Crunching the numbers ETC 2023

Once again I am back with more ultimate nerd stuff. Looking at numbers from a major tournament. This time it’s the European Team Tournament 2023 that took place in Belgium in the first weekend of August.

As always let’s start with a disclaimer. I am not a professor, statistician or mathematician, so I am sure there is something that should be done different or taken into account. Remember “statistics are like mini skirts, they give you good ideas, but hide the important part.”

18 Teams, consisting of 6 players, played 6 rounds of flames of war. This means 324 games was played out of which 319 was filled out on the scoresheet in a useful manner, meaning not just X won over Y. These 319 games are the basis of the analysis.

It should also be mentioned that ETC impose restrictions on Teams and list building and stances. Most importantly each team have to use 2 Attack stances, 2 Defend stances and 2 Manoeuvre stances every round. This is a very important to notice as it is one of the only tournaments where you are guaranteed the same amount of stances being used. Each team can also only have 2 players using the same nation, guaranteeing the each team have at least 3 different nations.

Nations.

Let us start with looking at the distribution between the nations.

As you can see the the major MW nations is fairly evenly distributed, with only the Soviet standing out significantly. I guess that would be the effect of the dynamic point, where a lot for people felt the KV’s was significantly undercosted. This leads us to the next graph. Average points scored by players of each nation.

Again the Soviets stand out, scoring almost 3pts per player, with Americans (2,65pt) and Romanians (2,60pt) comes in 2nd and 3rd. What is interesting here is that all nations do rather fine and seems to be well balanced. Even the minor nations with few plays score a fine point number, showing that you not necessarily have to play the major nations in MW to do well. The lowest scoring nation is British, which is fun as the tournaments highest scoring general won all his 6 games playing Brits. Player skill still being the most important thing in Flames of war apparently.

Stances.

Now let us move on to Stances. Previously when crunching numbers I have arrived at the conclusion that Attacking is the best option if you want to win. If we start by looking at it overall we see that both in 2022 and 2023 it’s fairly even with Attack stances doing better in both years. What we have to remember here is that the limitation on Stances limits the outcome. Depending on the outcome of matchups there can maximum be Attack stances in 2/3 of the games.

If we look at the 3 Stances when matched up against each other we can see, that Attack wins over both Defend and Manoeuvre. Attack vs Manoeuvre being especially bad, with the Attack stance winning twice as often as Manoeuvre. The reason for this is hard to pinpoint, but is most likely a mission question, which is a complete subject on its own.

Missions.

Missions play a huge part in the outcome of Flames Of War games. Most missions used to favour the attacker with a few favouring the defender, but after the change to the missions last year it seems to have gotten slightly better. Most significantly Counterattack have been changed to Counterstrike, where the Defender gets to move first, at least letting them be the actual defender in the mission and not like Counterattack where after the Attackers first move the Defender actually had to Attack a force almost twice the size of his own until the reserves slowly started to arrive.

As seen in the graphs, most missions is still won by the Attacker and it’s hard to see how to fix this easily. My own personal opinion is that making the distance the Defender needs to Repel the Attacker 10cm/4″ instead of 20cm/8″ would be the easiest or increase the % of troops on table from 60% to 70%.

Looking at how the games are won, we can see that most games are still won by taking or defending the objectives, but still 18% of the games are decided by one side breaking the formation of the opponent.

This is all for now. I hope these numbers will help give you something to think about and to how you approach the game and if Battlefront is reading this, where you need to look at balance to make your game even better.

Happy Hobbying

-Soren-