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Saturday, January 14, 2012

Through The Ages - Poll - Most Popular Leader

As we finish off this Poll, a new one begins!  Please vote and take your educated guess!

I ran a poll for the what players believed the most selected Age A leader is in a 4-player game.  I then analyzed 20 games to calculate the "actual" most popular leader.  Forum for discussion located here: http://gamesstrategyandtactics.freeforums.org/strategy-analysis-f6.html

Poll Results
Most player's believe Julius Caesar to be the most popular leader, with Aristotle a close second.  I can honestly say I expected one of those two to to rank high as well, so the poll results don't surprise me.  Time to look at the data from the games.

All Hail...Moses?
Moses just barely beats Aristotle by a single game.  Julius Caesar comes in third at 14 games.  The rest are played in under 10 games.

Admittedly, a single game is not enough to determine if Moses truly beats Aristotle.  However, why would Moses beat out everyone's favorite: Julius Caesar?

Let's get some comments and discussion rolling!

3 comments:

Harald Korneliussen said...

I think turn order may be a factor. One rule of thumb that I have, is that I try to play a different strategy than the player immediately before me. Otherwise he tends to pick up too many of the good cards for that strategy.

So in situations where you can pick Caesar, but the player before you has picked Alexander or even Homer, I would usually prefer to take another leader, or wait.

But Moses doesn't have any competitors in his niche (population growth). Even if he has (say if Barbarossa is the first Age I card - there's my candidate for least popular leader, by the way, though I don't think he deserves it), it's not as card-dependent as going all-out on military is.

Earthenbulwark said...

I guess I'm not that surprised. I wonder if Caesar's perceived popularity comes from people -wanting- to pick Caesar... while often finding Aristotle or Moses a more effective choice.

Is there a way you can compile statistics on first player choices in the opening draft? You might be able to get a series of binary choices from that. (E.g. Player 1 picked Caesar, but did not choose Aristotle.)

Chance said...

I will see what I can come up with regarding the statistics. As a sneak peek, after 80 games analyzed, Aristotle finally beat Moses handily. I have a few more games to add, and it is still close. Caesar has closed the gap percentage wise, but his increase is not as quick as expected. It's like a horse race.

Lastly, after 80 games, the most Unpopular leader (the current poll) has not changed at all.