Edain Meta Report - Lorien news

Greetings, companions of Edain!

MotY has started, and even though Edain can't win the competition a second time, we are still very happy about everyone of you who votes for Edain - your continued support means a lot to us.
So while 4.6 is getting closer and closer, here is the second part of our Meta Report 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.

The community wanted to see Lorien next, so here it is! Lorien has 215 recorded replays of multiplayer matches on Edain Ranked since Edain 4.5.5 was released and has an overall winrate of 49,8%. (Please note, that the replays we were able to analyze had a slightly lower winrate.)

Let's start with Lorien's structures:

Compared to the rest of the buildings, the Mirkwood structures and the Ent Moot are rather successful, indicating that Lorien players do quite well when they get to build these later game buildings. From the Mallorn Tree we can also see that Lorien's strongest phase in the game is when they managed to get the first external economy upgrade.

Lorien is quite special in terms of their internal and external economy buildings due to the fact that it has only a single real external resource building and that all internal buildings generate resources. Thus the Mallorn Tree is obviously built in every single game, and the Borderguard Quarters as well, because they enable Lorien to recruit their standard infantry. The Galadhrim Quarters on the other hand are used in only 66% of all games, showing that Lorien players can use different army compositions.

Nonetheless, this allows us to compare those internal buildings and their total build distribution:

The Borderguard Quarters seem to provide the most interesting cost reduction. And even if the Galadhrim Quarters are build in a lot less games than the Sanctuary, both of them are build nearly as often in total, which implies that the Galadhrim Quarters cost reduction is quite useful as well, if one uses them.

And let's have a look at Mirkwood too:

The distribution is pretty much what one would expect from the statistics above and not that surprising.

Let's look at Lorien's units next:

Similar to Gondor, we can see that siege units (which are the Ents for Lorien) are quite effective. Also, Mirkwood units seem to increase Lorien's chances of winning.
Lorien archers on the other hand have a winrate below average and the winrate of strategies involving Minstrels is quite bad.

Let's also investigate the total distribution of Lorien's non standard units:

Here we can see that Beornings and Galadhrim are build in a similar amount of games, and Palace Guards are also build quite a lot, even if they are heroic units.

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

The first strategy that is the most popular with a playrate of 54% and a winrate of 45% utilizes a lot of standard infantry, as well as a couple of Beornings and Galadhrim. It is the strategy that makes the most use of Beornings.

2. Galadhrim
The next strategy is one that uses a variety of units, but mainly relies on standard infantry and Galadhrim. It has a playrate of 24%, but its winrate is only 41%.

3. Archers
The most successful strategy with a winrate of 50% and a playrate of only 3%, is one that utilizes mostly Lorien's standard units and in contrast to the other strategies uses lots of Lorien Archers. This is quite interesting, because it here Lorien Archers are recruited a lot more than the other strategies, even though those do not have a great winrate over all. This shows that archers become really effective if you have enough of them.

Looking at the economy upgrades, there is a slight 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.

Lorien seems to prefer internal economy upgrades quite a bit.

Compared to Gondor Lorien has only 3 unit upgrades that are researchable.

Both Forged Blades and Banner Carriers have a similar popularity compared to Gondor. Fire Arrows (which are the Silverthorne Arrows for Lorien) are a lot more popular than Gondor's equivalent, but still less popular compared to the other upgrades and can only be seen in every second game.

Spellbook

We can directly see that Veil of Mist is a lot more popular than the Mystic Stream. Similarly in the second row, the Arrow Volley is preferred over Refuge in the Woods. In the third row however, both Tauriel and Radagast are equally popular, while the outer spells are less popular, an effect that we already saw in Gondor and which is partly intended due to the more specialized kind of outer spells in the 3rd row of the spellbook.
Lorien's central spell is used, but not as much as Gondor's.

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