Landos
Chieftain
Hi Everyone. Congratulations on some insane turns. I also liked watching the 6otM thread get turned into an even crazier finish in the fastest science victory thread. I didn't get to play because of a newborn in the family, but I like the game and wanted to take a look at all of the agglomerated data to see if there was any strategic information to learn about how to play this game. I thought about posting this in the Strategy thread, but since it uses data from 6otM01, I thought that might be inappropriate.
Victory Speed vs # Cities
The first thing I did was to comb through all of the posts on the results topic, and pull out the turns to victory and the number of cities. I think the consensus is that expansion (Wide) is vastly more important in Civ6 compared to Civ5. If that's true, then broadly speaking & with lots of caveats there should be a trend correlating the number of cities and a faster victory. The data is actually more interesting:
The user reported data has a huge variance, with almost no linear trend to speak of. Presumably this is due to sub-optimal play, but it's the first 6otM and everyone's still learning. Despite the poor clustering, there does seem to be an initial downward trend (faster victory) which then rises a bit. This is more obvious is one performs a bit of smoothing on the data. If we hypothesize that there is some # of cities which will yield a minimum victory time, we can fit this data to a parabola (pictured above) as an estimate. This would suggest that based on user play, a city count of ~26 final cities would yield the fastest victory. Obviously the winners of this challenge far surpassed the average play. Although it is interesting that not only did the winners tie on total turns, but they also had the same number of cities...
#of Early Cities
The second thing I looked at was early expansion. We all know that to win, we have to snowball an early advantage into a later blowout. So I went back and looked at the Opening Actions thread, and picked out the number of cities for each poster at turn 100. I then plotted their total victory time vs the number of starting cities, as shown below:
Here there is a very clear trend. More cities early yielded players a faster win time. The linear fit to this data was not too bad. One can make a silly extrapolation and ask the following question. According to this data, how many cities would someone need to have at turn 100 to win by turn 100? The trend yields 27 cities, which is obviously A) Pretty difficult by turn 100 and B) Making settlers instead of festivals clearly has diminishing returns. I do, however, find it interesting that the trend lines from both data sets points to similar "optimal" numbers. I also think it's interesting that our top 2 players differed significantly in their city count at turn 100. EliteTroops had 9 cities, and Trojan13 had 17 cities. I wonder if Elitetroops didn't go on a conquering spree right around turn 100, or turned on colonization and pumped a bunch of settlers right away.
First District Choice
Finally, I decided to look at whether a players choice of initial district (after all, earlier bonuses are better than late ones) significantly impacted their win time. Again, this data was taken from the Opening Actions post, and correlated with total victory time. There were only a few people who posted that information, so this data is quite limited. The result is below:
If you pick a campus, a holy site, a commercial hub, it doesn't seem to make (on average) a massive difference. Obviously, more data would be useful here, but I think this suggests that if you pick an early district to get a short term gain, that may be okay, and the long term consequences of that first district choice might be lower than I would have guessed.
Going through this data was fun for me. If you think it might be more appropriate in a different section, let me know or feel free to move it. Hopefully someone else at least finds it interesting.
Cheers,
Victory Speed vs # Cities
The first thing I did was to comb through all of the posts on the results topic, and pull out the turns to victory and the number of cities. I think the consensus is that expansion (Wide) is vastly more important in Civ6 compared to Civ5. If that's true, then broadly speaking & with lots of caveats there should be a trend correlating the number of cities and a faster victory. The data is actually more interesting:
Spoiler :
The user reported data has a huge variance, with almost no linear trend to speak of. Presumably this is due to sub-optimal play, but it's the first 6otM and everyone's still learning. Despite the poor clustering, there does seem to be an initial downward trend (faster victory) which then rises a bit. This is more obvious is one performs a bit of smoothing on the data. If we hypothesize that there is some # of cities which will yield a minimum victory time, we can fit this data to a parabola (pictured above) as an estimate. This would suggest that based on user play, a city count of ~26 final cities would yield the fastest victory. Obviously the winners of this challenge far surpassed the average play. Although it is interesting that not only did the winners tie on total turns, but they also had the same number of cities...
#of Early Cities
The second thing I looked at was early expansion. We all know that to win, we have to snowball an early advantage into a later blowout. So I went back and looked at the Opening Actions thread, and picked out the number of cities for each poster at turn 100. I then plotted their total victory time vs the number of starting cities, as shown below:
Spoiler :
Here there is a very clear trend. More cities early yielded players a faster win time. The linear fit to this data was not too bad. One can make a silly extrapolation and ask the following question. According to this data, how many cities would someone need to have at turn 100 to win by turn 100? The trend yields 27 cities, which is obviously A) Pretty difficult by turn 100 and B) Making settlers instead of festivals clearly has diminishing returns. I do, however, find it interesting that the trend lines from both data sets points to similar "optimal" numbers. I also think it's interesting that our top 2 players differed significantly in their city count at turn 100. EliteTroops had 9 cities, and Trojan13 had 17 cities. I wonder if Elitetroops didn't go on a conquering spree right around turn 100, or turned on colonization and pumped a bunch of settlers right away.
First District Choice
Finally, I decided to look at whether a players choice of initial district (after all, earlier bonuses are better than late ones) significantly impacted their win time. Again, this data was taken from the Opening Actions post, and correlated with total victory time. There were only a few people who posted that information, so this data is quite limited. The result is below:
Spoiler :
If you pick a campus, a holy site, a commercial hub, it doesn't seem to make (on average) a massive difference. Obviously, more data would be useful here, but I think this suggests that if you pick an early district to get a short term gain, that may be okay, and the long term consequences of that first district choice might be lower than I would have guessed.
Going through this data was fun for me. If you think it might be more appropriate in a different section, let me know or feel free to move it. Hopefully someone else at least finds it interesting.
Cheers,
