The Road to Edain 4.6: Edain Meta Report - Gondor news

Greetings, companions of Edain!

we recently saw the culmination of the second Edain Ranked Open Cup, a tournament organized by the community on the basis of MaxPower's Edain Ranked ladder. In the Grand Finals, KairoShamoo managed to defeat Jojo convincingly - congratulations to him! But not only do we want to thank the organizers of the tournament, today we also want to introduce the first part of a small information series.

Thanks to all the players participating in Edain Multiplayer and Edain Ranked documenting all of the replays, we were able to create some detailed statistics concerning the factions and their playpatterns.

Today, we will start by presenting you the statistics we collected concerning Gondor. Gondor has nearly 250 recorded replays of multiplayer matches on Edain Ranked since Edain 4.5.5 was released and has an overall winrate of 51.2%.

Please note that there isn't necessarily a causality or correlation between the data presented here and some of the data might have a lot of influences that might not seem obvious. For example if we look at the number of games each of Gondors structures has been build at least once and the average winrate of those games. Then we will notice that the Gondor Stonemaker has a winrate of 100%, even if it was only build once. Does this mean that building a Gondor stonemaker as your first building in multiplayer matches will guarantee your win? Probably not, but you are free to try.

Here, we can see the interesting fact that the Ranger Tent is more popular and successful if build at level 1 or 2, but if you already have the second external economy upgrade, building a farm might be better.

If we not only consider which external resource building was built in how many games, but also how many overall where build, we get the following distribution:

And the same for the internal resource buildings, where we get a much bigger difference:

Let's look at Gondor's units next:

Here we can see that the Denethor strategy seems to have fallen out of the meta completely. One year ago, it was actively used in tournaments, but in 4.5.5 it was used only once and that game wasn't a success.

Another interesting fact that we can see is that siege seems to be pretty good, which means that a player who decides to build siege units at the right moment to finish of the game, will usually be able to do exactly that. Of course it can also indicate that only players who are already in a good position build siege, whereas losing players invest their money in other things.

But that isn't everything we can look at. From the replays we were able to extract popular Gondor strategies, which we will present here.

1. Standard Gondor Infantry

Gondor's standard strategy of mainly relying on its basic infantry was used in 21% of all games. However it had only a winrate of 30%.

2. Infantry and Battering Rams
A strategy that utilized Gondor Fighters combined with Fiefdom units and battering rams was used in 6% of all games, and was slightly more successful than the standard Gondor strategy and had a winrate of 44%.

3. Fiefdoms and Towerguards
As we can see by the following strategy which was also used in 6% of all games, Fiefdoms seem to finally be viable after being a niche strategy for long (winrate 60%). Here they are combined with Towerguards and Dol Amroth units.

4. Fiefdoms
The last strategy, which was both the most popular with 35% of all games being played this way and the most successful with a winrate of 68% relied mainly on Ringlo Vale Fighters, Gondor Spearman and other Fiefdom units.

Looking at the economy upgrades, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between internal and external economy upgrades. For those unfamiliar with this kind of visualization, the darker each part of the pie diagram is, the earlier it happened, thus showing the research distribution over time.

The most popular unit upgrades are also quite evenly distributed for Gondor.

The spellbook shows us that most people start with Horn of Gondor (its dark blue part is much larger than the one of Rebuild), however most players take Rebuild sooner or later and go for Lone Tower.
We can also see that Gondor's central spell is much more popular than all of the spells of the 3rd or 4th row.

We hope you found those statistics interesting and are looking forward to your discussions. Which faction would you like to see next in the edition of the Meta Report?

Your Edain Team