ( arbalest for the most basic solution, skirm vs a civ with weak stable and strong ranged units and hand cannons as a situational unit)
@@gletscherminze9372 Well that's part of the problem. So you've to have 2 types and the 3rd is different based on the enemy civ.
WIth civs like Vikings, Celts, Huns etc. you just create a horde of one type and send it toward the enemy's base.
@@Kubinda12345 Yeah Bohemians are a bit tricky in that regard. Huns (and Franks) especially are all about just making tons of knights/hussars and send them to kill. Bohemians focus more on slow pushes, keeping your houfnice safe and destroying the enemy one building at a time.
I'd be interested to see a video about the overall worse civs and trying to find a map or niche where they actually work ok.
Civs like the Koreans and Sicilians seems to never be seen in high level games and/or tournements.
The lastest series of TTL was a lot of non-standard maps and civs being used but certain civs are just flat out never used.
Would like to see where exactly these "worst" civs can actually find success.
Koreans are an absolute powerhouse on closed maps like Arena and Black Forest. Walling the gap against a Korean flank on BF almost isn't worth it because between towers and onagers, they'll be able to push through a wall Very quickly. They have bombard cannons and bombard towers too, so they can really pack a punch after that safe boom.
Waiting for the other kinds of map lists, since Arabia has been banned for me for both single and team games since forever.
I'm loving this content as someone who just started playing again. I play every now and then since it's on Xbox now (i know it's not the best way to play it).
I'm glad but also surprised Saracens didn't make it to any of the lists
I do wonder how much SOTL accounts for what's known as Survivorship Bias. I saw it explained in another video for how in the context of video games, a more overpowered or 'meta' pick in a multiplayer environment might actually have a lower win rate percentage than an objectively less powerful pick; the reason being that because of the OP pick being 'meta', less skilled players will take it thinking it will give them an edge, and get beaten by more skilled players who know how to counter the meta pick.
Then again, that he split the listings based on ELO ratings probably does already account for it. Still, I wonder how the 'worst/best civ' lists line up against a most/least played civ lists.
I am a crafty Korean clown at 800 ELO and can sadly confirm I get walked by Frank morons every time, no matter how creative I get.
So these are the AoE2 Raspberry awards?
Awesome! And now that we've established that a lot of these are naval civilizations, how about we do a naval map rather than Arabia and see the context? That would be a fun video.
This confirms that Sicilians need another nerf @Devs
Bohemians are probably the best troll civilization. I once used them against some friends, and haven't recovered from PTSD due to how many trash monks I used.
Honestly, this suggests the spear line should get a buff. All the weak civs are weak because don't have a strong enough answer to knight civs. If spears were stronger (maybe give them more range or more movespeed?) these civs could maybe survive a bit longer until they can access their strengths.
I've been saying all along we *really* need Blast Furnace but a straight up better Halberdier would do just fine, not like we ever bother with champs 11 but fr if I get steamrolled by another Frank dingus who can't even PRETEND that he needs his axemen to defeat me and just steamrolls with 60+ Paladins instead. Literally nothing I can do.
In conclusion: Play what you enjoy! Great video :D
Hot Take: 1v1 Arabia is a horrible way to judge balance as the map has a clear rush and cav bias.
Ikr it's as if using it as the standard bearer for the game isn't a great idea for diversity and balance. Funny that.
(Directed at the game/devs/bland tryhards, not SoL)
I would imagine that the Spanish tech tree might be a weakness at low elo. They do everything and in doing so I could envision the player researching too many upgrades.
Low ELO Spanish tend to just conquistador rush and go all in on it.
@@Oxen1997 only pros do this mitake. New players are prone to use a lot of different units and research too many upgrades
@@timii072 Well then I've been playing with many pro players around the 800-900 Elo level then,
@@Oxen1997 800-900 elo are NOOB players, not NEW players
that transition at 1.46 was sick. Is that a preset?
Dravidians
I would love to see the Dravidian ‘’Skirmishers attack 25% faster’’ bonus go to a new Mapuches/Tarascans civ that forms part of a New DLC
Tribes of the Tropics DLC
Taíno/Arawak peoples / Carib kingdom/Tupi
Zaputechs
Mapuches/Tarascans.
Toltecs
Polynesians/ Tuʻi Tonga Empire.
In turn the Dravidian Urumi gains the ability to build/repair docks and faster firing BBC/hand cannoneers.
Since I watched your Videos: my workspeed has increased by 3%, presentation Speed by 6 %, and my love for statisics by 15 %.
I think Koreans could use another unique unit on land, something less niche than the war wagon.
The game Empires: Dawn of the Modern world had a lot of interesting units for Korea, that game had fully unique armies for each faction and some had interesting abilities too.
Like a bomb thrower, cavalry with primitive fire arms that could also throw caltrops, infantry with two swords and also a swordsman that could instantly kill any enemy below half health.
Are there separate stats available for "picked civ" versus "random"?
Would really be nice to see how this naval civs perform on ... naval maps.
He did a video about that a few weeks ago.
@@Salnax Oh I missed that. Thank you very much!
Dravidians actually very strong early game as they have 54-58% wr in first 20 mins on 1600 and below elo. They dropped hard after that though which means they are absolutely terrible in mid and late castle, the graphs shows that they have 50%ish wr around 40 mins which is like early imp, possibly due to ele archer + wootz steels urumi but if game went post imp they just got absolutely crushed due to having terrible light cavs.
An interesting statistic to look at would be -- for a given civ matchup which is in no way balanced, like Portuguese vs Huns, what ELO rating on average would it be enough to bring the win percentage back to 50%? I mean, on average when a player is on a worse civ, he is expected to lose say 60% of the time and only 40% to win. At the same time, when a player has 50 more ELO rating, he is expected to win 60% of the time, same 10% difference. If we combine these two, how much more ELO you need to give to a player to consistently outplay the disparity in civs?
I agree that's a very interesting question. Let's take Vietnamese vs Huns as an example.
Vietnamese' ~45% win rate overall is comparable to having -35 elo points (a 1665 player has a 45% chance to beat a 1700 rated player).
Huns' 53.5% win rate is roughly the same as having a +25 elo advantage.
It would be interesting to know if that actually works in practice, and if a Vietnamese player who was 60 points higher rated would actually end up winning 50% of the time against Huns. Unfortunately none of the tools available let us check that, but using numbers from a year ago, Huns seem to beat Vietnamese about 57% of the time, which is pretty darn close to the 58% win rate that would be implied by a 60 elo advantage, so it seems to have some predictive power in that example, at least.
@@SpiritOfTheLaw Yeah, just like so, exactly what I've meant! If there is enough data for a matchup, one can even build a rough graph of some of the relations like "for a specific civ pair, elo difference vs win rate" or some other graphs. More than telling us about the particular civ, this statistic describes the rating system used in matchmaking. If there would be a close correlation with +60ELO perfectly balancing an inherent weakness of a civ, that would be super impressive
I see that this data is not in the graphs at the moment and there is no way to retreive it from woobly. I think it won't be too tricky to compute this statistic if we had a csv with the data, so maybe somebody could email woobly to give the csv with raw gameplay data?
I wonder what effect dlc civs not being owned by everyone has. I assume this is more the case at low levels than high ones
Elephant civs are complicated to play effectively. Plus, current meta prohibits these civs to get strong enough to really shine in the late game. They need a little love in upcoming patches.
Spirit, is choosing random truly random? Seems bias to certain civs, but I don't have entdata
FINALLY someone focuses on how important the cooler looking arrows are! lol
Hey, anyone know where I can find these stats? All the sites I can find seem very outdated.
aoe2insights. There's no raw "data pool" per se, SoL does the hard work and crunches them for us!
Most lopsided matches plus most even matchups between radically different civs?
Could be an interesting topic to cover
@spirt Of The Law - what site are you using to get these stats? Cant seem to find an AOE2 api that sorts by "last 6 months of games"
I hate Arabia maps. They're too open, have too few trees, and have few natural barriers.
I wonder if Koreans weaknesses continue on into Team matches?
Thanks for the info, I don't actually play AoE2 but now I can flex on my friends who do :)
"Weaker micro" at lower levels is a such a weird way to say "no micro whatsoever"
So it is mostly elephant and naval civilizations that you should avoid picking on Arabia. The case of naval civilizations makes sense, since they primarily just get dock bonuses that don't matter there, but the elephants performing poorly stands out.
"spirit of the law" definition;
The interpretation of the law towards the end of providing justice, even if this interpretation does not fall within the law as written.
What a perfect name for the guy who analyzes the balance (or law) of the game.
For spanish with low ELO players i think its about 3 major factor
1 Too much micro. Low ELO can do way to much control and completely forget to rebuild behind, making kills they get from that micro less effective to even detrimental for them. They have to watch 2 places at the same time while the opponent they have only has one place to watch
2 A poor fast castle. Pretty self explanatory if they dont know or are not good at fast castling then its hard to use the conquistadors at all, even more so if they do try to do the fast castle by neglating defence and the opponent play aggro on them
3 Poor micro. Reverse of point 1, makes the good unit feel like less than average ones.
Its just me obviously saying what i think it is but from having a few low ELO friends playing with me a lot, i am pretty sure those 3 points are the most likely to be why the civ is underperforming at low ELO
Sorry in advance for the poor english writing, its my second language
It feels like rathas are weakvs skirms, but man do they feel strong vs skirms ingame
Guys, I need help really, its so frustrating and I cant find a solution, I did everything, antivirus off, everything off. "a running process may be interfering with the correct operation of aoe2 de"
I respect for the last quote you said
Would love to know what xbox player bring to the stats? Wich map we play the most,average elo for xbox player and game lenght
I'm curious, if you average winrates between most popular open map (Arabia I assume), most popular closed map, and most popular water map, which civs fall outside the "balanced" range of 45-55% wr?
As this list shows, when you play a civ can be nearly as important as how you play them, so how do the stats change if you take that factor out?
Inb4 "hi curious, I'm Spiritofthelaw"
From personal experience, hugely. I'm 800 ELO Korean mainer and I see a huge gulf inbetween my abilities on a hybrid water map vs an open map.
Interesting point I actually don't rate Korean that high in open water maps like Islands/Team Islands. If opponent knows about the lack of demo it gets really rough really quick, and the turtle ship is pretty useless if it's not sneaking in a pond, making us a pretty standard naval civ (not weak by any means)
Proofs: I'm 100% this rotation on Mediterranean, and of course I ban Arabia are you nuts!? aoe2insights /user/6849245/
Honestly, Koreans need a buff.
I think them giving archer bonuses dont fit.
Give them age up or university bonuses Id say. Maybe even blacksmith ones
Totally agree with the last point about how even "bad" civs aren't that bad, and you should just play with what you enjoy. I'd add two things to that. First, if it's a civ you enjoy, you're probably better than the average player for that civ, because you've probably played them more and taken time to figure out how to play them well. Your win rate might be well above 50% even with the "worst" civ. Second, the joy of Elo is that everything comes out in the wash and you will win 50% of your games on average. If you always play Koreans and you always perform "badly", you'll still win 50% of your games because your Elo will just drop a little until you're playing against people you can beat.
Don't worry about the number on your Elo, just enjoy playing games against well matched opponents and play each game the best you can!
Love the Malay but I knew they’d be on here
I think an interesting topic I'd like to hear your thoughts on would be shuffling around unique units. Many civs have unique units that don't synergize with their bonuses (The throwing axeman is the first to come to mind). it would be a fun thought experiment to give those units to civs that have bonuses and/or unique techs that directly benefit them, or maybe even expand that to regular units, like giving the britons hand cannons and making them benefit from their extra range bonus.
Throwing axemen synergize really well with the Franks though. Best counter to halbs.
@@Naxhus2 a bit too far on the slow side
Teutonic -Knights- Paladins might have wanted dem 'xes but Franks are nyomming way ahead of Axemen
@@The-jy3yq In the sense that they are not quick enough to go raiding with, yes. In the sense that your opponent can engage your knights if you have TA numbers with them, no.
I've thought a bit about this. Korean conquistadors could be lethal. Faster stone mining to drop that first castle plus free armor upgrades means conqs would have 4/4 armor out of the gate! Maybe we can cheat a little and pretend like Koreans have bloodlines tho!
Malian Teutonic Knights would have +3 pierce armor for 9 total! I can't think of a more OP combo!
@@jefffinkbonner9551 well how about slav kamayuks or ethiopian hussite wagons, if we apply torsion engiens to them
Hauberk should give cavalry +2/+1 armor. Serjeants get +1 base attack.
I noticed that you never really mention the naval game when it comes to the naval factions. I think it should be worth mentioning their strengths on the water when compared to their land based counterparts.
Could you redo some of the civ overlay
It's sad that DE development team taken out the Korean personality in play style
I do play towers, when if were possible, with Korean, Japanese, Turks, Portuguese and Vietnamese
Personality, those civilization may help with tech tree "gap" . Either defense or offense
SOTL hi, could you review Rise of Nations as an AoE2 player?
Yeah for how many civs exists, 40ies% range for the worst ones on one particular type of map even, is pretty darn good
My pet theory on koreans: the lack of lag in game really hurt their onagers which was their best unit in hd. That and there's better/more flexible siege civs now, where Koreans lack good melee options.
We're talking 1v1 Arabia here, onager play was never common.
Can you give me the link of the best civs?
What about water or hybrid maps?
Moment of silence for the Korean Civ, that went from best to worst in a matter of 23 years
I rue the day I picked this game up and immediately found out Koreans were unstoppable and committed to them for life... what a poor, poor choice it was.
JUST KIDDING SEE YOU ON THE HYBRID MAPS #banarabia
They going to have an dlc update this year?
It's pretty funny that a dumb achievement might have dropped a civs viability ranking data
Where can i get those winrates? i found some pages but the content is outdated.
aoepulse is the best at the moment, in my opinion, and still works even when AoE2.net goes down. Ageofstatistics is better for breaking down individual civilizations, though it's no longer updated regularly.
Worst civ is definitely Gurjaras. Unique units -> Camel scout (good joke) , Chakram thrower (good if you have 50 of them lul..) and Shrivamsha riders (can dodge projectiles, 70 hp, 0/1 armor , weaker than basic Cavalier... another joke). I am always happy when they are my enemies.
Will expect these to redeem themselves in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
The number 1 worst 1v1 Arabia civ is computer player. Since the last update made it Damm near impossible to play on computer for many of us lmao
Not surprised that Bengalis are here. Thanks God that Goths aren't there, I would cry.
Hey spirit will you make any more AoE4 videos in the future?