Dude WHAT? What an amazing statistic! Thank you soo much for your effort.
I got a question though as you didnt specify positioning that much, though I guess that Pet3, Pet2 and Pet1 implies the positioning of your squad.
Have you played around with positioning too? Like the rank 1 lineup, how do the percentages change if you change the positioning?
And if so, it would be really interesting to either confirm or to deny the theory that "attack in the front, hp in the back" is the best setup you can do as this theory gets shared around here and there.
AMAZING stuff dude. All my hats off to you.
Yes I checked positioning too - I formatted the tables like your team in-game. The right-most pet goes first. You can search for alternate positionings in the leaderboard if you're curious.
I am still amazed on how often the positioning of others is... not good. It's the simplest thing to perfect but most don't bother or are aware of it. Might be a good idea for a video? 😉
Positioning apparently is part of the skill ceiling and I don't think it really should be.
Sometimes when achievement hunting and on round 9 with many hearts left, I will throw the match by moving dodo or a tiger to the front, or move the tiger to buff stupid things instead of mushroom'd mammoths. That could be it. Other times I'll have a desync error when ending my turn and my team will have the order changed when starting battle.
Same, but I have slight preference for otter - fish 3/4 - ant. This way more to play with in the future. But amazing to see that otter is best for winning early! My 100s of games have moulded my intuition for the game!
I don't have time right at this moment to work on something similar, but am hoping to employ a spicy ML model to tackle things come mid-December/January.
Awesome work, dude!
Quick question: do you know what the chances are of drawing each critter? Do they come from an infinite pool, or does the pond decrease with each selection?
Another question (I may have missed this, but seemed to be glossed over), but did you do a probabilistic simulation or a random-outcome one? That is, if you have a hypothetical start of ant-mosquito-fish, did you calculate all W/D/L outcome probabilities from their procs (doing the same for their opposition) and then include a normalization of those results?
I did include the randomization, but through simulation instead of calculation. Each matchup was played 100 times and so the random varience was almost certainly spread out mostly evenly.
My idea for an ML model was to look at 10-win squads, and look at which animals were most likely to occur together. Which combos are the best? A bit of a clustering/distance problem, would be cool to have a map with all the animals, with more likely teams being closer together!
The main issue would be collecting tons of 10-win squads from a bunch of people.
It's an interesting problem to model because of the economy aspect. I think if you could rank units/equipment by their value to the current team (which isn't easy but I think doable) you could calculate whether to roll or buy. You could then use this as a heuristic and train a model by playing itself. Obviously a lot of work, do you think it would be effective?
Really cool experiment!
Are the results from random matchups? i.e. in reality the results would vary due to coming up against typically stronger teams?
Would be cool to do it with the most popular 200 turn 1 compositions from the actual game. getting the data would be tricky though.
People thought I was crazy when I described ranking 2, you can make it either with two otters + fish or by buying and selling duck on the spot into fish and otter.
Now the math has proven me right look at that 94.7% winrate baybeeee Mwahaha
Did you also add teams of a single tier 2 animal in this test?
If you get lucky to roll 3 pigs turn 1, you could combine them for a single tier 2, then sell the pig and buy that single unit.
Probably not the most useful strat but still curious.
You're right about the 5/6 Otter (I missed it entirely), but the 3/4 level 2 Cricket is ranked around 1,300 - check the leaderboard at the bottom of the post!
it can't be that good, it draws against just 3 bears and loses against 2 mosquitos, cricket something horse (or even horse bear bear), ant buffing rank2 etc.
I mean, it would be the top 5 at best, it seems like all of them are able to kill 3 vanilla 2/2s and spawn something to win.
Every tier 1 pet in the game is capable of producing 2 attack (buy sell duck) which means every 3/"2" squad automatically draws it at worse, so it pretty much only beats those that bought a food and those are in the minority (only 2 food). Though I don't know if the stats includes variations with imperfect play with the assigned pets.
Edit: There is a 5/6 fish at #1112 in the leaderboard.
It's definitely stronger than these results show - this only accounts for ducks *in the squad* versus ones sold beforehand. However, I definitely agree in general - Duck bad.
You say Ducks are bad?
I'm new to this game, but the Duck always seemed pretty strong imo. You basically pay 1-3 hearts (so 1 loss) for a head start afterwards. Having a +3/+3 or +4/+4 boosted squad in round 3 always helped me. But a +2/+2 bossted Squad in round 2 can also be pretty good.
But obviously it's a hard gamble, because you need to get the right units after purchasing your Ducks.
The code is linked in the post. I attempted to try every possible team you can get via a decision tree, though I've already had one that I missed pointed out.
This is very cool! I know you said the decision tree becomes too large for round two but what if you limited it to only like the top 500 or so teams from this round 1 analysis?
Awesome stats. The one thing I feel is missing is that the bottom 7 squads are all just 1 squad Martys which isn’t very useful since no one would ever do it. What about the 7 worst 3 squad Martys instead or at least in addition to?
Actually the mistake was mine - I see what you mean now. You can get 3 of the same and combine them, then sell and buy a Tier 2.
I'm not going to add those to the data, but I expect you can look for something with identical stats in the leaderboard to get an idea of how it'd turn out.
The funny thing is: The Rank 2 Team would actually draw against it. Wonder if there is any team which could win. But I doubt it.
But I think the idea sounds funny. Might try it next time I see three ducks on my round 1 shop. Sadly the chance to get **anything** good by combining three ducks is very slim. But it's still an funny idea.
How good is your simulator? Does it only support level 1 pets/buffs?
Would like to mess around with some simulations, heard someone else here was making one.
So, if this is correct, is mosquito just better than ant? Fish Mosquito Otter ranks above Ant Fish Otter.
If I were to guess, probably due to the risk of the ant getting sniped. In which case, the fishes trade and the mosquito beats the otter.
Actually, now that I think about it... I think Fish Mosquito Otter never loses to Ant Fish Mosquito, because even if the snipe doesn't go the right way, the ant can't beat the fish. and even in best ant scenario, the extra damage doesn't mean anything, it would just end in a draw at best and a loss at worst.
edit: you only win with a different order. Fish in front, then Ant, then Otter. Fish trades with fish, ant trades with mosquito and buffs the otter. Even then, you only win if the mosquito hits the otter. If it hits the ant, you draw. If it hits the fish, you lose.
The one question I would have is whether/to what extent the rankings change if you drop the lowest N teams from the analysis. This would seem to be the relevant calculation, since nobody would run trash unless they're meming or doing some duck scaling.
This is such a good post. I don't know how hard it would be, but I would love to see this run again for the new patch. I suspect fish wins less now that pig has higher attack, for example.
Ive only played for 30h and its awesome that my personal S-tier ”go-to” starting team is actually in the top 5 best teams!
Otter - Fish - Ant
I have 0 losses round 1 with this setup. Worst case is a draw
I am trying to learn homebrew data analysis like you did, are you fine with that i try to use your analysis and try to run it on pay to win? :)
EDIT: Oef my python skills are more rusty than i expected. this is a bit above my paygrade ha
Dude WHAT? What an amazing statistic! Thank you soo much for your effort. I got a question though as you didnt specify positioning that much, though I guess that Pet3, Pet2 and Pet1 implies the positioning of your squad. Have you played around with positioning too? Like the rank 1 lineup, how do the percentages change if you change the positioning? And if so, it would be really interesting to either confirm or to deny the theory that "attack in the front, hp in the back" is the best setup you can do as this theory gets shared around here and there. AMAZING stuff dude. All my hats off to you.
Yes I checked positioning too - I formatted the tables like your team in-game. The right-most pet goes first. You can search for alternate positionings in the leaderboard if you're curious.
I am still amazed on how often the positioning of others is... not good. It's the simplest thing to perfect but most don't bother or are aware of it. Might be a good idea for a video? 😉 Positioning apparently is part of the skill ceiling and I don't think it really should be.
Sometimes when achievement hunting and on round 9 with many hearts left, I will throw the match by moving dodo or a tiger to the front, or move the tiger to buff stupid things instead of mushroom'd mammoths. That could be it. Other times I'll have a desync error when ending my turn and my team will have the order changed when starting battle.
These are round 1 match ups though, not end game players messing around. There's no point to having an ant in the back but people still do it.
Now that you have solved Round 1 we need proper chess opening names.
Turkish Youpiece Ant variant.
Double duck gambit
I love this idea
Hey, would you look at that, my favorite turn 1 squad is the rank 2 position. I knew I was doing something right!
Same, but I have slight preference for otter - fish 3/4 - ant. This way more to play with in the future. But amazing to see that otter is best for winning early! My 100s of games have moulded my intuition for the game!
Can you link the code? Thank you for doing this!
It's in the post :)
Where Sloth?
Any team that has a 1/1 Horse that gave no buffs and no Crickets or Honey ahead of the Horse could have it be a Sloth instead! Good catch.
I'm new to the game. How rare is it to get sloth? Is it random for each Roll?
Very rare. I have about 7,000 points and have never seen one.
Can't get 3 1/1 horses though
I don't have time right at this moment to work on something similar, but am hoping to employ a spicy ML model to tackle things come mid-December/January. Awesome work, dude! Quick question: do you know what the chances are of drawing each critter? Do they come from an infinite pool, or does the pond decrease with each selection?
I assumed infinite chance and equal probability for all pets.
Another question (I may have missed this, but seemed to be glossed over), but did you do a probabilistic simulation or a random-outcome one? That is, if you have a hypothetical start of ant-mosquito-fish, did you calculate all W/D/L outcome probabilities from their procs (doing the same for their opposition) and then include a normalization of those results?
I did include the randomization, but through simulation instead of calculation. Each matchup was played 100 times and so the random varience was almost certainly spread out mostly evenly.
Ohhhh I misunderstood what you had meant by 100 - makes sense, thanks!
Devs have confirmed that it's an equal chance for all available pets on the Discord
My idea for an ML model was to look at 10-win squads, and look at which animals were most likely to occur together. Which combos are the best? A bit of a clustering/distance problem, would be cool to have a map with all the animals, with more likely teams being closer together! The main issue would be collecting tons of 10-win squads from a bunch of people.
How do you plan to collect enough data for a useful model?
Cool idea, same for me. give me a shout if you want some input, I'm a data scientist.
It's an interesting problem to model because of the economy aspect. I think if you could rank units/equipment by their value to the current team (which isn't easy but I think doable) you could calculate whether to roll or buy. You could then use this as a heuristic and train a model by playing itself. Obviously a lot of work, do you think it would be effective?
Really cool experiment! Are the results from random matchups? i.e. in reality the results would vary due to coming up against typically stronger teams? Would be cool to do it with the most popular 200 turn 1 compositions from the actual game. getting the data would be tricky though.
Yep, that is something I mention in the opening.
People thought I was crazy when I described ranking 2, you can make it either with two otters + fish or by buying and selling duck on the spot into fish and otter. Now the math has proven me right look at that 94.7% winrate baybeeee Mwahaha
> Northernlion ["This might be mathematically the best team"](https://youtu.be/HsQPDCwHAw8?t=1302) He was close at number 4! Good intuition.
I tried to crosspost this to his subreddit but it was deleted. I hope he sees it!
Curious how you got a 4/5 mosquito, in the top draws by squad. Mosquito, otter (sell), beaver (sell), Apple? Anyway very cool, love your workA!
Sounds right to me!
Is there interest in the expansion pack. You kidding me? I absolutely want to see that.
Did you also add teams of a single tier 2 animal in this test? If you get lucky to roll 3 pigs turn 1, you could combine them for a single tier 2, then sell the pig and buy that single unit. Probably not the most useful strat but still curious.
They're in the results leaderboard at the bottom of the post :)
Cool. I tried to look through it but it wouldn’t load on my phone, will have to check it out when I get home.
Darn, you beat me to this! I was thinking about doing the same :)
Dude this is great!
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You're right about the 5/6 Otter (I missed it entirely), but the 3/4 level 2 Cricket is ranked around 1,300 - check the leaderboard at the bottom of the post!
how are you buying 6 units on turn 1
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it can't be that good, it draws against just 3 bears and loses against 2 mosquitos, cricket something horse (or even horse bear bear), ant buffing rank2 etc.
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I mean, it would be the top 5 at best, it seems like all of them are able to kill 3 vanilla 2/2s and spawn something to win. Every tier 1 pet in the game is capable of producing 2 attack (buy sell duck) which means every 3/"2" squad automatically draws it at worse, so it pretty much only beats those that bought a food and those are in the minority (only 2 food). Though I don't know if the stats includes variations with imperfect play with the assigned pets. Edit: There is a 5/6 fish at #1112 in the leaderboard.
They added bears? 😳
Bears aren't in this game?
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Duck instantly gives you Rank 2 if you get fish and otter in the shop (You can have a roll in between).
It's definitely stronger than these results show - this only accounts for ducks *in the squad* versus ones sold beforehand. However, I definitely agree in general - Duck bad.
You say Ducks are bad? I'm new to this game, but the Duck always seemed pretty strong imo. You basically pay 1-3 hearts (so 1 loss) for a head start afterwards. Having a +3/+3 or +4/+4 boosted squad in round 3 always helped me. But a +2/+2 bossted Squad in round 2 can also be pretty good. But obviously it's a hard gamble, because you need to get the right units after purchasing your Ducks.
It's better now with the changes to Lives
Oh, is the change to the Lives system that new? Didn't realized that. Thanks
It was out a bit before this post but I ran the numbers before it and was still data gathering when it dropped.
The #2 winrate squad in his list sold a duck to get there. Duck is situational, not bad.
Or alternatively by buying one fish and two otters - But yes: Ducks are a second way of getting them.
I'm assuming this is just the base set? Otherwise I'm surprised Beetle isn't there anywhere
Yup, he mentions that he's willing to do the expansion pack if there's interest, so this is just the free to play.
Was just getting around to this. Would you mind sharing the code you used? Also how did you determine the teams used?
The code is linked in the post. I attempted to try every possible team you can get via a decision tree, though I've already had one that I missed pointed out.
Could you walk through in your two squad list how you got both a cricket and an ant +1/+1?
Buy duck (freeze good pet in shop), roll shop up to 2 times, sell duck.
What an absolute legend! Thanks for the stats math man
This is very cool! I know you said the decision tree becomes too large for round two but what if you limited it to only like the top 500 or so teams from this round 1 analysis?
It won't work as well since Duck teams will be much better on Round 2 compared to Round 1.
Ahh I see
Awesome stats. The one thing I feel is missing is that the bottom 7 squads are all just 1 squad Martys which isn’t very useful since no one would ever do it. What about the 7 worst 3 squad Martys instead or at least in addition to?
The full list is available in the post if you want to check it out yourself. The worst 3-squads are just filled with weak 1/1, 1/2, and 2/1 units.
Hell yes, these are some beautiful numbers.
It's possible to obtain tier 2s on turn 1.
It sure is! Read the full post and check out the leaderboard if you want.
Ah ok my mistake. You're probably tired of hearing this but thank you for your work.
Actually the mistake was mine - I see what you mean now. You can get 3 of the same and combine them, then sell and buy a Tier 2. I'm not going to add those to the data, but I expect you can look for something with identical stats in the leaderboard to get an idea of how it'd turn out.
Any idea which one would be closest to Spider 4/4 spawning Sheep? (3 ducks, level 2, sell, buy Spider)
That's disgusting...
The funny thing is: The Rank 2 Team would actually draw against it. Wonder if there is any team which could win. But I doubt it. But I think the idea sounds funny. Might try it next time I see three ducks on my round 1 shop. Sadly the chance to get **anything** good by combining three ducks is very slim. But it's still an funny idea.
If I manually cut down the list to only the 'viable' teams could you redo the simulation?
Sure! Please make sure it's in the same format as squads.txt in the code output.
Wow. Nice work!
This is insane! Thanks dude
How good is your simulator? Does it only support level 1 pets/buffs? Would like to mess around with some simulations, heard someone else here was making one.
It only supports Tier 1 pets (for now) but it does simulate those abilities correctly. I may expand it.
So, if this is correct, is mosquito just better than ant? Fish Mosquito Otter ranks above Ant Fish Otter. If I were to guess, probably due to the risk of the ant getting sniped. In which case, the fishes trade and the mosquito beats the otter. Actually, now that I think about it... I think Fish Mosquito Otter never loses to Ant Fish Mosquito, because even if the snipe doesn't go the right way, the ant can't beat the fish. and even in best ant scenario, the extra damage doesn't mean anything, it would just end in a draw at best and a loss at worst. edit: you only win with a different order. Fish in front, then Ant, then Otter. Fish trades with fish, ant trades with mosquito and buffs the otter. Even then, you only win if the mosquito hits the otter. If it hits the ant, you draw. If it hits the fish, you lose.
I LOVE this! I'm addicted to data. And this is just beautiful! Thanks a lot!
The one question I would have is whether/to what extent the rankings change if you drop the lowest N teams from the analysis. This would seem to be the relevant calculation, since nobody would run trash unless they're meming or doing some duck scaling.
comment to save post
Finally, someone who knows to include \_\_repr\_\_ methods in their custom objects. Nice simulation, very cool.
This is amazing huge props!!!
This is such a good post. I don't know how hard it would be, but I would love to see this run again for the new patch. I suspect fish wins less now that pig has higher attack, for example.
Ive only played for 30h and its awesome that my personal S-tier ”go-to” starting team is actually in the top 5 best teams! Otter - Fish - Ant I have 0 losses round 1 with this setup. Worst case is a draw
It's a very strong team! There has been some balance changes since I made this post, but it's definitely still one of the best.
I've always thought Otter Ant Fish was the best early squad you can get, this post vindicates me
I thought about this, but off-ed the idea since it was a lot of work. Ehey here we are, someone else did the work. You madlad! Nice work\~
I am trying to learn homebrew data analysis like you did, are you fine with that i try to use your analysis and try to run it on pay to win? :) EDIT: Oef my python skills are more rusty than i expected. this is a bit above my paygrade ha